West Virginia solar leader keeps beat to rhythms of industry reinvention

Mike McKechnie knows a thing or two about periodically reinventing his company, Mountain View Solar, set in the quaint West Virginia panhandle berg of Berkeley Springs.

House and Senate proposals to reformulate federal solar incentives are forcing yet another adaptation. But far from finding himself stymied in uncertainty, McKechnie is jiving along in his element: navigating upheaval.

The 62-year-old McKechnie is nearing his 30-year anniversary of steering the business from one transformation to the next.

For all but a few years, McKechnie was known for his thick brown ponytail as he spread his infectious solar passion on a local, regional and sometimes even national stage. It was not untypical for McKechnie to sit beside Republican West Virginia U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito at a mid-June luncheon in Washington, D.C., where he lobbied her on solar policy. Now clean-cut, McKechnie comes off a little more like a grey industry eminence.

Yet, in a recent interview with pv magazine USA, McKechnie sounded no less hungry or scrappy about securing yet more success through the industry’s next policy smashup.

“There’s always a threat looming out there on the horizon for solar,” he said. “This one seems worse, and it seems like a bigger threat. But when I sit back and think about it, I realize, it’s a bigger one, but it’s really nothing different: We look to the future, and we figure out what are customers are going to need from us.”

Moreover, McKechnie is fond of pointing out his understanding that the Chinese character for crisis is the same one for opportunity.

McKechnie founded Mountain View Builders with his brother, Pete, in 1996 in their eastern West Virginia town historically known for its mineral springs.

Eyeing an opportunity to carve out a niche dedicated to environmentally sensitive construction, the brothers refocused on the technical toolset of green construction under the brand Mountain View Builders, The Green Builder.

Also with this pivot, the company began its decades-long drive into energy technologies such as heat pumps, wind and battery storage.

Drawn by solar, McKechnie covered the 100-mile distance to Washington, D.C., in 2005 to tour the Solar Decathlon, the U.S. Department of Energy competition launched in 2002 in which university teams designed and built model homes for exhibit on the National Mall.

McKechnie was so enchanted that he wound up making the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth model his home back in Berkeley Springs. It featured 175 W solar panels that BP Solar had made in Frederick, Md., about an hour’s drive away.

Then called Mountain View Solar & Wind, his firm was not yet a solar pure play. It would take the 2008 jump in the federal investment tax credit to 30% from 10% to prompt the company to build its last house in 2012 to focus on solar.

McKechnie bought out his brother in 2017, and over coming years, he led Mountain View Solar in pushing hard to re-weight its business from predominantly residential in favor of the comparatively more stable and business-efficient commercial segment.

Now known as MTV Solar, the firm targets commercial projects ranging from 400 kilowatts to 1 MW. “We’re lethal in that segment,” McKechnie said.

As a measure of the company’s success, MTV Solar now employs about 50 people.

McKechnie admits that his business stamina sometimes flags. “After 30 years in the construction business, it’s wearing me out,” he said.

Plus, McKechnie also has a mind for concerns other than championing a regional renewable-energy empire. McKechnie recently learned more about his biological father, the late Cesar Chavez, a famed labor and civil-rights advocate for farm workers. Since 2001, McKechnie has discovered and met unknown half-sisters in Arizona, California and Washington, all, like him, born outside of the labor leader’s 45-year marriage.

But back on the job, the high potential impact of congressional budgeting on federal solar incentives is now consuming much of his attention. Thankfully, bad solar-industry news often tends to bring a short-term bump in business – until it doesn’t.

Diminished industry clarity has spurred commercial building owners to move ahead faster with solar projects to ensure they will benefit from an investment tax credit (ITC) before a final budget bill could begin sunsetting it, McKechnie said.

Until just lately, backers of one prospective 3 MW project seemed to be plodding toward completion, McKechnie said. “They were thinking about waiting until next year. Then this bill dropped, and they called to say, ‘We need a meeting.’”

With such a surge, he said, “We think we’re going to see a boom in 2026.”

Meantime, McKechnie has gone back to the drawing board of long-term strategy, zeroing his sights on business segments he identifies to be comparatively less prone to congressional action.

For one thing, he sees opportunity ahead for Mountain View’s residential and commercial segments, both to pick up high-skilled employees from outgoing solar firms and to field calls and contracts for maintenance and operations of orphan systems.

“A lot of our competitors are out of business over the past five years, and if the ITC shuts down, many of the rest are going to go out,” he said.

McKechnie also aims for the company to keep landing its own commercial projects but also to build up its contracting partnership on school projects with CMTA Inc., a consulting engineering and construction services firm based in Kentucky. With CMTA in 2023, Mountain View built its biggest project so far: a 1 MW array atop Broad Run High School in Loudoun County, the richest U.S. county.

Partly based on what Mountain View has learned in its affiliation with Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce, McKechnie also is taking aim at a new approach to his battery-storage business. With 200 data centers already built and more than another 100 planned, Loudoun County is home to the world’s highest concentration of data centers.

Explosive data-center demand, led by torrent adoption of artificial intelligence, is posing tremendous new demand for utility power. It’s even, he points out, driving an initiative to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear site in nearby Pennsylvania.

“The grid is going to be under incredible pressure,” McKechnie said. Whenever the power supply will run short, he said, data centers will outrank other users in priority for supply. “One way to alleviate that is with batteries.”

Of his reluctance to further specify this strategic aim, he said, “We’re maybe six months ahead on this, and I like to be ahead.”

Whatever the plan, Mountain View’s history with batteries dates to its green-building days. McKechnie also expects the segment to survive budget legislation comparatively intact. “We believe battery storage is going to have continued support,” he said.

McKechnie trusts that the company possesses the organizational and technological strength to execute to his plan, leaving McKechnie to focus on strategy.

“I’ve built a good team over the last 20 years,” he said. “It’s taken on more of the day-to-day and week-to-week business parts. I’m now able to work on what the company needs as the visionary leader and business strategist.”

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