Southwest Flavor Ep. 150 - PJ Gomez, Charles Heller

**Ron Arenas** (0:00)
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Southwest Flavor. Happy Thursday to all of you. This is Big Episode 150 So thank you for joining us today. And our first guest is PJ Gomez of, sorry about that, my cord got stuck.
Solarmaster USA.

**PJ Gomez** (0:20)
Solarmastermind USA.

**Ron Arenas** (0:21)
Solarmastermind USA, sorry about that.

**PJ Gomez** (0:23)
Yeah, that's my own entity. So my dealership is Solarmastermind USA. And I have two major installers here. Well, actually in six states. But like I mentioned before, my office is right around the corner here with ICOM.

**Ron Arenas** (0:33)
Yeah, yeah. So you're up here in Marana. But you're serving all of southern Arizona, I'm sure.

**PJ Gomez** (0:39)
Six states.

**Ron Arenas** (0:40)
Six states, okay.

**PJ Gomez** (0:41)
Primarily in the past six years since I started Solar, almost 80% of our business here is here.

**Ron Arenas** (0:48)
Okay.

**PJ Gomez** (0:48)
So Arizona is a big market. It's nice and sunny, nice and hot.

**Ron Arenas** (0:51)
Exactly.

**PJ Gomez** (0:51)
Dills are high.

**Ron Arenas** (0:52)
Yeah.

**PJ Gomez** (0:53)
And the big transition happening now, once since 2010 till now, is renewable energy.
It's big because it's not the future. It's happening now.
We need to rely on and we should be turning to nuclear power, wind, solar, hydro. And solar is a big thing here. And the big renewable push is because of the sun. It's free, you know, and it's very powerful. I was studying up on what I might do my podcast on today.
And one thing that stuck out to me was that one hour of the sun hitting the earth's surface produces enough photons to power the whole globe for a year. One hour of power. That is an incredible statistic because why aren't we harnessing the sun's energy? We are now, you know, 50 years behind schedule. But, you know, when that also made me think of when Ben Franklin discovered electricity, what was it, 200 years ago, 30 years ago, I don't even know. He said, you know, when he finally was able to harness lightning, he said, I hope that we can discover how to harness the sun's energy before we run out of natural resources. So, you know, he was a super genius, him and Nikolai Tesla.
They really knew what they were talking about, and they were really ahead of their time.
And now is that time, you know, harnessing the sun's energy. The photovoltaic systems came out about 1979 We started making solar panels. And it was, the sun hits the silicone panel, and the photons disperse, and we harness them and stick them into an inverter, converts to AC power, goes to your home, and makes it usable. So, the big push now is, we're not, I can't say we're not, but the natural resources are getting depleted. Of course, they're not going to last forever. We're getting regulated on mining coal, digging fossil fuels, drilling the ocean for natural gas. Well, it's costly, it's more regulated, and of course, it's not good for the environment.
And having the sun, just those three sources of mining, digging, and drilling are eliminated when you're using the sun. There's no regulations on those. And then you still have to burn the source, the fuel, to generate the power, the generators and turbines turn. So, you have regulations and all that. And the reason I'm mentioning regulations is because I was talking to my brother yesterday in Southern Cal, and he's with Southern Cal Edison and he does not have solar. And I've been nicely saying, you need to get this. And sure enough, the tax incentive went away last year, so he lost that $17,000 he would have got, left money on the table. And his monthly cost is $1,000 a month for SE in Orange County. He was averaging $750 a month for electricity two years ago when I pitched him solar, and their rate increase was like 22%.
Oh, wow. That's huge, and that's not ever going to go backwards. SE is always going to raise just like TEP. We had a 14% rate increase this year. It started April 1st. They usually wait till January. So it's like, those of you who don't have solar, the future is now, and the time is now, because even though the tax incentive did go away, like I just mentioned, now the whole industry shifted from purchases and taking big loans out and having on your credit report to where you can get a TPO, which is a third-party ownership agreement or a power purchase agreement, a PPA, which are lease products, without having it on your credit report, without having to have these dollars on. And the best thing about it is it's still zeroed down, but the best thing about it is the company that installs gets the tax credit still, and we apply it to those TPO's. So you're not missing that tax credit in the 2027 It's going to go away, so we still have a year with that. So the tax credit is gone for a purchase, but not for a lease product. So the industry shifted at the beginning of the year to let's do leases. And another big thing was, like we just talked about a second ago, a lot of the utilities are doing away with their net metering. They don't even call it that anymore. It has been called net metering for like four years. But their energy buyback program.