How Strata Solar built its model on regulatory innovation

Looking for the first big startup that disrupts North Carolina’s power industry? Mike Mazzola, executive director of UNC Charlotte’s Energy Production and Infrastructure Center, says it already happened.

“Strata Solar is the poster child for a company in North Carolina with an innovation that caused real disruption in energy,” he says.

The breakthrough wasn’t technological — it was regulatory.

By 2011, Strata had figured out how to use the specific combination of state and federal regulations that had grown up in North Carolina out of the federal Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA) to build an unlimited number of 5-megawatt, utility-scale solar farms.

The N.C. solar industry never looked back.  

Read the full article from the Charlotte Business Journal

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