Solar Maverick Podcast SMP 03: Innovative Solar Financing Solution with Abinash Tiwari from Blue Flame Energy Finance
About our guest:
Abinash Tiwari is the CIO of BlueFlame Energy Finance, a startup company based in California that focuses on financing energy projects for commercial building owners. He has over 15 years of experience in the solar energy industry, including in energy finance, project development, origination and business development. He has worked on projects totalling 250 megawatts of solar energy and invested one billion in solar PV, storage and other Distributed Generation projects. Before he joined BlueFlame, he was the director of renewable business development at Constellation NewEnergy.
Episode summary:
Abinash speaks from 15 years of experience creating innovative ways to finance solar energy projects and navigating the dynamic nature of working in a relatively new industry. He says learning on the job and constantly evolving with the technology makes his job fun.
Insights from this episode:
- Abinash’s secrets to innovating ahead of PACE(“Property Assessed Clean Energy “) financing programs instead of waiting around for those programs to catch up
- How you can be the value added on a project – quality over quantity when building relationships
- His thoughts on the trends to look out for in solar technology (hint: it’s not energy storage)
Quotes from the show:
- “I always thought power has more value than SRECs fundamentally, because power is something people need. SRECs is something which is created by regulators.” - Abinash Tiwari, Episode 3
- On BlueFlame’s financial model versus the national financing initiative PACE: “The beauty of this is we can go to any state, any jurisdiction, and actually still finance fairly small projects.” - Abinash Tiwari, Episode 3
- “As a small business, as a startup, you are always looking at how the market reacts to what you’re trying to do and then change course. And you have to do that super quickly because you don’t have the liberty and the stability of a very large business. Pretty much you learn as you go, and actually that is pretty exciting.” - Abinash Tiwari, Episode 3
- “The tailwinds are there behind solar and energy distribution in general fundamentally, and it is not going to go away.” - Abinash Tiwari, Episode 3
- “The question is do you want stability or do you want to join the fun?” - Abinash Tiwari, Episode 3
- “It’s all about adding value, being honest and transparent.” - Benoy Thanjan, Episode 3
Stay connected:
Benoy Thanjan
Li Wang:
Instagram: @liwang22
Abinash Tiwari
- blueflameenergyfinance.com or hyperqual.com