Solar industry association's new boss seeks to repair relationships

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Glenn Montgomery

As the new head of Oregon’s most prominent solar energy group, Glenn Montgomery must guide one of the state’s most promising industries through a minefield of controversial policy debates.

But he is also charged with healing a rift within the Oregon Solar Energy Industries Association that caused several long-time members to leave the state’s 75-member solar trade group.

On that front, Montgomery may already be succeeding. He took over June 1.

“I’m going to think pretty seriously about getting back on board,” said Alan Hickenbottom, a principal at Tanner Creek Energy, a Portland-based commercial solar systems installation firm that left OSEIA last year. “I’m very encouraged and I’m very complimentary of the work they’ve done to reorganize the group.”

Montgomery replaced Desari Strader, a Washington County Commissioner who left the organization earlier this year to start a national renewable energy coalition.

“I think Glenn has a really good basis of experience and a good personality to bring together disparate interests and different elements within the industry and the public sector,” said Eric Nill, vice president of Eugene-based Advanced Energy Systems who recently joined the OSEIA board.

Yet part of OSEIA’s past problems have been rooted in those “disparate interests.”

While membership has already grown 15 percent since the end of 2009 to 75 organizations, a handful of long-time members left in recent years, some citing personality clashes with the board and its previous director.

A flashpoint in the conflict came last spring while the state Legislature debated a proposed "feed-in tariff," a program that will enable residences and businesses to sell power from rooftop solar panels back to the grid.

While OSEIA’s board issued a vote endorsing one version of the bill, a core group of rank-and-file members cast their own vote in opposition, saying, among other reasons, that it inequitably allocated the green energy credits tied to rooftop solar systems.

“The general feeling was that OSEIA had been taken over and was being controlled by larger corporate interests and not the grassroots solar industry in Oregon, which were the majority of the members,” said Steve McGrath, president of Portland-based Sustainable Solutions Unlimited and a former OSEIA board member who left the group.

Andy Noel, OSEIA’s chairman, said some of the group’s problems are the result a still-maturing industry in constant transition.

In the past decade, Oregon has gone from a minor player in the solar energy landscape to the home of manufacturing plants for multi-national companies such as Sanyo Solar and SolarWorld that employ thousands.

“If you go back four years ago, the membership of OSEIA was dominated by smaller solar contractors,” said Noel, the regional sales manager in Oregon for California-based REC Solar Inc., which designs and installs solar energy systems.

With the state’s Business Energy Tax Credit program under siege, the feed-in tariff program set to launch next month, and a new set of state building codes for solar installations now under review, shaping policy will be a key part of Montgomery’s work.

But Noel said Montgomery will also be asked to focus on membership retention, a task that’s easily lost in an industry where even minor shifts in policy can send it into crisis mode.

Montgomery has had little interaction with OSEIA in recent years, which he said works in his favor when it comes to bringing together the group’s membership.

“I’m coming in with a pretty objective viewpoint,” he said. “My first order of business is to listen to every member out there.”

Already, he’s turning heads.

Andrew Koyaanisqatsi, who founded Portland-based Solar Energy Solutions in 1987, was introduced to Montgomery earlier this week.

“I said, ‘Hey, welcome, I was with OSEIA for 23 years and am part of the disenfranchised minions,” Koyaanisqatsi said. “He said, ‘Let’s do something about that.’ We have high hopes.”