SolaBlock: Technology that Drives Sustainability

Welcome. My name is Mike Ungar, and I'm one of the Industry 4.0 Club co-founders. The club's purpose is to advance the deployment of Industry 4.0 for manufacturers not only here in the U.S., but also around the world. My background includes 35 years of experience with Michelin North America in continuous improvement, operations, finance, and HR roles. Today, I'm a Focal Point business coach helping business leaders achieve their full potential. We have the privilege today of having conversations from CESME's broadcasting booth in the Smart Manufacturing Zone at SME's South Tech Conference. I'm really, really lucky today to be joined by Eric Plany, Chief Executive Officer of Soloblock, and Craig Dorey, who's Executive Director of the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Center at RPI. Welcome. Just a quick introduction for our guests. Eric joined Soloblock as CEO in September of 2021. He has 25-plus years of international banking and economic development experience. with a focus on industrial, automotive, aerospace, and energy industries. Eric is a proud graduate of Bowling Green State University and the Thunderbird School of Global Management. In 2015, Eric completed NYU's inaugural Energy Finance program in their School of Professional Studies. He's currently co-host of the Pirates of Cleantech podcast and a board member of the City Parks Foundation in New York City. Craig. Craig is a results-driven business development leader with deep strategy and operations acumen, known for connecting the dots with out-of-the-box disruptive thinking. Proven track record— Eric, I'm sorry. Craig has a proven track record developing strategies, markets, and products for startup, hypergrowth, and market-leading enterprises in high-tech, And advanced manufacturing. Well, you guys have a ton of experience. It's really great to have you here.

Thank you. Great to be here.

So, um, we're here to talk about SolarBlock and the role that RPI has with SolarBlock. So I'm anxious to get into that with you both. So SolarBlock's an amazing breakthrough for manufacturers who are considering building a new facility. Eric, can you talk about what is SolarBlock and, and just what makes it so revolutionary for, for folks?

Yeah, first, thank you, Mike, for having us here. It's really a big honor and great to be with Craig again and We'll talk about the great relationship we've started with RPI. Solablock was founded by 2 gentlemen. I love telling this story. It's the great American success story. These are distant cousins. One of them is a solar scientist, background worked at National Renewable Energy Lab. His distant cousin Jason was a bricklayer. And literally at Thanksgiving dinner years ago, they said, why hasn't someone thought about putting solar panels in cement blocks so that your whole sidewalls can actually be solar generated? Years later, they're literally making prototypes in their kitchen ovens, much to their spouse's chagrin. And then several years after that, they came up with a product that was worth bringing to market. Their friends and family investors said, okay, now's the time for you to go find a real CEO. When they couldn't find a real CEO, they hired me instead. But I'm happy to be here. It's been a great year for us, partially because of the great collaboration we forged with RPI. But in June of this year, we had great news that we passed our Underwriters Laboratories certification for our product, which was a really big deal. And then right after that, we got accepted into SESAME, which really means a lot for us in a myriad of different ways. As I mentioned, we take a solar panel and actually submit— seal it in and embed it into a cement block, a standard-size concrete masonry unit. And that was done by purpose so it could be easy to install. But there's a great symbiotic relationship between the panel itself and the block. There's a lot of cases with rooftop solar and solar arrays where only after a few years in extreme climates like extreme heat, extreme cold, the panel starts degrading in power output because of microfracturing. We have evidence that suggests that our product can go about 40 years with only about 20% degradation at the end of 40 years. And that's partially because in excess— in hot weather climates, The block actually acts as a way to transfer excess heat away from it and dissipate the heat. And conversely, in cold weather climates, it acts as a thermal blanket to keep it running efficiently. So there's this great relationship. So we are truly the I in what they call building integrated PV.

That's great. So, Craig, so 2 things for you. First of all, I don't think our listeners understand the relationship between RPI and SESAME. So maybe you could talk about that briefly. To get us started, and then talk about how you got connected to SolarBlock.

Absolutely. So RPI is a Smart Manufacturing Innovation Center, part of the SESAME family of organizations, and we have at RPI several manufacturing systems that are actually integrated with the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform that SESAME has been developing. So we are a testbed, we are a demonstrator, and we also have done several projects, research projects, both in developing technologies for SESAME enablement and in terms of application projects to actually show the smart manufacturing in practice with companies of different sizes.

Fantastic.

As far as getting started with Solar Block, It was about a year, almost a year ago, I was introduced to them through one of our professors at RPI, Ashish Ghosh, who leads our Inventor Studio program. And there were 2 students that actually I was working with in a different project that had projects with Solar Block. One was developing an automated way to actually help build those, those blocks piece by piece. And then another project was in terms of plant layout for their new plant in, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. So that fit in very well with what SESAME is doing, helping companies, you know, improve their operational acumen.

I guess I should ask, because maybe not a lot of listeners know, RPI stands for what?

RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

You guys are Troy, New York. Troy, New York.

Okay. We're the oldest technical institute in the United States. We're celebrating our 200th year in 2024.

Fantastic. Well, that's great. So, Eric, to get back to SolarBlock then, just to kind of focus us back to that, who's your ideal client, ideal customer?

We are really focusing on both private sector and public sector buildings. So right now we're only going to focus on commercial buildings and institutional buildings. So we're not doing any single-family residential. We get a lot of phone calls about that. It's just really a different client base, different customer service. So we look at new buildings, we look at retrofits, and depending for a customer, there's a whole different way of looking at return on investment for them. If you were building a new building, if you're a private developer, our product really makes a lot of sense because there's a sunk cost associated with the labor associated putting a wall up. You have to put a wall up no matter what. So then when you look at our product, it's really only the incremental cost of buying, you know, a little bit more of an expensive block with our technology, and also then the labor associated with having an electrician install and connect all the blocks after they get built on the wall. So the ROI proposition is incredible. Depending on the cost of electricity in that various market, the payback period for the incremental cost could be as little as 1 to 2 years.

Well, now you mentioned retrofitting. I guess I meant I I could clearly understand building a new building, but you said retrofitting possibly as well?

What's really interesting, because when you look at our ROI, I have a diamond in our presentation and I talk about new building, you know, retrofit, private, public. The worst in the past for an ROI would be a public sector building doing a retrofit. But if you look at a lot of the government buildings that were built in the '70s and such, they're really energy inefficient. There's a library that we've talked to in a small city where even after they installed LED lights, have an $80,000 energy bill every year. It just bleeds, it bleeds energy.

Yeah.

So obviously they need to change their heat pumps, et cetera. But on a retrofit, you could take our product, put a layer of insulation on the existing brick wall, and then put our block in front of it. And you have the dual benefit of generating green electricity, but you also have the, we call the R-square value of creating more insulation. So it has a double benefit in that. Where our world changed so much for the positive last year, was because of the Inflation Reduction Act and all the monies that are flowing to incentivizing people, private developers were— had access to solar tax credits and they still do. Now, even public entities like municipalities can get direct payments in lieu of tax credits. So even retrofitting an existing government building now has energy efficiency tax credits by way of direct payment. So they even have an ROI proposition that is much more palpable than 2 years ago. It's great.

That's really neat to understand. In fact, you know, I don't— I'm trying to think of what our audience might be asking, and they still may have a wonder of why SESAME's involved with SolarBlock. You know, SESAME stands for—

Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing.

Yeah, clean energy. You know, we're here in the Smart Manufacturing Zone, but it's about clean energy as well.

Exactly. And smart manufacturing is certainly a path to help companies improve their energy productivity.

Right.

And that transcends, you know, every type of business across multiple sizes so that it's not just an industry or not just the automotive industry or the chemical process industry. It's all industries, including construction and even into agriculture. But the objective is to help companies improve their operational efficiencies, reduce energy usage on a, on a per manufactured unit basis.

And if you don't mind, I want to piggyback off that a little bit because these couple of days for us at this conference have been great, partially because of the conversation I was having with SESAME's relatively new CEO, John, and then some of the things that came out of the annual meeting this morning for SESAME. Right now, in order for us as a climate tech or construction tech startup to really make it, We have to make a product. And a lot of the venture capital money that we're going after, a lot of those types of firms have invested in the past in software. They've invested in things that weren't hard to make. And now these investors have to realize in order to achieve our climate goals, we have to start making products. And startups need assistance in setting up manufacturing. So when we were introduced to Craig and SESAME last year, I mean, the skies opened up for us because here is a conduit for us to get assistance in setting up our assembly operations. And, you know, this morning the Department of Energy speaking at the SESAME annual meeting talked a lot about, okay, a lot of large companies have the resources to institute and implement smart manufacturing, but the people who really need it are the small mom-and-pop manufacturers because they need every dollar of efficiency they create from smart manufacturing goes to their bottom line in a way that's so much more important for them because every dollar counts for a small-medium manufacturer. So SESAME and being here for us is really— we want to be a prototype. We love to say internally at Soloblock that we're putting the CE back in SESAME because they talk about smart manufacturing. They do such a great job. And we want to be kind of that conduit to that new world of climate tech that's coming up right now.

We have a tremendous opportunity working with a company like Soloblock because they're starting from scratch, right? So we can help them build a smart manufacturing facility from the ground up. We don't have to retrofit anything.

Makes sense.

It's—

we work from the get-go to build them a smart manufacturing facility.

So your facility, have you built a facility to build construction?

We are getting ready to sign our lease on a— we're using— we have a building selected in Pittsfield, Mass. We're negotiating the lease right now. Our world changed a little bit in the last year or so because at first we were actually considering building out the entire solar module that gets potted into the block. But as we started getting into supply chain, we were introduced to an incredible gentleman through NYSERDA, the state of New York's clean energy agency, who started and sold 3 solar companies over his 30-year career. And he helped us introduce to domestic fabricators in the US that are going to fabricate our modules. So we're really going to become a final assembly shop. But smart manufacturing and automated manufacturing are very important. There's not a lot of people that are going to want to pick up cement blocks all day, put them on an assembly line and, you know, pot that themselves, you know. There'd be a lot of Advil being used during the course of the day. So we really need to have smart manufacturing because we really need to have those robotic assists that we're seeing on this trade show floor. It's really going to be important for us, especially as our growth model is going to be to have 6 to 8 of these locations throughout the US.

So I'm assuming that they will have— they will be using your technology, those buildings?

Well, those— we hope so, absolutely. But, you know, because we're making a cement block with solar panel, You can't really ship a cement block more than 500 miles before the cost of shipping becomes so expensive. So we're really going to have like a spoke system where we're going to have 6 to 8 locations where the modules will get shipped and then we'll make the block locally and use it for deployment in that market.

That's really neat.

And that's one of the— what's one of the very clear advantages of a smart manufacturing-enabled manufacturing system is that you can replicate that very easily.

Yeah, if you plan it right, you can.

Exactly, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you can simply replicate it and learn from everything you do in every manufacturing environment because it's data-centric.

Yeah, you can actually build it. Yeah, that's really wonderful, that's neat. So just, Craig, if I can just ask you, what is SESAME doing to share technology breakthroughs like SoliBlock throughout the country and with That's a great question, and it's at the core of what SESAME does.

Our membership, like SolarBlock is now a member of SESAME, all the projects that we work are shared. The IP is shared amongst the members so that if we develop a new technology or develop a new way of looking at the data or a new way of looking looking at some profiles for their systems, we can share that anonymous— with anonymous data information, obviously. So we're not going to share their IP.

Their IP, yeah.

But those kinds of developments are shared amongst the members, as well as any developments that we've made with other companies throughout the system can be utilized by SolarBlock in their new environment. So there's a great groundswell of information that we can pull from to help them set up their plant based on other projects that have been performed and show success within the seismic environment.

That's really neat. If I think about the future, Eric, tell me what's the plan 3 years down the road?

Where do you see Well, hopefully we take it public and then I could retire to a beach in the Caribbean. But before that—

Besides that, yeah.

Yeah, besides that, as you heard a little bit, obviously we're focusing on the Northeast region with our facility in Pittsfield. Yeah, that makes sense. We're actually a finalist and really have to give a shout out again to RPI. We're working with RPI. We're in the next round of a Department of Energy grant in a different area of the DOE to work on our second-generation product. One area about BIPV that has a slight competitive disadvantage is because you're on a vertical wall, you're not getting as much rooftop and out— you're not getting as much output as rooftop.

Right.

Because rooftop has more solar. Well, the team at RPI under Dr. Ghosh's team have developed a solar illuminated solar concentrated panel that could go into our block that could actually close the output gap. So we're hoping we develop our first product, We have a 1.5 product which is going to be using a precast cement. So data centers, highway sound barrier walls can really use our product. We've had 2 states approach us about highway sound barrier walls.

Makes a lot of sense.

So we're working on Gen 1, Gen 2. Once we get operational and start generating cash flow in the first one, we're going to look at either the Southwest or the Southeast for our second and third facilities. We're also working with RPI University to test our product for hurricane resiliency. And if that goes according to plan, I think we're going to be here in the Southeast for our second plant.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

So if, if manufacturers want to get in touch with you, how do they do that?

Yeah, obviously info@solablock.com, and I got to spell it because everyone thinks there's an R, but it's S-O-L-A-B-L-O-C-K.com. We are all over on LinkedIn. We ask people to follow us there because we post a lot on both our website and LinkedIn. But info@solo-bloc.com, and we try to get back as soon as possible.

That's fantastic. And Craig, if folks want to learn more about what you're doing at RPI—

2 ways. You can, you can always contact me through the CESMI website, cesmi.org, or through rpi.edu.

Super. Well, this has been great. It's been great to hear more about Solo-Bloc and about what you're doing at RPI. So I just want to thank both of you for taking your time out of the out of the conference to be part of this conversation. It's been really great. So if you like these sort of conversations, please look for additional Industry 4.0 Club broadcasts on LinkedIn Live. We host broadcasts on women in manufacturing, the future of manufacturing, fireside chat, and people, process, and culture several times during the week. You can also check out our webpage, At www.industry40club.com. Anyway, again, thank you, Craig. Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it a lot, and have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you.