Today we’d like to introduce you to Sachin Patel.
Sachin, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was born in a farming family in rural India, My ease with numbers led me to pursue degrees in engineering in India and the US. I started my professional career in 2000 building conventional gas and coal fired power plants for Enron and other construction companies. After designing and constructing several of these plants, I attended the Wharton MBA Program and made a switch to energy investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York. Banking exposed me to the various renewable energy technologies and I could not stay away from an operating role for too long. Since leaving banking, I have developed many large scale wind and solar projects in different countries. Last year, I took the entrepreneurial plunge and started my own solar development business based in the Greater Boston area.
Has it been a smooth road?
Entrepreneurship is anything but smooth. As a business owner, one has to be adept at dealing with multiple fronts – customers, investors, co-workers etc. – all at the same time. The first challenge is getting the first few customers. I got my first corporate customer nearly after eight long months of waiting. I have learned that the greatest virtue one needs to be a successful entrepreneur is patience. Additionally, absence of a paycheck compels you to run a business with meager resources whereas a new business demands a lot of resources, business development and marketing expenses to grow etc. So one has to learn to strike that balance in the absence of any meaningful capital.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the LastMile Energy story. Tell us more about the business.
LastMile Energy develops solar projects. In less than two years, I have grown the business from doing small residential rooftop solar projects to now developing commercial scale solar fields. My 15 years of experience in the energy and power generation space as an engineer, banker and corporate executive gives me a unique advantage. Having seen the industry from all facets allows me to form not only the right corporate strategy but also focus on the nuts and bolts of technology and operations, which I think are crucial for a start-up.
While it’s too soon to claim any victory yet, we have done some interesting projects, including a solar project on a curved industrial roof, implementing one-of-a-kind, non-penetrative racking solution for our customer. I am also soon starting the development of a 1 MW ground mounted commercial scale solar project for a private investor, which hopefully paves the way to develop more of these in the coming years.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
15 years ago, I worked on a captive gas-fired power project for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority. Times have now changed and organizations over the world want to implement clean technologies, especially when they are cost competitive. Airports now are building captive solar projects to power their operations. In the next 5 years, clean technologies such as solar will compete head-on and without any subsidies with conventional, polluting technologies and every major business and rooftop owner will produce and consume its own power. With energy storage costs expected to decline rapidly in the coming years, “onsite solar + storage” solutions will largely eliminate the century old model of mega scale, centralized power production and the need for massive transmission and distribution lines.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lastmile-energy.com
- Phone: 781-686-2729
- Email: sp@lastmile-energy.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LastMileEnergy
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lastmileenergy/
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