Inside the Create Energy Un-Evil Empire

Forget domestic “content,” Dean Solon is ready to sell complete renewable energy power plants — from transformers to trackers to turnkey installation — all made in the U.S.A.

“We’re building an un-Evil Empire,” Solon says of Create Energy, a company built to disrupt everything you know about the renewables industry.

Solon is best known for 1) founding Shoals Technologies and 2) wearing jorts. After Shoals went public in 2021, he stayed loyal to the jorts.

“You go from a founder with a renegade mindset always improving and cannibalizing past successes to a company that has lots of rules and responsibilities to the public market,” Solon tells us about his decision to leave Shoals after 25 years. “I gave birth to my baby Shoals, raised her, introduced to her fiancé, and walked her down the IPO aisle. Like a good father I needed to step aside and let her raise her family as she sees fit.”

With a restless brain and a billion dollars in his jorts pocket, Solon got to work on the Create Energy ecosystem — what he’s calling the un-Evil Empire.

“We’re trying to get the industry out of this status quo of buying the cheapest products and piecemealing them together. For example, this module, on that tracker, with their inverter, with that EPC service, and blah blah blah. All of this requires completely different engineering services and labor,” Solon says. “We’re generating a McDonald’s menu board that runs into an Amazon-style distribution facility. We don’t give a fuck what you order.”

Here’s the inside scoop on Create Energy’s companies, strategic partnerships, and the long-term vision of the Un-Evil Empire, straight from Solon’s mouth to our ears, minus many words we cannot print.

Building the Empire

The McDonald’s and Amazon analogies are good shorthand for Create Energy’s quantity of product options and the efficiency for ordering and delivering those products to the end customer. But no one goes to McDonald’s for good food, or orders “built-to-last” products from Amazon. Conversely, Create Energy has already amassed an arsenal of quality brands in their ecosystem.

Launched in 2023, Create Energy is a one-stop shop for developers, IPPs, EPCs, and utilities developing renewable energy projects. In conjunction with the Create Energy launch, Solon also teamed with Peter Joanna and Ron Corio, former CEO of Array Technologies, to launch private equity firm Neos Partners.

“We raised $830 million for fund 1,” Solon says.

What can that type of cash buy? Check the sidebar below for all the acquisitions made by Create Energy or Neos Partners to this point. (Note: Neos Partners operates independently from Create Energy and Solon is a founding investor in Neos.)

“All of our Neos Partners companies are well run organizations standing on their own.” Solon says. “They run independently of us, as they were. We’re helping them grow and scale. We’re bringing networks to these companies that they never had access to, especially in renewables, utility-scale solar and data centers.”

Each company in the Neos portfolio will benefit from additional capacity at their factories — “double or triple in under 12 months,” Solon estimates. He is one of the largest investors in Neos Partners, but he also has side investments into all these businesses. The companies owned by Neos Partners are now learning high volume manufacturing; they’re buying new buildings and new machinery.

The Create empire also consists of joint ventures. The most notable to this point is a new PV module company called ReCreate Solar, a JV founded by Solon and RECOM Technologies CEO Hamlet Tunyan. RECOM is a European module and cell manufacturer.

ReCreate Solar will pump out modules and cells from a facility in Portland, Tennessee, inside Create Energy’s HQ and Giga-Shop. The facility line will be running by Q3 2025 and have the capacity to produce up to 5 GW of modules and cells in the near future.

Potential customers are lined up, ready to go in 2025.

“We are not going to build products hoping customers will come,” Solon says. “We’re launching with a handful of very long-term friends and customers. We’re going to execute very close-knit relationships, solve their problems and choose our customer list wisely.”

Join the Force

Create Energy revealed a significant partnership with OMCO Solar at RE+ 2024. OMCO Solar will supply its Origin Tracker for the ReCreate modules, ensuring customers receive both trackers and modules from a single provider, Create Energy.

OMCO is a steel roll former and long-time contract manufacturer for many well-known solar racking and tracker companies. OMCO Solar is the market leader in fixed tilt mounting systems according to Wood Mackenzie, and it has served both the distributed generation (DG) space — the 1 MW to 20 MW range — and the utility-scale market with its Origin tracker.

Eric Goodwin, VP of business development with OMCO Solar, says “the timing’s perfect” for such a higher volume, utility-scale project partnership. The goal for utility-scale solar projects with ReCreate modules + OMCO trackers in 2025 is about ~500 MW to start with some strategic, solid customers.

“We’re definitely ready for it,” Goodwin tells us. “Between our six factories — two in Alabama, two in Indiana, Ohio and Arizona — we currently have 13 GWs of annual capacity. This [~500 MW rollout] allows us to really focus our support for the Create initiative, but it also allows us to continue to grow and serve new markets as well as our existing markets — because we see those markets as growing.”

A key attribute for OMCO is its factory-direct manufacturing model and short lead times. OMCO’s customization and contract manufacturing capabilities also come in handy with a higher volume partnership.

“We’ve worked with the ReCreate engineering team to design a module mount specifically for that module, as we do with any module that we support,” Goodwin says. One of OMCO’s facilities in Alabama also produces a backrail specifically for First Solar’s Series 7 modules.

Empire Strikes Back

Back to our question: What can a billion dollars and a restless brain accomplish?

Phase one is mostly the billion dollars at work. In phase two, we’ll see what all these brains inside Create Energy’s “not-a-Death Star” can do. The module + tracker integration is a first glimpse at its disruptive power.

“We hope to be talking over the next year about ways to take our manufacturing capabilities, and the full scope of what Create is becoming, to take cost out of a project and shrink lead times,” Goodwin says. “With such a challenge with labor in our industry and across the country, how can we do things with less?”

Solon’s goal is to make installation as simple as pressing a combo meal button on the McDonald’s register.

“Think about it this way,” Solon says, sanitizing his original explanation for me to print. “This is what we do now: Scrape the earth. Pound the posts. Set the bearing caps. Mount the torque tubes. Prewire the freaking electrical, the eBOS. Come back, mount the module rails. Come back, mount the modules. Bolt them to the torque tube. A separate crew comes and does a torque verification. Another crew comes and connects the connectors. The last crew comes and puts a gazillion zip ties everywhere, and it looks like ass.”

That list equals around six to eight crews, all highly paid manual labor. That list doesn’t include the annual O&M costs of checking the eBOS at least once per year.

“It’s all labor for years,” Solon says. “I’m just going to eliminate all that bullshit. We’re going to take out all of the potential failure modes that are built into a system on each module.”

Create Energy in Action

Create Energy’s first customer was actually the Nissan Corp. The Nissan North America headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., is now home to what the Create team is dubbing (and trademarking) a “NanoGrid” — a 60 kW carport + 500 kWh battery energy storage solution that feeds into 16 Level 2 charging stations, and two Level 3s capable of vehicle-to-grid bidirectional charging.

The Create Energy NanoGrid at Nissan was designed, developed, built, and installed in less than a year, and it is just the first of many.

“Together we will have a joint product to deliver to their dealerships,” Solon says.

During the Create Energy NanoGrid development, EV charger OEM Blink was pulled into the un-Evil Empire. As a result, Blink is set to be more than an EV charger OEM and software company.

“We’re partnering with Blink on next-gen infrastructure for energy storage, and their sales channel and team can go to market with it,” Solon says. “We’re pulling in their EV charging platform and products. This is a critical piece to delivering full turnkey microgrids and a bundled offering to our clients. We can deliver a full turnkey offering. But then Blink has the ability to revolutionize their business too.”

My two cents per Watt

“Your bullshit meter should be going full tilt,” Solon jokes as we wrap up our chat.

I’ve definitely heard a million pitches for game-changing innovations that will disrupt the renewables industry. I’ve written about a few that seemed to make perfect sense and then were gone by the next Solar Power International.

Create Energy definitely feels different. Those other ventures made sense on paper; Create essentially owns the paper mill. Confidence in that financial stability and the people behind it is hugely valuable right now.

“The customers we’re partnering with are literally afraid that half of the companies that are supplying them today won’t be around to pick up the phone shortly. We are going to see companies go out of business or consolidation in the market. Create Energy is here to take the industry to the next frontier.” Solon says.

But it’s not just the equity. Solar in the United States is still a young industry, and many solar inefficiencies come from that lack of history and a lack of consolidation.

For example: Any effort to innovate the module + tracker connection point and scale it up to make it profitable could not happen without decades of working and networking in the industry. Solon’s relationship with Goodwin dates back to his days at First Solar in 2011. They stayed in close contact when Goodwin joined OMCO in 2017, when OMCO started to sell its own fixed tilt and tracker systems.

“Since we started launching our own products, Dean’s always given a lot of support,” Goodwin says.

“I like to play with people that I know that are going to be around decades from now because in solar and battery energy storage and EV, it’s a come-and-go market,” Solon says. “I know 10 years from now I can pick up the phone and call Eric at OMCO, and he’ll pick up and we’ll have good conversations.”
Those connections now go beyond solar.

“What we’ve come to learn in energy storage or EV charging, when we pick up the phone, it’s the same familiar faces that we knew in solar five years ago,” Solon says. “The solar people have entered into the other realm, and they know how to compress the timeline of costs now.”

Given the track record, equity, and ecosystem arsenal to this point, Create Energy seems poised, at the very least, to provide stable U.S. supply and cutting-edge turnkey systems for utility-scale solar fields and larger renewables projects.

After that? The un-Evil Empire has its sights set on the residential solar market.

“What we’re doing in a utility field needs to be done in residential too,” Solon opines. “You’ve got 20 different racking solutions tied to 10 different module solutions tied to how do I interconnect and plug all of this together … the whole system just needs a wholesale change.”

Your bullshit meter reading on that is as good as mine but bet against the jorts at your own peril.

Tags: OMCO solar