Adam Torres and Owen Barrett discuss solar.
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Show Notes:
What are the financial, environmental, and social benefits for apartment owners to use solar energy? In this episode, Adam Torres and Owen Barrett, CEO at Shine, explore Shine and solar energy.
About Shine
Shine helps apartment owners boost Net Operating Income (NOI) by transforming unused rooftop space into revenue-generating assets through solar energy. Founded by apartment owners for apartment owners, Shine is led by a team of clean energy professionals, master electricians, and tech entrepreneurs united by a mission to help multifamily property owners monetize onsite solar power.
Frustrated by the lack of scalable, risk-mitigated solutions—especially those that work across all 50 states—Shine was created to fill that gap. Existing options only focused on reducing common area loads, a minimal impact in the grand scheme of energy use. Shine changes that equation.
As the only nationwide solution capable of eliminating both Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions—while actively monitoring Scope 3—Shine is setting a new standard in sustainability for the multifamily housing industry. The company is committed to accelerating decarbonization at scale, offering a powerful blend of financial and environmental benefits for apartment owners nationwide.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BER guest to apply. All right, so today I have Owen Barrett on the line, and he’s the CEO of Shine, which provides solar for apartments.
Owen, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. All right, so first thing first I gotta ask shine. Where’d you come up with that name for? I love it. It’s kind of on the nose, right? But I don’t know. Yeah. Honestly, my, least favorite part of coming up with a business is like the name and the branding.
‘ cause it can take so long and it just kind of distracts you from doing what you wanna do, which is obviously the business model. But yeah, I mean, it works for this one. Yeah, I was gonna say, I was like shy. I was like, come on man. Who did that one? No, it was good. So, so how’d you get into this business?
How’d you get into solar? Oh, man. So I, I started off in finance kind of noticed that I had a knack for financial analysis, but didn’t really like the financial industry. So I went to grad school for environmental science that launched me into a career as an energy manager for a Fortune 100 company.
I was there for about three years, then I quit to start my own company and I’ve been doing kind of the, entrepreneurial journey within the clean tech sector for the last decade. Hmm. And what, what what geographies do you work in? We are nationwide for Shine, which is super exciting. Fantastic. Well, let’s go a little bit further into kind of the benefits of what you’re doing.
So environmental, social impact, like, talk to me a little bit more about, what that looks like. So from an environmental perspective, 40% of global emissions are from the built environment, right? So buildings that are already existing we cannot curb greenhouse gas emissions if we don’t figure out how to decarbonize existing buildings.
It’s just that, straightforward So Shine focuses on exactly that. We decarbonize existing apartment buildings by installing solar on the tenant meters, which is a big distinction because most solar companies go after the common area meters, like the leasing office, the fitness center, et cetera. 90 to 95% of, emissions within an apartment building come from tenants.
So if you’re only installing solar to offset the common area loads, you’re, you know, it’s a drop in the bucket. It’s not even worth mentioning. So we distinguish ourselves by going after the tenant load, which is the bigger one. From a social perspective, it’s really interesting because, you know, a lot of people talk about getting the benefits of clean technology to low and moderate income individuals, LMI, individuals.
And they, by far and large live in apartment buildings. So again, if we can’t figure out how to get solar to the apartment unit level, not just the common area meters, we can never get the benefits of cheaper, cleaner electricity to tenants. Generally, you know, electricity from solar increases, the price of it increases a lot solar than electricity from the grid.
So by installing solar on 10 meters, you can kind of take off some of that inflationary burden that the utilities have been putting on people the last five, 10 years. Hmm. And then finally the, the financial piece you know, it costs about $6,000 is a gross cost to install solar per apartment unit. It’s eligible for about a 30% tax credit, which.
You can sell and turn into cash. So the net cost is about $4,000 and it generates about 600 bucks a year in NOI. So if you put, you know, five, six, 7% cap rate on that $600 per unit per year in NOI it usually adds about two to three times in value what the system costs you. So it really is a triple bottom line approach.
Wow. How did you, how did you come up with this business model? We bought 650 apartment units ourselves as our Guinea pigs, I guess you can call them. We wanted to figure out how can you actually decarbonize solar, not just, or sorry, apartments, not just talk about it, but how do you actually do it? And turned into this crazy journey where we had to develop a software platform because.
If you think about your average apartment building, say it’s 200 units, you have to install 200 small solar systems. Mm-hmm. You need a way to bill 200 tenants. You need a way to monitor those 200 systems. And it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist outside of Shine. And the only reason why is because we kind of purpose built this thing.
The problem that we’re going after. Then we realized, you know, instead of using this tool to help us buy more apartment buildings, let’s turn it into a, turnkey niche solar EPC, for the multifamily industry, because that’s really what’s missing in this space. Hmm. so what kind of adoption have you had so far?
Like, like how’s this talk to me about like scaling this and spreading this idea. It’s growing like crazy. 2023 was the first year of shine. That was after I think six years of buying our own apartment buildings. Hmm. You know, shine itself is fairly new, but sort of the expertise and the business model is not.
Had zero revenue in 2023, had about $500,000 in revenue in 2024, and we’re on track to do about 7 million in 2025. Wow. So it’s just exploding. And I mean, the reason why is apartment owners. Generally want to decarbonize, especially within sort of the institutional space. Most just don’t know it’s possible to install solar on tenant meters, and so we’re on this big just educational campaign to let people know it’s possible.
So I can imagine like, yeah, I didn’t know it was possible, like until you just mentioned it. Like I, I was like, what? Wait a minute. How, how, how did that, I didn’t even know that that passed by me. By what areas are you seeing a lot of adoption? Are you in California, Arizona? Like what kind of areas are you seeing A lot of adoption.
We do work in California. I mean, the idea was kind of born in California. At the time I was living in Southern California. My partner still lives there. But we’ve seen a ton of adoption in Texas. Texas is is a really incredible market because most people are unaware, but. The cost of electricity for residential meters in Texas is actually fairly high.
It’s not too far off California. The cost of electricity on commercial meters in Texas is like extremely low, and so again, most building owners are used to thinking about installing solar on their commercial meters, where it’s really hard to get the unit economics to work. But if you flip the equation on its head and you use the residential electric rates, it makes, you know, all the sense in the world.
You start talking about like a high teens IRR. And so we’re seeing Texas is probably our fastest growing market because of the cost of electricity and the solar radiance. There’s just, you know, there’s a ton of sunny days and the sun’s fairly strong in Texas. Hmm. So what, your next step for the business?
Like, talk to me about, obviously you’re growing, like mad. What, what’s the next steps? Well, we just, we raised a seed round, which we’re pretty excited about. So we’re kind of in a a moment of hiring right now, but, and we have a couple, projects going on with the top two of the top five largest apartment owners in the us.
So for us, it’s really just focusing on execution of those projects because we know that if the first couple projects are successful, then they’re just gonna scale within their portfolios. So it’s always focusing on execution, making sure that we have great. Experiences with the customers. The tenants have good experience with us.
And then just again, this, this educational campaign of letting other owners know that it’s possible now to install solar on tenant meters. And just kind of seeing where the journey goes. I think it’s super interesting and that execution piece is, is gonna be key. What are some of the, like, hurdles that you, obviously there’s gonna be many, but what are some of the, what are some of the hurdles that you kind of foresee, like as you scale this?
Like, I’m just, I’m trying to fathom like, because there’s so 200 departments per, my head is spinning right now, Owen, thinking about your logistics, talk to me about some hurdles, man. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s hard, right? Every project. So again, that 200 unit property. It’s 200 sets of plans.
It’s 200 permits. It’s 200 points of interconnection. I mean, it’s, a kind of a, a monster to take on. Yeah, but we’ve been doing it for a while. So we have all of our systems in place. You know, we’re, we’re sort of unique in the, the solar. Contracting world. I think we’re the only group doing this style of installation.
I think that’s an understatement to say you need con The only one’s crazy enough to attempt it. I’m gonna say that. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re rewarded, but ugh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, fortunately we’ve done a lot of the legwork now. It’s just, you know, obviously we wanna grow as fast as possible, but we also want to grow responsibly because.
As owners of apartments ourselves, we recognize that if a large owner installs solar for the first time and they have a good experience and the, you know, the actual numbers hit the pro forma numbers, they will scale across their portfolio. Yeah. Which is huge for us. If they have a bad experience, they’ll not evaluate solar again for probably five, five years, 10 years.
And so. We’re sort of in control of our own destiny in that regard. And so that’s again, why the execution piece is just so important. Yeah. I wonder, I, I’m just throwing this out there. I’m, and I don’t know if you have these metrics or I’m just thinking about like, some of the benefits of going through, in my head, it seems like, like as a tenant, like let’s say I’m moving into a apartment, like that’s a, that’s a big draw for me.
I feel like. Have you noticed that or have you gotten any feedback like that? Like that’d be pretty cool. So we have had that feedback. We’ve also have the alternate feedback though, which is, you know, I don’t believe in climate change. I hate solar. I’m not gonna live here. Right? Because I mean, the issue is kind of 50 50 depending on who you’re talking to.
So it depends on the region. Maybe I shouldn’t go there, right? Depends, yeah, it probably depends on region. But you know, I think regardless of politics yeah. Everybody wants to save money, right? Like life is more expensive for everyone. Whether you’re democrat, republican, believe in climate change or not.
That pocket book from the exactly, exactly where it matters. So from a tenant perspective, if they’re paying a hundred dollars to the utility now per month, presolar, we come in and install solar. Their utility bill drops to 50 bucks a month. So now they’re saving $50 a month, and of that $50 savings, they’re paying a portion of it to the owner.
So they’re paying anywhere from, 20 to $45. Hmm. So there’s always net savings to the tenants, which is super important. How big those net savings are is entirely up to the owners, but I feel like dollars speak to both sides of the aisle. So, in theory it shouldn’t really matter what someone’s perspective is of climate change or clean technology.
They just wanna save money. Yeah. Good old capitalism I’m in. Great. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that get, get ’em there. I agree with you, Owen. This is great. Well, Owen, man, first off, thank you for coming on the show today and educating me on this. ’cause I, I didn’t know it was available and for my audience as well for those that did not know.
So it sounds to me like you’re working, I mean, you guys are growing like crazy. how do people connect? How do they follow up? They wanna learn more. A lot. A lot of business owners, a lot of investors multifamily that listen to this show. How, how do people learn more? Yeah. So they can reach out. My email [email protected].
I’m on LinkedIn, Owen Barrett, and then our website is get shine.com. And there’s little contact form on there too. Fantastic and everybody watching and listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes that you can Just click on ’em and head on over to get shine.com. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day I am bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new. To help you along way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and oh, and man, I, look forward to hearing and seeing more of your journey. Congrats on all the, growth, man.
And I know you guys are just gonna keep on knocking it outta the park. So again thanks for coming on. Yeah, man, appreciate it. It was fun.