In the summer of 2008, Charles was on a roof in New York’s Hudson River Valley, running his father’s roofing crew in the middle of a heat wave. The roof they were tearing off wasn’t that old. Across the street, another crew was installing solar.
“It’s 120 degrees out, and we’re literally cooking,” he told me. He watched the waste build up on his side of the street while solar panels were built on the other side of the street, improving the home’s efficiency and reducing waste, and he decided to leave. He told his boss (his dad) that he quit and was going to college.
He studied environmental studies with a minor in finance at CU Boulder, and in 2012 he joined Clean Energy Action, a small Colorado nonprofit doing educational outreach. The team held events at schools, churches and community centers to explain how electricity works, how bills are calculated, and how to make public comment at the Public Utilities Commission. “A lot of the great things that have happened in Colorado are because of a lot of sleepless nights of people working for free,” he said.
After 15 years in solar, Charles says the biggest challenge has always been storage. The sun shines during the day, but people use energy around the clock. In 2023, an engineer and a group of investors asked him for a third-party assessment of a carbon AGM battery from Univix. “This is what we’ve been waiting for,” he remembered thinking.
His concerns about lithium come from safety and cost. A lithium system for a home runs $14,000 to $18,000, he said, and the warranty is 10 years, which can expire before the system pays for itself. He also pointed to thermal runaway, the overheating that can cause lithium batteries to catch fire. Univix’s batteries don’t have that risk, he said, and they’re nearly 100% recyclable. He sees that as an advantage in places like New York City, where permitting a lithium system can be close to impossible.
What’s important to Charles is that renewable energy businesses are viable not because of incentives in the industry, but because of longevity and economics. According to him, thirty gigawatts of lithium storage could be either the best thing to happen to the environmental movement or a huge bubble. “We just don’t know, and no one’s talking about it.”
His company, Colorado Energy Experts, starts homeowners with solar and storage because it replaces a bill they already pay. It also screens homes for heat pumps, windows and insulation. If a house has none, he tells people to insulate first: “that’s going to be the lowest cost, highest ROI investment you can do.”
Charles is a businessman but at heart, he is deeply motivated by a mandate to address climate change. Electrification is about saving money and making a home more efficient, but it’s also about health—what Charles calls the “intrinsic value.” “You can’t put a price on that. Clean air.”
