Episode Details

Episode Summary

In this episode of Solar Maverick, Nathan Vasher discusses how Extra Space Storage is one of the biggest corporate users of solar energy and how they plan to continue growing their solar deployment and also employing energy-conscious initiatives.  Nathan also shares his path to solar, trends he’s excited about, and an energy future that looks very bright.

Benoy Thanjan

Benoy Thanjan is the Founder and CEO of Reneu Energy, as well as an advisor for several solar startup companies. Reneu Energy is a premier international solar energy consulting firm and developer, and the company focuses on developing commercial and industrial solar, as well as utility-scale solar plus storage projects. The company also sources financing for solar projects and hedges both energy and environmental commodities. Reneu Energy has brokered $27 million in environmental commodity transactions.  

Benoy received his first experience in Finance as an intern at D.E. Shaw & Co., which is a global investment firm with 37 billion dollars in investment capital. Before founding Reneu Energy, he was the SREC Trader in the Project Finance Group for SolarCity, which merged with Tesla in 2016. He originated SREC trades with buyers and co-developed their SREC monetization and hedging strategy with the senior management of SolarCity, to move into the east coast markets. Benoy also worked at Vanguard Energy Partners, Ridgewood Renewable Power, and Deloitte & Touche.

Nathan Vasher

Nathan Vasher is the Manager of Solar at Extra Space Storage, a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Standard & Poor 500 (S&P 500).  It is a fully-integrated, self-administered, self-managed real estate investment trust. Extra Space has properties in 40 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico, they own or operate over 1,800 stores comprising approximately 1.3 million units and 135 million square feet of rentable space.  Extra Space has become one of the largest corporate users of solar energy according to rankings realized by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).  The trade group ranked Extra Space in tenth place in terms of the number of solar installations.

Nathan has 7 years of professional client-facing experience working with public sector, non-profit and international clients through all phases of organization development; providing strategy, performance management, measures development, process improvement, change management, training and business process design services. He has experience providing technical support to advance health programs in the area of supply chain management working in multiple countries including The Netherlands, South Africa, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, and Switzerland.

Insights from this episode:

• Details on Nathan’s role as Manager of Solar at Extra Space, the history of the company’s solar program strategy, and how that strategy has advanced over the years.
• How Extra Space determines what properties to install solar.  
• How Extra Space runs RFP process with preferred vendors on properties to determine where to install solar.
• Why Extra Space has a preference toward owning the solar projects on their properties. 
• How Nathan uses Extra Spaces’ past successes to guide where they invest in new solar properties.
• Strategies to plan for the future when you are dealing with older properties and the inevitable repairs they will need.  
• Benefits of employing energy-saving initiatives including increased energy efficiency and cost-saving.
• Details on the step-down of the Investment Ta