[V]ermont’s largest solar company has expanded further into New York state with the acquisition of Hudson Solar, through a merger completed on Tuesday in Rhinebeck, New York.
The move won’t result in layoffs in either state, said SunCommon co-founder Duane Peterson.
“We’re going to dramatically increase employment in New York, and even increase SunCommon’s [number of] employees in Vermont, to serve the expansion in New York,” Peterson said.
The expansion marks SunCommon’s second foray into New York’s solar scene.
In 2017, the company joined with Sustainable Energy Developments, based in Ontario, New York, in a rebranded venture known as SunCommon NY.
Peterson said the new venture with Hudson Solar demonstrated that SunCommon’s approach is workable outside Vermont.
Peterson said it was Hudson Solar that approached SunCommon to inquire about the possibility of forming another partnership.
The Hudson Valley area has a number of similarities to Vermont, Peterson said. Both are rolling rural landscapes with small towns whose inhabitants feel a connection to the land, he said. The major difference, he said, is that the Hudson Valley has four times as many people as Vermont, and about half the solar-energy development.
Peterson said the New York market won’t lure his six-year-old business from its native state.
“We’re in Vermont to stay,” he said.
Vermont policies and politicians in recent years have retreated from the ambitious renewable energy goals that had been set in the past, and at the federal level politicians are scrambling to protect fossil fuels, but Peterson said the time still is ripe for his company’s expansion.
“We call it the solar coaster,” he said. “Lots of strange things happen to the solar coaster. Our president slapped a tax on clean-energy equipment. Well, that was dumb, but we’re on the right side of history, and so whatever nonsense they throw at us, we feel compelled to figure it out and make it easy and affordable for people to go solar.
“Vermont state policy ebbs and flows, New York state policy ebbs and flows, and whatever it is they throw at us, we’re going to deal with it, because this is a mission-driven organization,” Peterson said.
“The solar market, broadly, in Vermont has been shrinking,” he acknowledged, but “we need to build a lot more renewable energy to serve the planet, so we’ll just figure it out.”
At the same time, Peterson pointed to recent predictions, by reputable and high-profile investment specialists, of trillions of dollars of activity, in upcoming years, in renewable energy markets.
“Clean energy is now,” he said.
Peterson would not share details on the cost of the company’s latest acquisition, nor would he share specific plans and performance goals for the newly merged entity except to say the plan is to sell thousands of New Yorkers on solar energy. The company’s plans for the future, he said, are “pretty intense.”
