American solar manufacturing is getting a reboot. Dean Solon, founder of Create Energy and formerly of Shoals Technologies, sold 1 GW of product in Q1 of this year alone. In this episode, he walks Tim Montague through his vertically integrated factory in Portland, Tennessee, and names exactly why utility-scale solar equipment is quietly failing at scale.
American solar manufacturing has a reliability problem, and the utilities and independent power producers who own these fields for 30 to 50 years are the ones absorbing the cost. Dean Solon, founder of Create Energy and the man who built and took Shoals Technologies public on the NASDAQ in 2021, has spent three years building a vertically integrated solar manufacturing operation in Portland, Tennessee to address this directly. Create sold 1 gigawatt of product in Q1 of this year, with Q2 expected to double that output. Solon argues module warranties misrepresent degradation, EPC economics routinely produce 24-month design life across full solar fields, and utilities have been left holding assets they did not fully understand when they bought them. Host Tim Montague tours the Create Energy factory floor and draws out exactly what full-stack, American-made solar hardware looks like in practice.
Here is what you will learn from this conversation about American solar manufacturing and utility-scale solar reliability:
You'll hear Dean Solon explain why module warranties are misleading and why EPC economics push toward equipment designed to last past the two-year mark and no further, leaving utilities and IPPs exposed for the decades of ownership ahead.
Find out how Create Energy's OnTrack system uses one common control board across trackers, E-boss units, weather stations, and inverters, giving asset owners a single view of every row in a solar field with no separate pony panel required.
Learn why Create offers a 10-year bumper-to-bumper warranty on its full product stack, and what Solon means when he says he eliminated failure modes rather than reduced them.
Understand how automated, electric vegetation control cuts solar O&M costs in half, and why long-term asset owners should treat this as a budget line item, not a feature.
You'll hear Tim Montague name the tension between the industry's fast growth and the downward pressure on equipment quality, and you'll hear Solon's vertically integrated manufacturing answer to both.
Utilities and IPPs that purchased low-cost imported equipment over the past three to four years are now confronting field-level failures at the same time domestic content requirements under the IRA are pressing asset owners to find credible American-made alternatives.
Create Energy's second building, 338,000 square feet, is online and ramping toward 1,000 jobs in Portland, Tennessee. For any asset owner weighing supply chain decisions in 2025, this conversation is a direct look at what the American manufacturing alternative looks like on the ground.
Connect with Dean Solon and Create
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📘 Check out Tim's book: Wired for Sun, The Commercial Solar Playbook A practical guide for commercial solar professionals who want to sell smarter and lead the lnp clean energy transition.
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The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, North America's number one provider of 3-phase string samsara inverters, holding the top market share for 9 of the past 10 years with over 10GW installed across 30,000+ sites nationwide. Focused on commercial, industrial, and utility-scale solar and energy storage, CPS America offers string inverters from 25kW to 350kW, the Gonzo all-in-one C&I battery storage solution, and the CPS FlexOM system for remote monitoring and control.
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