solar-installation
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Cool Earth Solar
Cool Earth Solar is a California solar company with two lives: it launched in 2006 as a venture-backed clean-energy startup chasing utility-scale power with cheap, air-inflated plastic concentrator dishes, then evolved into a locally owned residential and commercial solar installer serving the Stockton-to-Placerville corridor. Today it designs, engineers, and installs solar power and battery storage systems in-house - no outsourcing - under CEO Rob Lamkin, and has been a recognized SunPower dealer, winning national and regional dealer awards.
Charge Robotics
Charge Robotics builds robots that automate the most labor-intensive parts of building solar farms. Its flagship product, Sunrise, is a portable assembly line that ships to a project site, robotically snaps together solar 'bays', quality-checks them with machine vision, and uses an autonomous vehicle to place them in the field. Founded in 2021 by MIT engineers Banks Hunter and Max Justicz, the Y Combinator-backed company aims to be the 'Henry Ford moment for solar', removing the labor bottleneck that limits how fast the grid can go renewable.
Banks Hunter
Banks Hunter is the co-founder and CEO of Charge Robotics, a Berkeley-based startup building the world's first fully automated solar construction system. An MIT mechanical engineering alumnus and veteran of medical robotics startup Vicarious Surgical, Hunter co-founded Charge Robotics in 2021 with Max Justicz to solve one of clean energy's most stubborn bottlenecks: the physical, labor-intensive grunt work of assembling a utility-scale solar farm. His company's Sunrise system - a portable robotic assembly line shipped directly to job sites - autonomously puts together 800-pound solar bays and deploys them in the field, aiming to make solar installation as repeatable and scalable as factory production. Backed by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Energy Impact Partners, and Y Combinator, Charge Robotics has raised over $39 million to accelerate the energy transition.