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Due to his record of success, it came as no surprise that his firm has been chosen for the high-profile installation of a community distributed generation project using a cutting-edge bifacial solar technology this summer.
Hertz founded Sunrise Solar Solutions in 2009 by leveraging his decades of electrical design experience in the entertainment industry to revolutionize the way energy is consumed in Rockland, Westchester and the Hudson Valley.
“A partner and I were restoring old homes about a decade ago, and we wanted to incorporate solar. We searched locally for a good, responsive solar energy company to work with, but we just didn’t get a good response,” says Hertz. “That’s when we realized this was an opportunity for us.”
Their timing couldn’t have been better: Solar technology was making a major leap forward at that time, which made solar energy safer, more efficient, longer lasting, more transparent and more attractive in one fell swoop.
Hertz and his business partner then made a bold move: “Even though we were a startup, and we knew it would be more costly up front, we made the company decision right from the start to do 100 percent of our residential installations using only the new micro-inverter technology. We were the first in the region to do that,” said Hertz.
“There can be a temptation for startups to let cost, rather than value, drive certain decisions. I resisted that temptation. One of the things we decided from day one was that we were going to build the best systems that you could get.”
It was a carefully calculated risk that paid off -- and left their competitors scrambling to catch up.
“It was more expensive, but the value and savings so far outweighed the difference in upfront expenses that we really branded ourselves around this technology,” Hertz says. “From my view, it’s been fantastic. Over the years, other companies have begun to embrace that, and are now trying to catch up.”
