Jenya Meydbray: Forging a path through a maturing solar industry

Two decades ago, Jenya Meydbray was working at SunPower, performing accelerated testing of solar modules to try to provide a technical basis for what was at the time the standard warranty of 25 years. “At $8 a watt, it seemed worth figuring out,” Meydbray told pv magazine USA. And thus began Meydbray’s attention to the correlation between reliability and commercialization.

His career, which has remained laser focused on the role of quality and reliability in commercialization and finance, led him to found PVEL which became a highly respected solar module performance and reliability testing lab. That experience, combined with a stint with major developer Cypress Creek Renewables, led him to his role as chief commercial officer of Nevados Engineering and most recently to become a vice president at Nextpower.

[Read: Nextracker changes name to Nextpower]

We sat down with Meydbray to learn about the path that lead him to rejoin his former SunPower colleague, Dan Shugar, at Nextpower, the company previously known as Nextracker that’s now an integrated platform provider of eBOS, robotics and AI, foundations, trackers, software, controls, module mounting and now power electronics.

Back in the early 2000s when Meydbray was an undergraduate electrical engineering student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, there wasn’t much study of solar energy. “The only textbooks on solar were written by Martin Green,” Meydbray said, referring to Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales and Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics.

Meydbray headed east to study optical electronics at Boston University, which, at the time, was the closest option for studying the technology of solar. Through a connection at the lab, he landed an internship at SunPower where he worked on accelerated lifetime testing of photovoltaic modules. At SunPower, working along with what he said were some of the smartest people in the industry, the company established what he called “a foundation of technical understanding of what solar was.”

Crossing paths with Dan Shugar began in 2007 when SunPower acquired PowerLight, a company that designed, manufactured, installed and maintained utility-scale solar plants. Shugar had been president of PowerLight and after the acquisition became president of systems at SunPower.

Their paths crossed again when Meydbray was spending lunch hours ducking out of SunPower to go pitch a new lab idea to venture capitalists in Palo Alto. As it was 2009, a few years into the Great Recession, his pitches were not going anywhere. But one day when he came out of a meeting, dressed uncharacteristically in a business suit, he ran into Shugar. He was sure he’d been caught and would be fired, however, Shugar wanted to show Meydbray his brand-new Tesla Roadster. They went for a ride, Meydbray said he “spilled my guts,” and instead of getting fired, Shugar became his first investor and board member.

“I’ve known Jenya since his early days at SunPower, where he built a reputation for solving tough supplier challenges—often flying to India on a moment’s notice to get to the root of module quality issues,” Dan Shugar, CEO and founder of Nextpower told pv magazine USA. “Even then, he was driven by a deep belief that better testing could de-risk long-term solar investments. I still remember when he nervously pitched me his vision for PVEL in a parking lot—he had just come from a Sand Hill VC meeting and thought he was in trouble. Instead, I became his first investor and board member, because I saw the same thing I see today: a technical leader who pairs deep field knowledge with a relentless commitment to improving solar performance and reliability at scale.”

“Dan was pivotal because he knew what he was doing,” Meydbray said. “I learned that I had to be very forward and I got used to it.” In less than two years, Meydbray had 40-some investors and PVEL was off the ground. Despite competition from established labs including Underwriters Labs (UL) and Intertek, PVEL became a leading solar module reliability and performance testing lab, known for its product qualification program and annual scorecard. In 2021 PVEL joined the KIWA Group, expanding its testing to international customers.

In growing PVEL from a fledgling startup to an international leader, Meydbray admits to learning a few lessons the hard way. One is the importance of picking your team, whether it’s staff, other management or board members, he said. He also learned that you’re always going to spend twice as much money as you think you’re going to spend, remembering that he spent many years cash strapped, trying to make the next payroll and harassing customers to pay early.

After nearly three years as chief commercial officer of Nevados, a company with proprietary solar tracker technology that enables PV to be installed on undulating terrain, Meydbray’s path lead him back to collaborate with Dan Shugar, joining Nextpower as vice president. His focus at Nextpower is on commercializing steel module frames, a mission Nextpower began in September with the $53 million cash acquisition of U.S. steel solar frame maker Origami Solar.

Origami Solar steel frames. *Image: Nextpower*

“Nobody is under more cost pressure than panel manufacturers,” Meydbray said, and to reduce cost manufacturers are making larger modules. But as the modules get bigger, the panels need more support—and that’s where steel frames come in, he said. Steel frames can solve issues like breakage rate in the field, he noted adding that while they’re heavier than aluminum frames, they’re ideal for robotic installation.

Steel frames also enable different flexibility, Meydbray noted, with the potential to add features to the frame to eliminate fasteners altogether. He estimated that this can cut manpower by about 10%, “which is great,” he said. “But if you increase that to 90%, it’s very impactful.”

Origami Solar is just one of the many recent acquisitions by Nextpower. In July the company announced the acquisition of robotic and AI technologies and prior to that it acquired foundation specialist Ojjo and eBOS provider, Bentek. Collectively these acquisitions are the mark of a company that’s fast becoming a complete solutions provider, which Meydbray acknowledged is true.

“As mature and big this industry is, it is still pretty immature,” he said. He described the industry as being, until now, “a bunch of component companies developing their widget in isolation with no real co-optimization.” If we look at the solar industry as a power plant industry, the components and controls should integrate better than they have in the past, he said. He added that by using AI, we can “optimize plant designs, have lower cost installs, and have more reliable, robust solutions.”

Nextpower is already a technology leader and Meydbray plans to see it evolve into the next chapter. Trackers help you optimize yield, he said, but Nextpower is becoming a “technology platform company that has the potential to co-engineer the millions of inputs that go into a power plant to make it more reliable from yield perspective and from a time perspective.” By monitoring all components by sensors in real time, and driven by analytics, maintenance is done as a function of the behavior of the power plant, rather than by the calendar, he added.

“Solar has been my passion, hobby, and career for the past 20 years. The industry keeps outperforming expectations—with unprecedented cost reductions, efficiency gains, and novel solutions—and it never stops surprising me. I expect the next few decades to be just as remarkable as the last two. The next chapter will require us to grow up: to think in systems, not just components; to co-engineer and co-optimize; and to leverage intelligent software and AI capabilities,” Meydbray concluded.

[Also read: Dan Shugar, more maestro than midas]

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