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Health & Fitness

SEA Solar store a sign of greener skies ahead





“I like my business being small.”

In an age of dwindling yet cutthroat competition, fast-consolidating wealth, and the accelerated outsourcing of American manufacturing, the above is not a declarative you’re liable to hear often.

Then again, it’s not often you run into a business owner like Jack Bingham, founder of SEA Solar Store in Barrington.

In a green journey spanning more than half a decade, hundreds of projects, one retail shop, and a perpetually changing industry landscape, Bingham has witnessed the growth of both a promising technology and public frustration over an economy somehow stuck in second gear – a climate businesses like Bingham’s have grown seemingly in spite of.

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Through it all, Bingham knew that – one day – solar’s cost-benefit calculus would become too enticing to ignore.

That day might well be here.

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“Sales have tripled this year, in terms of both the number of systems and the size of the systems themselves,” Bingham explains. “And a lot of that has to do with sheer education: people are simply starting to understand the benefits more clearly.”

Still, broadening public awareness can only count for so much, which is why the technology’s increasing cost-competitiveness is so crucial: after selling systems for around $10 per watt back in 2008, Bingham credits plummeting prices for pushing a new “tier” of solar proponents into the market, in the process turning what once was a prospective 20-year payback into one closer to six to eight years.

“We’re down to about $3.50 per watt now, so that’s almost a two-thirds decrease in cost,” Bingham says. “This is where you start getting that second tier of people. The hardcore greenies – they didn’t care as much about cost. They just wanted to be green. But this new market of people – people hold very strong green sympathies – the calculus is starting to make sense for them.”

According to Bingham, he and his team – all locally subcontracted, all experts in their respective fields – currently have five commercial projects on the docket and several more in the cue for early next year. But just as impressive as the quantity is the spectrum-spanning quality: from smaller-scale wood pellet boilers to full-on photovoltaic (PV) systems and just about everything in between, the public thirst for clean, renewable energy is anything but discriminating.

“There are all sorts of unique ways to combine systems such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” Bingham explains. “So if you combine a small PV system with a heat pump, your home or business is basically starting close to zero energy.”

For inspiration, Bingham need look no further than his own home: a spacious, wooded, pond-abutted headquarters in Barrington built two decades ago by Bingham himself and featuring a few solar systems of its own.

Today the property serves as the nexus point of a business bursting in both size and stature, while at the same time becoming more fleet-footed and focused: Bingham hones almost exclusively on residential hot water and PV, commercial PV, and specialized, small-scale home heating options, many of which boasts their own solar tie-in capabilities.

It wasn’t always so seamless. For SEA’s first four years, Bingham operated a small storefront near the Dover-Somersworth border. But though the project docket was seldom empty, Bingham found the task of converting curious walkers-in to solar’s affordability and efficacy exceedingly difficult.

“We simply figured out that it wasn’t a retail business,” Bingham recalls. “We’d have people stop in who were genuinely curious, but the bridge between that and actually selling a system is pretty wide. It’s much easier for the people who know they want solar to come to you.”

“Besides,” Bingham continued with a slight laugh, “I built Paradise in the woods. Why would I want to leave that?”

He does leave of course; so it goes with having a bevy of projects – commercial as well as residential – slated for installation before the end of October. Ditto the occasional house call and check-in on completed projects, something Bingham considers an integral part not only present PR and protocol, but future sales as well.

Better busy than bust, however. And if anyone can appreciate what it means to hitch fortune’s wagon to the future – and the technologies that will make it a cleaner, greener one – it’s Bingham.

“Every time I’ve made a big career investment, it’s always taken five years to mature – it’s like clockwork,” Bingham says. “I don’t know whether that means ahead of the curve or what, the fact that it’s happening with solar is really exciting.”


Learn more about SEA Solar Store at www.seasolarstore.com
Learn more about Green Alliance at www.greenalliance.biz


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