Adam Foodman May Have Left His Real Property Practice, But He’s Still Reaching New Heights In Renewable Energy
When he last appeared in North Carolina Lawyer magazine in 2005, a younger Adam Foodman and his wife, Samantha, had just returned from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. He had already served as chair of the NCBA Real Property Section, helped navigate the debate over laypersons conducting residential real estate closings, and appeared settled in for a long and successful legal career in Charlotte. Seventeen years and three children later, his family is planning another trip to Mount Kilimanjaro in the near future. This time around, Foodman jokes, his children may have to carry him to the summit of Africa’s highest peak.
As for his legal practice, Foodman left that behind several years ago and began a highly successful second career in the renewable energy field. Today he serves as Chief Executive Officer of Solar Operations Solutions, LLC, in Cornelius, is a past chair and current member of the Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association (CCEBA), and board member of the North Carolina Advanced Energy Corporation (Advanced Energy Corp.)
Foodman is also a loyal member of the North Carolina Bar Association, as evidenced by the sentiments he expressed recently in the following interview.
When did you step away from the practice of law into the energy business?
Toward the end of 2014. I left Foodman Hunter & Karres, which was the successor of the firm I had actually started in 1994 right when I got out of law school. It was at the end of that year when I transitioned out and set up a partnership with someone who was actually a client of mine at the time, Joel Olsen. We started the company O2 emc, LLC. The purpose of that company was to develop and own utility-scale solar power plants.
What happened – how I got there – was that I had a really specialized firm, a boutique firm that did transactional work. The Great Recession really crushed our business. We did lots of real estate, and real estate went away, so for a period of time, there was nothing.
The recession actually coincided with the time North Carolina passed the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard. That was the law that set the stage for renewable energy in the state because that was the law that created the requirement that the utilities fill some of their generation with renewable energy.
In a way that work was kind of income-producing real estate work, and it came to my attention because I also cared about climate and environmental issues. I started educating myself on it and really sought out the opportunities which I was hoping would develop in this state, and did. I was on the very front end of the initial wave of the industry in North Carolina and worked on what were some of the very first PURPA (Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act) Projects.
They were solar projects that were built under the implementation of that law in North Carolina. I helped structure and build those plants, and rapidly I got very busy with that work. It was still kind of a nascent industry in 2010-11 and started to develop out in 2012-13. I saw it as an opportunity, but I also really liked it and found it interesting, and thought it would be exciting to make that change, although it was also a very big risk. By that time my law firm had recovered and was doing well after the Great Recession, so I was walking away from a steady income and that was scary.
But it worked out well?
My partner and I got together under the O2 company and in total built out, between some my partner had already built and several we built together, roughly 23 projects all across North Carolina. The total amount was over 100 megawatts. The biggest one we built was over a hundred acres in Montgomery County – it’s called Montgomery Solar – and we built a lot of various sizes that were big at the time but are not big today because of the way the industry has developed.
It was always our goal to build them and own them long-term, so in the process of building them my partner and I set up a company called Solar Operations Solutions, LLC. The purpose of that company was to operate and maintain the facilities. What I found, as the COO, was we really didn’t have good software tools and we really didn’t have a good method of operating and maintaining these facilities. The way you build these facilities, they are income-producing properties, but they have a fixed income, and if you don’t handle them perfectly, you end up losing money.
Montgomery Solar in Biscoe was built by O2 emc in 2015 and now relies on products provided by Solar Operations Solutions LLC.
First, we got people out there in the field who were on trucks and making sure everything was running. And then we built up a data platform that continued to evolve over the years. That started back in 2014 right around when we first started, and this is the second effort. Fast forward to 2019, for a variety of reasons, we decided to sell our entire portfolio. We sold all of the power plants except one that I still own down in Edenton.
When we sold them, we still had this Solar Operations platform, and we started to roll it out to third parties. I took over at that point as the CEO and that company now does a variety of things. It builds products that help renewable energy power plants interconnect. It has monitoring and control solutions, deals with batteries, is really robust and I think it is the best intelligent software platform in the industry.
So I went from being a real estate developer, which really lent itself to my experience in transactions and finance and worked very well with that, to running what amounts to a technology company, a software products company.
Your resume now includes involvement with additional organizations. How did that come about?
I had the privilege of being the chair of the Real Property Section, which was great. I have always enjoyed my participation in the industry groups and working for the greater good of these industries, so I got involved in CCEBA (Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association) and just finished two years as the chair of that industry group. CCEBA represents North and South Carolina. I was able over the last four years to work on building it up, and it now has most of the major developers in the United States as part of it. It has a national reach, and we’re really proud of it. A great team of people is working there as well. I have continued that, and Governor Cooper appointed me, and just reappointed me, to the board of Advanced Energy of North Carolina. That’s a state corporation that works in the energy area as well, so I have been involved in a lot of policy work.
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Are you excited about your work?
It is really interesting work – very complex. I have really enjoyed learning about the engineering side of it and find it fascinating. I really didn’t know much about electricity, so I continue to educate myself on that and have gone to a variety of courses to make sure I can understand what my engineers are talking about and what my product developers are talking about. I am not a programmer or an engineer, so I employ those people to do that work. We have 17 employees. Primarily I employ people who have degrees in renewable energy or engineering. There are some folks who work on the procurement side and sales, but the predominant group I have are software programmers and engineers.
It happens to be an issue that is important to me and to everybody on my team here – climate change and moving to decarbonize the energy economy. So on a high level, we have that kind of mission – where we are trying to facilitate that transition. And we have a perspective about some of the elements it will take, and we work on our portion of it. There is also a real market opportunity, and it has a lot of meaning to all of my team here and me.
Solar Operations Solutions prides itself on providing “reliable, high-resolution data.”
What does the future hold for this industry?
We recently passed House Bill 951 in North Carolina, and that was a landmark bill because a more conservative legislature set legislated carbon goals for the state. For those goals to be accomplished, it is going to require multi-gigawatt procurements of solar energy and other renewable energy in this state. That’s a law. So just to accomplish the needs of that law will require I believe 8 to 10 gigawatts of renewable energy procurement through the Duke Energy balancing authority area, which is North and South Carolina.
Governor Cooper not only signed that, but also has two executive orders with respect to decarbonization. The goal under this bill is to get to 70 percent carbon reduction by the year 2030; that’s really not that far away. It’s closer than we think – it’s already 2022. That’s a lot of work for this industry in this state, but look outward and think about the carbon goals of the large corporations in the United States. So it is not just these legislatures in some states like California, and we are very different from California, but these goals are across the United States and across the world. They are desired by companies – I think the vast majority of the Fortune 100 companies have carbon goals – and now the biggest utilities, like Southern Company and NextEra, are seeking zero-carbon goals for cities, counties, as well as individuals.
So the future of it is both a massive challenge and economic opportunity, which from my perspective is something necessary for the future. This transition is a multitrillion-dollar economic event that is going to happen over the next decades. Coal is going away, and not because people don’t like coal. That is part of it, but it also has economic externalities with respect to its effects, like the multibillion-dollar coal ash issue. It is going to have to be replaced, and that was a large part of just the start of our energy footprint. It’s just uneconomic.
A lot of people don’t know this, but solar is actually the cheapest dollar-for-dollar energy in the United States now. Solar is very inexpensive by watt – it’s the cheapest. Across the United States, solar is being built and sold in the $2 range per kilowatt-hour. Keep in mind your residential bill is in the $10 range per kilowatt-hour, so it’s a very inexpensive form of generation. It needs to be in the grid and there is work to do to have that happen, but from my perspective, the future is incredibly bright.
Solar Operations Solutions, LLC (Solar-Ops) relocated to a larger facility in Cornelius last year.
Do you have a sense that your industry is gaining traction when it comes to breaking down political barriers?
Just look at our state. We actually adopted carbon goals and I was on the team from CCEBA that negotiated on behalf of this. At the start, there was a general thought that there was no way our state would adopt a carbon goal, and yet it did as part of this legislation. I know there are a lot of reasons why, but I think one of the reasons is education.
With climate change, and not just the cost of it, there is also the fact that now these renewable energy sources are economic and save money for ratepayers. The combination of those things, I think, has moved the perspective from one of being tied up in the culture wars to one of recognition of the cost the country is paying for environmental-related catastrophes and damage.
And there’s the money thing – this is a way to save money for ratepayers while eliminating all of those external costs associated with the traditional forms of generation we have pursued. I am hopeful we will continue to move in a rational discourse on this. The benefit to me is obvious, but I don’t begrudge people for taking their time to understand this.
Ultimately, we are still selling a product. If all the customers want it, and companies are still set up to serve those customers, and it’s cheaper, that’s going to drive it as well. It’s a market question. This is what the large corporations want, and not just because they’re trying to be good citizens, but if you talk to them, they think it is cheaper. It is not easy to see any kind of economic transition this size, but I am optimistic that it is going to continue two steps forward and one step back.
This may be a stupid question, but has the increasing popularity of electronic vehicles had a significant impact on your industry?
That is a hugely relevant question, and a critical one. When you think about moving away from traditional petroleum generation sources, one of the biggest components of it, and it may be the biggest one, is transportation. The electrification of transportation is one thing, in essence, that has to happen in order for there to be a transition away from carbon-burning resources. That requires, among other things, batteries, and when you see the valuations of these electronic car companies and battery companies that seem so astronomical, what you are actually seeing is the market perspective with respect to what is going to happen in the future. The electrification of transportation is coming.
I know there were naysayers, but I will point you to the fact that everyone said no one is going to want to get rid of their truck, and Ford just announced that it has doubled its production of the electric F-150 because the demand is so high. Now you want to electrify the vehicles that take batteries. That could help with the transition from the burning of carbon-based resources, but it doesn’t matter if you charge them up with coal plants. So those go hand in hand – the electrification of transportation and the electrification of the grid with renewable energy.
Is membership in the North Carolina Bar Association still important to you now that you are no longer in private practice?
I was probably informed of my decision to participate in the trade associations in my industry through my experience with the North Carolina Bar Association. It has been so positive. I look at it the same way now.
I was a pretty young attorney when I was chair of the Real Property Section, and it was a great opportunity for me to meet people, learn and interact with great attorneys. I maintain my license.
I have always loved being an attorney and felt like it was adding value to so many things that took place. So it was meaningful to me, and I see the value for the public with the work the bar association does, which is why I have always maintained my membership.
Periodically I come to events. I think it was the 40th anniversary of the Real Property Section that I attended a few years ago. I really value the friendships of the people I knew there. I felt like we were making a positive contribution to the state. All of those things were meaningful to me, which is why I’ve kept my membership. And I also use the CLEs. I don’t practice law for anybody but myself these days, and I haven’t now for years, but being an attorney is really important to me.
Has being a lawyer helped you navigate the energy industry?
Energy is a fascinating business. I tell people it is not like a lemonade stand – stick a sign out front and start selling lemonade. Everything is subject to regulation and law. The only markets are created pursuant to law and regulation. This may be applicable to other industries, but not to the extent of energy. Literally, there are no avenues to sell your product other than those that are clearly delineated in law.
It’s either governed by the state or by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission). You can’t do this work without understanding that, and having a law degree to me has been critically important for the opportunity to understand the law and regulation toward the end of creating business models. You just can’t do it in this industry without that.
Lawyers are very prevalent in this industry and are incredibly important. My law degree has been invaluable. It was the only way I was able to enter and create business models that actually work and find some success in the industry.
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.