Role Models for the Rooftop Revolution - Rooftop Revolution - page 33

side. As I wrote on a blog with one of my venture-capitalist friends, “The genie is out of
the bottle.”
It may be premature to say that the jobs-versus-environment debate has been won,
but the uplifting reality that burst onto center stage in the election of 2010 was that job
growththroughcleanenergywillbeanimportantissueinfutureelectionsandthatgreen-
job growth is a proven fact (as discussed in chapter 5 ) —and facts are stubborn things.
Renewables attract more bright, young talent moving from other careers than does the
Internet or any other sector. The solar industry now employs more than 25,000 Califor-
nians. As we scale our percentage of the electricity supply from 1 percent to maybe 20
percent, there will be a lot more jobs coming from the Solar Ascent. Here's hoping that
our tartan-tie-wearing Tom will continue to carry the movement forward.
Danielle Merfeld: Advocating as an Intrapreneur
Some rooftop revolutionaries will build their businesses as entirely new enterprises in
the service of bringing solar to the fore. Others will be intrapreneurs —those who work
within existing institutions or companies to drive the Solar Ascent. An inspiration on
this front is Danielle Merfeld, a young, spirited mother of three from Upstate New York.
Danielle leads General Electric's solar business unit and has dramatically risen through
theranksofGE,agiant100-year-oldcorporation—notaneasytaskforafemaleelectric-
al engineer working in a male-dominated field.
Passion and brains are the trademarks of her craft, which she has used to help GE see
the ways it can integrate solar into much of the rest of the grid it helped build. A mind-
blowing25percentofelectricitycomesthroughaGEdevice,whetherthetransformeron
your block or the bulb in your bedroom—an astonishing fact that shows that this heir to
the legacy of Thomas Edison is very much a part of the firmament. Danielle is helping
move this grandpa of a company into the twenty-first century.
GE's solar division is set to boom, just as its wind business has been its most profit-
able over the past decade. The company's ability to integrate solar panels with storage
solutions, inverters, and transformers and all sorts of technologies critical to the infra-
structure ofthe existing gridwill create ahugeamount ofvalue. Forbes reported that the
first major market that GE's brand-new solar division is going to step into will be solar
farmsaroundwindturbines, whichthecompany isalsogoingtobuildandfinance. More
than 1 million solar panels will be produced in a US factory each year, and they're going
to go to GE's own wind farms and will probably connect to the grid through devices that
the company made. It's a beautiful business model of vertical integration that could res-
ult in a massive opportunity to create clean electricity.