Called the Solar Cir­cle, it is a qui­et sort of brain trust made up of mem­bers hand-cho­sen for their tal­ents and com­mit­ment to the cause (see side­bar). It has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly explored and sought to improve every aspect of the sup­ply chain, play­ing a behind-the-scenes role as solar trans­formed from a hip­pie curios­i­ty into the fastest-grow­ing source of new ener­gy on the pow­er grid.

Twice a year, the group meets like clock­work, despite hav­ing no bud­get, no legal struc­ture and no staff. Mem­bers trav­el on their own dime to week­end retreats that have been held every­where from Maine to Mex­i­co. And now, after years of brain­storm­ing ses­sions, deep dives into pol­i­cy and finance, and late-night gui­tar ses­sions, the cir­cle has matured from indus­try asso­ci­a­tion into some­thing else.

“It has become akin to a fam­i­ly,” said Denis Hayes, a founder of Earth Day and an ear­ly direc­tor of what would become the Depart­ment of Ener­gy’s Nation­al Renew­able Ener­gy Laboratory.

The group, found­ed by 30 rep­re­sen­ta­tives from every slice of the solar val­ue chain, is exceed­ing­ly diverse. Mem­bers are entre­pre­neurs, phil­an­thropists, engi­neers, man­u­fac­tur­ers, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, archi­tects, project devel­op­ers, activists, lob­by­ists, physi­cists, jour­nal­ists and pol­i­cy­mak­ers, and spe­cial­ists in most tech­no­log­i­cal means of deriv­ing ener­gy from the sun, as well as adja­cent fields like wind pow­er. While the group’s thrust is Amer­i­can, it has had del­e­gates from India, Japan, Ger­many, Great Britain and Hong Kong, and includes inno­va­tors who designed the pil­lars of today’s solar landscape.

Many of the founders have been active in solar for decades and are now retired or approach­ing the end of their careers. They have been sup­ple­ment­ed by new­com­ers who bring the ros­ter of inac­tive and cur­rent mem­bers to about 50.

The coterie’s old­er mem­bers include Steven Strong, an archi­tect who installed solar pan­els on the George W. Bush White House; Stan­ley Bull, a for­mer asso­ciate direc­tor of the Nation­al Renew­able Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry; and Mike Eck­hart, the found­ing pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Coun­cil on Renew­able Ener­gy and now the head of envi­ron­men­tal finance and sus­tain­abil­i­ty at Cit­i­group. Oth­er, younger mem­bers are in the thick of today’s tur­bu­lent solar mar­ket, like Danielle Mer­feld, a tech­nol­o­gy direc­tor at Gen­er­al Elec­tric Co.; Tom Starrs, a vice pres­i­dent of solar pan­el man­u­fac­tur­er Sun­Pow­er Corp.; Rhone Resch, the recent­ly depart­ed head of the Solar Ener­gy Indus­tries Asso­ci­a­tion; Dan­ny Kennedy, a founder of solar rooftop installer Sungevi­ty (Ener­gy­Wire, Feb. 4); and David Hochschild, a mem­ber of the Cal­i­for­nia Ener­gy Commission.

The cir­cle was found­ed in 2002, when the notion of solar play­ing a seri­ous role on the elec­tric grid was enough to make a con­gress­man laugh. Solar pan­els were those things that got attached to satel­lites and blast­ed into space.

The cir­cle’s recruits were ear­ly believ­ers in the sci­ence of cli­mate change and had a fer­vent hope that solar could replace the car­bon-spew­ing coal plants that formed the coun­try’s ener­gy back­bone. But their indus­try — if it could even be called that — was so small and frag­ment­ed that many of its mem­bers had nev­er met.

Now most are aston­ished at how fast and how large solar has grown. Since the cir­cle’s found­ing, the price of an installed res­i­den­tial rooftop solar sys­tem has dropped from $11 a watt to less than $4, and the solar indus­try employs over 200,000 Amer­i­cans, more than the num­ber who work in oil and gas extrac­tion (Ener­gy­Wire, Jan. 12). Solar farms pro­duce only a slim frac­tion of U.S. elec­tric­i­ty — six-tenths of 1 per­cent as of last year, accord­ing to the U.S. Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion — but adop­tion is sky­rock­et­ing. If trends hold, this year will see solar bring more new capac­i­ty to the U.S. grid than any oth­er source.

That accel­er­a­tion has some mem­bers of the cir­cle won­der­ing whether they still have a role to play. On one hand, solar has scaled to a size they could scarce­ly imag­ine; on the oth­er, it has a long way to go if it is to meet the group’s pro­fessed goal of rul­ing the world’s ener­gy system.

In any case, the cir­cle has tapped its mem­bers into an ener­gy source they could find nowhere else.

“It allowed us to take a breath for a moment, mar­shal our resources and be stim­u­lat­ed intel­lec­tu­al­ly,” said Scott Sklar, a solar lob­by­ist and a for­mer direc­tor of the Solar Ener­gy Indus­tries Asso­ci­a­tion. “It was a way to clois­ter away with peo­ple who were as crazy as you were.”

The roundtable

The group hop­scotch­es across the coun­try, alter­nat­ing between the East and West coasts, seek­ing out nature retreats and organ­ic food when it can. It has con­verged near a space obser­va­to­ry in the Col­orado Rock­ies, at a con­vent, at an eco-con­fer­ence cen­ter out­side Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and sev­er­al times at Asilo­mar, the famed meet­ing spot on the cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia coast. Mem­bers have brought their fam­i­lies to Hawaii and met on the shores of Mex­i­co’s largest fresh­wa­ter lake.

Oth­er times, they come togeth­er at mem­bers’ offices, such as in Seat­tle (at the Bul­litt Cen­ter, run by Hayes); Oak­land, Calif. (head­quar­ters for Sungevi­ty, co-found­ed by Kennedy); and Chica­go, at the offices of Howard Learn­er, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Envi­ron­men­tal Law & Pol­i­cy Center.

Every­one’s con­tri­bu­tion is dif­fer­ent. Hochschild tees up tan­ta­liz­ing polit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tions. Joel Makow­er, the founder of Green​Biz​.com, who attend­ed in the ear­ly days, coun­seled on how to expand the group’s mes­sage to the larg­er ener­gy indus­try. Julie Blun­den, a for­mer vice pres­i­dent of SunEdi­son and Sun­Pow­er, deliv­ers a detailed talk on the finan­cial state of the indus­try, while Don­ald Aitken, an edu­ca­tor and sus­tain­able build­ing expert, gives the lat­est on cli­mate change. Bar­bara Har­wood, an advo­cate for afford­able ener­gy-effi­cient homes, was a deep thinker who spoke rarely; Dan Shugar, one of the most suc­cess­ful ser­i­al entre­pre­neurs in solar, is known for yelling and pound­ing the table when he gets worked up.

Most con­ver­sa­tions revolve around pho­to­volta­ic solar pow­er on the U.S. pow­er grid. But some mem­bers dogged­ly remind their col­leagues that there are plen­ty of oth­er ways to pro­duce solar pow­er and many oth­er places that need it.

Robert Shaw, an ear­ly investor in solar man­u­fac­tur­ing, talks about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using sun pow­er to cre­ate hydro­gen fuel. (“It’s a lone­ly sub­ject to bring up, but I do it at every meet­ing,” Shaw said.) Bill Guiney, who start­ed the solar arm of indus­tri­al con­glom­er­ate John­son Con­trols, is a vocal advo­cate of solar-ther­mal pow­er. Oth­ers advise their com­pa­tri­ots that it isn’t all about the grid. An ear­ly mem­ber was Har­ish Hande, an Indi­an entre­pre­neur and a founder of the move­ment to pro­vide solar light­ing for the bil­lion or more peo­ple in the devel­op­ing world who have no elec­tric­i­ty. Oth­ers in small-scale solar are Titus Bren­ninkmei­jer, an heir to a Ger­man cloth­ing for­tune who backs clean ener­gy projects, and Richard Hansen, an engi­neer who focus­es on rur­al Latin Amer­i­ca. (“I keep the mes­sage going like a par­rot,” he said. “The sun­shine’s for all.”)

A con­stant top­ic of dis­cus­sion has been finance and how solar pow­er can become afford­able. That dis­cus­sion, led by such mem­bers as Blun­den, Shaw and Eck­hart, is where many of the cir­cle’s mem­bers say they got their most valu­able mon­ey lessons.

How could the young indus­try stim­u­late man­u­fac­tur­ing? How about green banks, which make low-cost loans to low-car­bon projects? That lat­ter top­ic was explored by Alisa Gravitz, the CEO of non­prof­it Green Amer­i­ca, who served as mod­er­a­tor for the group’s ear­ly meet­ings. Oth­er ses­sions dis­sect­ed the anato­my of the yield­co, a renew­able ener­gy finance instru­ment that has now fall­en on hard times.

“There was a rig­or­ous atten­tion to the costs of solar, very care­ful track­ing, where the choke­points are, where the points of lever­age are,” said Brack­en Hen­dricks, for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Apol­lo Alliance, a group that in the ear­ly 2000s sought to ral­ly labor and envi­ron­men­tal groups around renew­able energy.

Straight talk

To under­stand the cir­cle’s val­ue, con­sid­er what hap­pened when Strong showed off about his solar buildings.

Strong is a lit­tle-known but influ­en­tial archi­tect. His com­pa­ny, Solar Design Asso­ciates, cre­at­ed the Unit­ed States’ first entire­ly solar-pow­ered house and the first solar-pow­ered sports sta­di­um (for the San Fran­cis­co Giants), and installed pho­to­volta­ic solar pan­els and a solar hot water sys­tem at Bush’s White House, on an out­build­ing. At one meet­ing, he proud­ly gave a slideshow of arrays he had placed on U.S. embassies. His col­leagues weren’t entire­ly impressed.

“A num­ber of us said, ‘Steve, what’s real­ly great is you got the gov­ern­ment to real­ize that solar mat­ters,’ ” said Jito Cole­man, for­mer pres­i­dent of North­ern Pow­er Sys­tems, a wind tur­bine man­u­fac­tur­er. “But the prob­lem is that none of this shit looks good.”

That was the start­ing point for one of the first high-lev­el con­ver­sa­tions about the aes­thet­ics of solar pan­els — a top­ic that remains vital today. (Tes­la Motors Inc.‘s Elon Musk in late July revealed that part of his mas­ter plan is to make rooftop solar pan­els “beau­ti­ful.”)

Every mem­ber inter­viewed for this sto­ry said the same thing: The chance to share rough-hewn ideas and get unvar­nished feed­back made the cir­cle invaluable.

“It’s a group that is inter­nal­ly pret­ty crit­i­cal of mis­steps,” said Dan Kam­men, an ener­gy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. Cir­clers felt safe shar­ing sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion — the prices of solar mod­ules, the val­u­a­tions of com­pa­nies — because con­ver­sa­tions were off the record and mem­bers came to learn they could trust each other.

Par­tic­i­pants also cher­ish the “cal­i­bra­tion exer­cise” held on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, when each mem­ber gives an update on how things look from his or her part of the indus­try. No oth­er venue exists where mem­bers get a 360-degree view of what’s going on. After­ward, the group fol­lows an agen­da through the rest of the week­end that includes small group ses­sions, pre­sen­ta­tions and discussions.

“I’ve nev­er left a meet­ing want­i­ng more,” Guiney said, “oth­er than more time.”

Secre­cy has been essen­tial to the cir­cle’s suc­cess, mem­bers said, though secre­cy might be the wrong word; “hid­ing in plain sight” is more like it. Some mem­bers men­tion the cir­cle on their web­sites or LinkedIn pro­files, with­out elab­o­ra­tion. “It has not had any vis­i­bil­i­ty, and it has not sought any vis­i­bil­i­ty,” Hayes said. By meet­ing out of the pub­lic eye, mem­bers said, they are able to speak freely.

Ener­gy­Wire learned of the cir­cle’s exis­tence from a chance com­ment of one of its mem­bers at a pub­lic meet­ing last fall. Since then, 19 mem­bers have gone on the record to tell the Solar Cir­cle’s sto­ry. Many said the cir­cle has been able to stay so low-pro­file for so long because of a fierce com­mit­ment to keep its con­tain­er tight, as well as a trait that is com­mon in the cir­cle but rarely found among those at the top of an indus­try: humil­i­ty. The group has self-select­ed for mem­bers dis­in­clined to boast or brag.

The group has grown, but slow­ly, as it seeks out a rare com­bi­na­tion of traits: unswerv­ing com­mit­ment to solar, a high lev­el of exper­tise, a hum­ble and gen­er­ous out­look, and the abil­i­ty to mesh with a well-estab­lished clique. Can­di­dates are audi­tioned and often turned away. “We look at not just what they are but who they are,” said Guiney. “We’re shar­ing some per­son­al infor­ma­tion, and we want to make sure that is a per­son who’s trust­wor­thy and hon­or­able. They’ve got to be in it for more than a buck. It’s got to be a passion.”

Among the addi­tions have been Kennedy and Blun­den, as well as Jigar Shah, the founder of solar devel­op­er SunEdi­son, and Mer­feld of GE, who caught the atten­tion of Shaw when she gave a talk at Cor­nell University.

The group has no mem­bers from new­er com­pa­nies in the clean ener­gy space that come clos­est to being house­hold names, such as Tes­la, Sun­run Inc. and SolarCi­ty Corp.

“We know peo­ple in all of those com­pa­nies,” Shaw said. “I just don’t think they matched the per­son­al­i­ty, the work-togeth­er eth­ic of the group.”

A guest speak­er or two can be found at almost every retreat. Once, the guest was a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who pro­posed a road map to the U.S. get­ting 100 per­cent renew­able ener­gy (Cli­mateWire, June 2); anoth­er was a social media expert from Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s first pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Often it is a local politi­cian who can give the group a ground-lev­el view, such as Jay Inslee, who spoke before the group when he was a con­gress­man and is now the gov­er­nor of Washington.

Some­times the guest stirs things up.

A solar city

In 2004, the cir­cle invit­ed Mar­vin Kesh­n­er, a direc­tor at Hewlett-Packard Lab­o­ra­to­ries, who pro­posed an idea that aston­ished the circle.

He sug­gest­ed that pho­to­volta­ic solar pan­els could fol­low the curve of anoth­er sil­i­con-based indus­try — semi­con­duc­tors — that had in the 1980s and 1990s scaled to titan­ic size, using economies of scale to ush­er in our era of ubiq­ui­tous, cheap com­put­ing. Kesh­n­er pro­posed that the Unit­ed States lead an effort to build hun­dreds of huge solar fac­to­ries that would pro­duce sev­er­al gigawatts of pan­els a year and spread solar to every roof by slash­ing its price to a dol­lar a watt. He called this fac­to­ry a “solar city.”

Kesh­n­er’s pro­pos­al was pre­scient. Mas­sive fac­to­ries that pro­duce gigawatts of solar mod­ules a year did get built — in Chi­na. The cost of an installed solar sys­tem may reach $1 a watt — by 2020. And one U.S. com­pa­ny is attempt­ing to steal back Chi­na’s lead with a solar “gigafac­to­ry.” Its name? SolarCity.

But back in 2004, when the idea first fell on the cir­cle’s ears, it was a rev­e­la­tion. Shaw said, “It was so far away from where the indus­try was at that point that it was almost unthinkable.”

The group briefly con­sid­ered mount­ing a man­u­fac­tur­ing effort like Kesh­n­er sug­gest­ed but changed its mind after it real­ized how much that would cost.

The cir­cle was a venue where excit­ing prospects first entered the minds of some of the indus­try’s lead­ing lights. Ideas are bandied about, in the leisure of a con­ver­sa­tion among equals, with lit­tle attempt to make them con­crete. Thus the Solar Cir­cle has served as a sort of salon for the solar indus­try, direct­ing intel­lec­tu­al heat onto promis­ing ideas that sub­tly per­co­lat­ed out­ward, often at the state level.

The cir­cle counts among its mem­bers some of the archi­tects of today’s solar land­scape. Starrs, the Sun­Pow­er vice pres­i­dent, orig­i­nat­ed key parts of net meter­ing, which com­pen­sates small-scale solar gen­er­a­tors, like homes, for the pow­er they sup­ply the grid — a propo­si­tion that now under­lies the finan­cial val­ue of much of the coun­try’s fleet of rooftop solar pan­els. Aitken helped draft the first renew­able port­fo­lio stan­dards, which are now in place in a major­i­ty of U.S. states. Shah of SunEdi­son pio­neered the pow­er pur­chase agree­ment, the mod­el that is used by util­i­ties and busi­ness­es to con­tract the pow­er from renew­able ener­gy pow­er plants.

The cir­cle often lends a hand to a mem­ber in need.

Some of the younger mem­bers, now in their 40s, look to the old­er cohort, many in their 70s, as men­tors. Sev­er­al mem­bers said Hochschild got cru­cial sup­port from the cir­cle as he co-found­ed Vote Solar, a San Fran­cis­co bal­lot ini­tia­tive that was one of the first suc­cess­ful attempts to make solar pow­er a vot­ing issue. (Hochschild declined to be inter­viewed for this story.)

“What’s inter­est­ing to me is that it remains a tight­ly cor­re­lat­ed group that will help each oth­er out at the drop of a hat,” Blun­den said. “I go to them for a kick in the pants.”

Oth­ers, like Kam­men, dis­cov­ered the pow­er of the cir­cle’s net­work. An intro­duc­tion from anoth­er cir­cle mem­ber brought two start­up founders into the pro­fes­sor’s office. Kam­men was impressed and became chair­man of the star­tup’s research board. Today that com­pa­ny, Enphase, dom­i­nates the mar­ket for microin­vert­ers, which con­vert direct cur­rent to alter­nat­ing cur­rent at the point of the solar pan­el and have become a key link in smart and effi­cient solar arrays.

“This was real­ly a group that just had a lot of inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions,” Kam­men said, “many of which became com­pa­nies, ideas or white papers.”

But con­ver­sa­tions are ephemer­al, and even the cir­cle’s own mem­bers don’t agree on whether they have had an impact.

“I think that key lead­ers with­in the indus­try were able to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly more effec­tive and nim­ble and cre­ative and time­ly because of the cir­cle’s exis­tence, and I can’t help but believe that the incred­i­ble suc­cess of the solar indus­try has been great­ly sup­port­ed by the exis­tence of the cir­cle,” said Hendricks.

Oth­ers are more cir­cum­spect. “If we were all shot and killed,” Sklar said, “solar would still be here.”

The next dawning

What does a group ded­i­cat­ed to dom­i­nance do when it final­ly starts to win?

That is the exis­ten­tial ques­tion fac­ing the Solar Cir­cle and its mem­ber­ship. For years, the group won­dered how to get celebri­ties and reli­gious lead­ers to speak about cli­mate change and renew­able ener­gy; in the last year it got just that, from Leonar­do DiCaprio to Pope Fran­cis (Cli­mateWire, Jan. 20; Green­wire, Sept. 25, 2015). Mem­bers strate­gized how to speed the adop­tion of rooftop solar; ear­li­er this year, the U.S. sur­passed a mil­lion solar installations.

Now that solar is matur­ing into a com­plex glob­al enter­prise, the hori­zon is filled with oth­er ques­tions: How will gigawatts of inter­mit­tent solar pow­er be stored? Can home or indus­tri­al-size bat­ter­ies get cheap enough to do it? Can elec­tric cars? Can the hub-and-spoke elec­tric grid be flat­tened into a mesh, mak­ing a thou­sand rooftop solar pan­els as valu­able as a cen­tral­ized coal pow­er plant?

Mem­bers of the group are quick to point out that it’s still ear­ly days for solar. “When there’s solar ener­gy on every build­ing you look at, our job might be done then,” said Guiney. Some cir­cle mem­bers, par­tic­u­lar­ly the younger ones, think the cir­cle could play a role in trans­form­ing the world’s ener­gy sys­tem into one that revolves around the sun.

“In a white­board envi­ron­ment, what would we do?” Blun­den asked. “We’ve got to pre­pare for domination.”

But before dom­i­na­tion comes defense.

One of the solar indus­try’s key pol­i­cy tenets, net ener­gy meter­ing, is under attack by cli­mate deniers and “util­i­ties who think they own the elec­tric­i­ty world,” said Shaw. Neva­da gut­ted its net-meter­ing pol­i­cy last year, argu­ing it is a hid­den penal­ty on cus­tomers who don’t gen­er­ate their own pow­er. Anoth­er key pol­i­cy tool, the renew­able port­fo­lio stan­dard, seemed to be on a path toward bring­ing ever more renew­able pow­er to ever more states — until recent­ly. In the last year, stan­dards have been scrapped in Kansas and West Vir­ginia and have stalled in Ohio and Maryland.

In oth­er ways, solar is “so suc­cess­ful that we caused a new prob­lem,” Shaw said. In Cal­i­for­nia, by far the leader in inte­grat­ing renew­ables onto the pow­er grid, out­put from solar and wind farms has spiked at times of day when demand for pow­er is the low­est — the so-called duck curve — which has caused the grid oper­a­tor to shut down deliv­er­ies (Ener­gy­Wire, May 2, 2014).

The cir­cle, found­ed with 30 mem­bers, now has meet­ings attend­ed by between a dozen and 20 reg­u­lars. Many of the orig­i­nal mem­bers have stepped away, and some refer to it in the past tense. Some, like Kam­men, believe the cir­cle has been over­tak­en by events; he has stopped going, he said, because he can see the same peo­ple and have the same con­ver­sa­tions at the ener­gy and cli­mate con­fer­ences that crowd the cal­en­dar these days.

Oth­ers find that time is over­tak­ing them.

“I would­n’t say it’s a social club, but it’s not as sub­stan­tial or as rel­e­vant as it once was,” said Hayes. “We’re a bunch of geezers now. We’re going to start dying, and we’ll see if we get replaced and it con­tin­ues to have usefulness.”

At a meet­ing last year, the cir­cle mourned the pass­ing of three spous­es. One was Har­wood, who was a cir­cle mem­ber along with her hus­band, Aitken. He still makes it to all the meet­ings he can, because both the top­ic and the peo­ple are close to his heart.

“There is no oth­er such group any­where that meets reg­u­lar­ly and has such a diverse mem­ber­ship,” he said. “And God, we love each oth­er. When we meet each oth­er, there’s hugs all around.”