Shop Talk: Q&A with Sascha Deri, AltE
Photo/Christina H. Davis
Sascha Deri
President and CEO,
AltE, Hudson
Hudson-based AltE (known until last year as the Alternative Energy Store) is one of many firms hoping to benefit from the Obama administration’s promise of an increase in federal funding and tax credits for renewable energy. The company, closing in on a decade in business, was founded 10 years ago by Sascha Deri, president and CEO, and his two partners, Nick Albright, CTO, and Jason Federspiel, COO, as an online source for do-it-yourselfers looking to go “off-grid” using solar or other renewable energy installations. Today, the company offers virtual and in-person training, for free and at a cost. It’s also an online distributor to consumers and installers of renewable energy technology. Here, Deri talks about the trends he sees in the renewable energy field.
How did you get to where you are today?
As I grew up, I knew I wanted to do something that meshed technology with benefiting the world. After working for telecommunications companies in Massachusetts, I began working on a VOIP business in 1998. That business basically failed, but it was a really good experience and we learned how to do commerce online. At the time I thought, why don’t we apply what we learned about doing online commerce to renewable energy.
We started out in 1999 by providing education to people interested in renewable energy. Since then, we’ve grown on average about 45 to 50 percent every year. We now have 25 employees.
How has demand for your services changed over the last 10 years?
In the beginning, our customers were traditional renewable energy users that wanted to live off the grid. Then, about two or three years later, California began subsidizing solar or wind systems that tied into the grid. We began orienting ourselves toward installers. We’ve largely hunkered down and focused ourselves on the “do-it-yourselfers” and wholesale installers.
There’s been a lot of media attention on the fact that our electricity grid needs updates in order to accept large renewable energy installations. What do you make of that?
The issue that you’re referring to is the old way of providing power, where power is centralized and 50 percent of the energy that gets transmitted is lost to the transmission alone. But renewable sources lend themselves to distributed power networks very well.
It’s like the old model of the Internet, where all the processing was done by a centralized computer. Nowadays, the Internet is a gigantic distributed network that is highly robust — if one link goes down, the system reroutes it with no issue whatsoever. That’s what we’re going towards with renewable energy systems.
If we put solar panels on every roof, energy is being produced on the local level and very little energy is lost and there’s no upgrades that need to be done to the grid. Nothing at all.
AltE just announced the installation of solar panels on its Hudson headquarters. What took you so long?
The biggest hurdle was probably the lawyers. We’re not the owners of the building. We’re leasing the space. So, we had to get a waiver and that’s actually what took the longest. Per day we can get around 2 kilowatt hours on average. It’s a relatively small system.
What’s the biggest misconception about renewable energy?
People always think the first thing they should consider is a solar-electric system for their home. After installing energy efficient light bulbs, the first thing people in New England should consider is solar air and water heating technologies. They are the least expensive and provide the fastest payback. A solar powered collector that heats air in your home pays for itself in three to six years. The solar air heater is a weekend installation that’s very easy to do and it costs less than a wood pellet stove.
Energy prices are down from their peak last year. Will that slow the momentum in the green sector?
If this was four years ago I think that would have been true statement. But now, a large part of our population is truly concerned about where we’re getting our energy, what we’re doing to the environment, and what we’re doing to address global climate change.
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