Owen Barrett

Founder & CEO at Shine

Speaker

As a Global Energy Manager for a Fortune 500 company for three years, Owen implemented

$60 million of clean technology. Combining his experience in fuel cells, solar PV, energy storage, LED lighting, and HVAC optimization, Owen left to launch lumeo, a niche ESCO. Within three years, lumeo hit eight figures in revenue and helped forty school districts implement energy efficiency and renewable energy.

After a successful exit from lumeo, Owen looked for his next opportunity. After nearly a decade in the clean technology industry, Owen concluded there’s too much attention given to developing new clean technologies and not enough focus on rapid deployment of existing technology. It doesn’t matter how efficient a solar module is if only 3% of American buildings have them installed.

Owen started ZNE Capital and pivoted to buying commercial real estate for the purpose of decarbonizing it. In just three years, Owen acquired and partially decarbonized 654 apartment units worth $75M. While ZNE Capital proved to have a successful business model, the challenge of installing solar nationwide, on individually metered properties sparked a new idea and venture.

Shine was born out of frustration at ZNE Capital. ZNE was limited to acquiring and decarbonizing master-metered buildings. These properties are hard to find and hard to manage due to their age. The challenge of individually metered properties is one small solar system needs to be installed per apartment unit. This leads to complications with billing tenants and measurement and verification. Shine was developed to be an internal solution for ZNE Capital. However, shortly after development, demand pulled Shine into being a turnkey solar solution for the multifamily industry.

Shine is on pace to decarbonize 200,000 apartment units with onsite solar by 2023.