Historically, investing in energy infrastructure has been the exclusive province of wealthy individuals and large institutions. But that’s changing, and my guest today is part of it. I’m joined by Energea co-founder Mike Silvestrini to discuss how his platform allows retail investors to back international solar projects with buy-in as low as $100. We talk about the unique risks and rewards of building microgrids in emerging markets and why an unapologetic, yield-driven approach might be the best way to do real good in the world.
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David Roberts
Hello, everyone. This is Volts for April 29, 2026: “Enabling ordinary people to invest in renewable energy projects.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
Investing in energy infrastructure has generally required a lot of money, which has made it the province of wealthy individuals and large institutions. But that’s starting to change, at least a little bit.
A handful of companies have been using a corner of US securities law called Regulation A to let ordinary people invest directly in solar projects — not stocks in solar companies, but the actual projects themselves — with minimums as low as a hundred bucks.
One of the more interesting versions of this is a company called Energea, which has a specific twist: rather than focusing on domestic projects, it goes where institutional capital tends not to — rural areas in Brazil, South Africa, and, as of a few weeks ago, Colombia — on the theory that the best solar returns are in markets where capital is scarce but sun is plentiful. As a bonus, the projects extend access to reliable electricity to some of the people in the world who need it most.
Since launching in 2020, Energea has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in assets across nearly 200 projects in six countries. Mike Silvestrini is its co-founder and managing partner. Today we're going to talk about how this model works, whether it delivers what it promises, and whether it can ever matter at scale.
With no further ado, Mike Silvestrini. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Mike Silvestrini
Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
David Roberts
Earlier in this century, you were in the conventional renewable energy biz. You’d say you were a renewable energy developer working on big-scale projects with big-scale investors doing the normal thing. Then in 2020, you pivoted to this, which is allowing what they call retail investors, small investors, to get involved. What was your experience there in the 2010s that led you to this? What was the dream here?
Mike Silvestrini
I think that in a lot of ways, Energea has been in the works my whole life. It really brings together my love of travel, my fearlessness to go into other countries and explore them and talk to people and meet people and see what makes them tick, but also my profession, which is renewable energy.
In 2017, I had sold that first company. It was called Green Skies. My partners and I exited. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have any solar panels or engineers or capabilities or accountants. My whole company was gone with a swipe of the pen. But I did have some capital. What we decided to do as a family was to travel. Packed up our bags and my wife and at the time two kids, now three, we hit the road and traveled. I couldn’t help myself but to stop and meet with solar energy companies in the countries that we visited in Asia and Africa and Europe, South America.
I kept hearing the same story, that there were these perfectly capable solar developers, sophisticated guys who had real projects and could not find access to capital. Having just come fresh off an exit, I kept thinking to myself, “Geez, I would buy this. I’d rather own this project with Unilever in Singapore than some stock.” Maybe that was, in retrospect, not the greatest vision because the stock market has done pretty damn well since then. But at the time, it’s just an asset class that I know. I know how to underwrite it. I know if it’s likely going to make any electricity or not. I know if the customer is likely going to pay us or not. It just seems like it’s the comfortable place for me to park my own capital.
At the same time, my lifelong buddy Chris Sattler had just sold his energy company as well. We were at a board meeting in Kenya for some wildlife conservation work that we did during that time period, still do. He was in the same situation. We said, “Why don’t we invest together?” Energea was really born as an opportunity for Chris and me to invest in the asset class that we know best in lieu of other investment options. Having come off these exits, that quickly grew into a friends and family type of opportunity because we discovered what was going on in Brazil and it was just a white-hot solar energy market.
Because we’re used to this industry, it didn’t take us long to accumulate a couple hundred megawatts worth of inventory to invest in. We had outkicked our own capabilities and called in some friends and family, mostly people who were part of our first enterprises and who had done well by us in the past — the low-hanging fruit, if you will. We really enjoyed it. I really liked communicating with them about the projects that we were investing in. I would go and visit the projects and make little videos and show them, “Here I am. This is the project, this is its location. Here’s the town nearby in Brazil,” trying to show them that it’s not as wild as it sounds to park some capital in this place.
While that was going on and I was falling in love with servicing individual investors, we did bite the forbidden fruit once again in pursuit of some institutional capital. When you have a couple hundred megawatts of inventory, you dial for dollars and you call some of the big boys and you bring home some capital to make these projects real.
We did that. We did a couple of deals. We did a deal with Brookfield. We did a deal with a listed trust called Victory Hill on the UK Stock Exchange. We did a deal with BTG Pactual, which is a big private equity company based in Brazil. The usual suspects for that particular market. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I really preferred serving my friends and family and the individual clients that we had directly than I did working with the large institutions. Not only did I like it more, but it was getting better results.
These institutional dollars come with all sorts of restrictions and strings attached. Especially in emerging markets, you have to be quick on your feet. They are just not quick on their feet, Dave. It took us only a couple of years of seeing these two forms of capital directly in competition with one another to realize that the direct-to-consumer investments were outperforming the institutional investments. We liked it better.
David Roberts
It was outperforming. We’ll get into this later. But outperforming because of the lack of restrictions. I’m trying to figure out why one pool of money is going to do better than another pool of money. It’s just you are able to use it more freely.
Mike Silvestrini
Exactly. If a decision needed to be made — I need to fire a guy, I need to hire a guy, I need to buy a different module, whatever it is — I just do it. That’s what you need to do to move in these types of emerging markets, especially. But really it’s also the same in the US — that flexibility to be the manager, what we would now call a general partner. In the days we just looked at it as we’re solar guys, we know what we have to do here and we know more than the sources of capital that we were using.
I go to Brazil, Chris moved to Brazil. He stood up our Rio-based office. We had a 35-person, at the time, Brazilian team. We knew Brazil and we knew these projects and the capital over in the UK didn’t. That made the difference in the performance of the portfolios that we managed without restrictions and the portfolios that we managed with restrictions.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Mike Silvestrini
It came down to dollars and cents, but it is also a quality of life thing. I love communicating how cool these projects are and how they work. Completely transparent — the goal is absolute transparency. Not in a Ray Dalio kind of way, but explaining to an investor what the heck it is that they just bought.
David Roberts
That answer raised a million questions for me. Before we get into some of the political and economic questions, let’s just start with the basic model, which is one of these retail investors. You opened it up from friends and family to any small investor?
Mike Silvestrini
Not at first. First we did a Regulation D offering for friends and family because the friends and family that we selected were all investors, they had the means to be qualified. When you do that, you do a Regulation D. This is the way a group of guys would get together and buy a piece of real estate or really any private investment ever has generally been done under Regulation D. That worked. But I had a bunch of friends that I’d known for many years who I wanted to bring along on this ride.
Maybe they couldn’t stroke a check for 100 grand, but they wanted to come in for 1,000 bucks. I think of some of my friends back from high school who I just wanted to work for in this asset class that I know well, I knew was a good investment for them. How do I let those guys in? There’s one form of Reg D that allows you to have up to 35 non-accredited investors. We went with that one first, but that just wasn’t going to cut it because there were so many more people that had interest.
Then we discovered Regulation A and now we do in parallel Regulation A offerings and Regulation D offerings so that there is a place for sophisticated investors and family offices and registered investment advisors. They can come in through the door they are most used to seeing, which is a Regulation D offering with a private placement memorandum, which is a fancy word for a business plan. Then I take that same exact document, I cross off “private placement memorandum” and call it an “offering circular.” Now it is the same exact device but in the Regulation A context. We run those in parallel. Really anybody can come and invest through Energea.com.
David Roberts
If I invest with you through Regulation D versus I invest with you through Regulation A, am I, the customer, getting anything different? Are you using my money differently? Is there anything, in other words, but a bureaucratic distinction here?
Mike Silvestrini
The distinction is how did I find you? There’s a cost to that. When I sell, the securities are for the same underlying portfolio of assets. When you buy through a Reg D offering or Reg A offering, you buy our Brazil product, for example, you’re buying participation in a portfolio of projects in Brazil exactly the same way — same cash flows, same everything, same reporting. But the difference is that if you’re a Regulation D investor and I found you because you went to your registered investment advisor and your registered investment advisor told you about us, the registered investment advisor has to get paid a fee and that fee will change the overall economics of the purchase of stock from Energea.
Whereas if you came from Regulation A, I had to run a Google Ad or some sort of ad spend in order to find you. They have different costs to discover them. There is also a Regulation D share class that we offer — if you’re rich, you’re qualified, and you found us, there’s no reason to pay anybody, so you get fee-less access to the product. It really just depends on how our clients discover us and matching them to the appropriate fee-paying category.
David Roberts
If I’m one of these little guys, coming in through the retail investment, coming in through the Reg A side, I give you $1,000 and I tell you I want to invest it in the Brazil portfolio. What exactly am I getting and where is the return coming from?
Mike Silvestrini
You’re buying a share of a company in Delaware called Energea Portfolio II Brazil LP, that’s the name of the company. Now you have a share of that company. The company issued you a share in exchange for the cash. Now the company has your cash and thousands of other people have done the same thing. There’s cash sitting in the bank account and it’s owned by thousands of individuals, proportionally, depending on how big the check size you decided to invest. Then Energea takes that cash and we go and invest it in a solar power plant.
When we first started in Brazil, there wasn’t operational inventory that we wanted to buy, so we constructed a lot of it ourselves. But now as the market has matured, more often than not we are buying operating assets.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Mike Silvestrini
We’re just stepping right into that cash flow. As those projects sell electricity, we collect the money. We pay for the project’s operating expenses — your insurance, landscaping, module cleaning, and all those types of things. Then the money goes back up to that Delaware company that you own. The Delaware company has some expenses — mostly regulatory fees and legal fees that it pays for existing — and then it pays Energea a management fee that we charge for our services. Whatever is left after all the fees have been paid gets distributed to the shareholders pro rata, and we drain the account every month.
David Roberts
That account makes it sound like the sole source of income for investors is the selling of electricity from the solar power.
Mike Silvestrini
That’s right.
David Roberts
That’s the source of the returns?
Mike Silvestrini
That’s it. The sale of electricity and rental fees from batteries. In some portfolios we have issued debt on projects, so the collection of principal and interest payments on debt. Even those debt payments are ultimately paid for by the sale of electricity too. It’s all about the assets — the underlying steel in the ground that sells electricity under long-term contracts. Then getting that back up to my clients.
David Roberts
That’s interesting. The revenue that’s going back to clients then is tied to economic fluctuations, fluctuations in the price of power, fluctuations in power markets — in other words, tied to electricity markets and whatever volatility they may contain. Is that right?
Mike Silvestrini
It depends. All of our projects have long-term contracts. Before we buy an asset, it is already pre-sold its energy for an agreed-upon rate for an extended period of time, usually 20 years.
David Roberts
I see.
Mike Silvestrini
We know if we make the power, we already know it’s sold and we already know it’s sold at X price. That price, more often than not, escalates, at least with consumer price index. It’s escalating every year, which helps us keep up with inflation. Those revenues rise as inflation occurs. There are some contracts, like in Brazil for example, a lot of our community solar assets will sell energy instead at a discount off of the then-applicable energy rate. You wind up saying, “The energy rate this year is 10 cents, I’m giving you a 20% discount and charge you 8 cents. Next year it’s 12 cents and apply the same discount,” and so on and so forth.
The reason why we like that is because we’re trying to give our customers the lowest risk action at the highest yield. To get the risk mitigated, you want to diversify it. We want some of our contracts to escalate with CPI automatically. We want some of our other contracts to escalate with the fluctuations in energy prices. It’s like hedging. You take a little bit of both flavors and in some years energy out-inflates CPI almost always. In some years CPI out-inflates energy — depends on the year. Either way we’re going to have some winners in there, we’re going to have some losers in there, but it’ll net out to have a nice consistent dividend yield.
David Roberts
What about appreciation of the assets themselves — does that bring in money?
Mike Silvestrini
They depreciate. When you have a solar project, it’s most valuable on its first day. When it still has 20 years remaining on that initial contract, it’s as valuable as the future cash flow anticipated from that contract. That’s the NAV or net asset value. The value of the project is all that future cash flow brought back to today’s dollars. As time marches on, that contract is getting shorter and shorter. Now you’ve gotten cash already, you’ve pulled cash out, that’s great. But the value of the asset is shrinking and it shrinks until the last month of that contract period, at which time it’s essentially worth zero.
David Roberts
Maybe this is a complete tangent and maybe you haven’t been invested in any of these things long enough to know, but I’m curious. The new solar field in Brazil signs a 20-year PPA, sells power for 20 years, then what happens to old solar fields? Are there 30- and 40-year-old solar fields somewhere and what are they doing and is anybody paying anything for them?
Mike Silvestrini
I just bought a 17-year-old solar power plant from Macquarie in California and we took the panels off. We recycled about half and half of them were pretty good. We sent them to Africa to be reused for schools, powering schools.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Mike Silvestrini
We took the site — it’s at an airport, the Fresno Yosemite airport — and we repowered it with new equipment. Solar has changed a lot since it was installed in 2007. Better panels, different voltage, new inverters. A lot of the gear had to be swapped out but there were still some years left on the original PPA. We went ahead and are taking advantage of that PPA with a new set of gear. The reality is that the interconnection point, these capillaries along the grid, there are only so many places to insert solar energy.
David Roberts
That’s the valuable thing for that solar field. That’s an asset.
Mike Silvestrini
I think that there will always be a solar plant at many of these locations at least for 50 years. That’s our position. But I don’t know that for certain and I don’t want to promise things to my clients that I don’t know. We just call it zero. But I hope one day to have some great news for my clients when we figure out how to realize that second life of the asset value. I think that will happen. A lot of investors are bolder than us and they will go ahead and call it a 40-year asset and say, “It’s not these panels and it’s not this contract per se, but we’ll make some assumptions about that and then we’re just going to call it this super long tenured asset.” I’m uncomfortable with that. We don’t assume exits, we don’t assume repowerings. We just look at it for what it is in the ground and give it evaluation based off that method.
David Roberts
But it is the land and the interconnection — that somebody paid a lot. The panels are relatively cheap. Why wouldn’t you just keep throwing new panels at that spot?
Mike Silvestrini
Plus they last a long time. Those panels came off Fresno Airport. I sent them over to Birakani, Kenya, installed them on a school, and they are outperforming P50 over there, just cranking away.
David Roberts
This brings up — there are other companies doing this, taking advantage of regulation.
Mike Silvestrini
Nah, not really.
David Roberts
Maybe we can talk later about the comparison. Why overseas? Why emerging markets?
Mike Silvestrini
To get my clients the highest return on investment. A lot of these solar plants, you have seen some lousy financial products come out of the solar energy industry before. A lot of these yieldcos were really crap. They had really low returns that did not do much for anybody. They were exposed to market manipulation and buy-sell pricing. I do not think there are too many investors out there who can say that they are really ecstatic about their yieldco position.
We wanted to create a product that was better than that. It started off by thinking, what would a perfect solar portfolio be if we look backwards? It would have some of that New Jersey stuff from the 2010 timeframe. It would have some Japan feed-in tariffs. Remember Ontario had a killer feed-in tariff. Couple of those in there. It’d be easy to imagine this rock star portfolio looking backwards. That’s pretty easy being a Monday morning quarterback. But how do you do that looking forwards? That’s what we try to do at Energea. Where are we going to make the most money? I think we’re going to make the most money in Brazil round the clock, back five years ago. I think we hit that square on the head.
David Roberts
What are the qualities of a place that tell you that you can make a lot of money there? Is there some formula?
Mike Silvestrini
Absolutely. We publish the rationale behind our market selection to all of our clients, and then we publish the rationale behind each project selection to all of our clients. A market analysis takes about three years. It is a long process of getting to know a country. I’ll go there 20, 30 times. I’ll meet with the accountants and the tax folks and the lawyers that I need in order to even think about a market. I’ll start to get to know what types of assets and policies exist, where the opportunities are, whether there are any good developers out there that I can really bank on.
David Roberts
I’m really curious how much of that process that you’re discussing right there is talking to business types and financial types versus interacting with the political class?
Mike Silvestrini
Zero political class, zero.
David Roberts
Really?
Mike Silvestrini
Zero.
David Roberts
I want to ask about that later too, because I have questions about the politics in these places. The idea is — for instance, now you’re starting in Colombia. The idea in Colombia is there’s big demand for solar, a lot of solar going up, but it’s still hard to fund solar projects. That’s your sweet spot. Rising demand, difficulty structuring capital.
Mike Silvestrini
It’s worse than that for Colombians currently because not only is there a rise in demand as they want more electrical devices and more technology in their economy, but they have an extremely hydrocentric energy grid. There are El Niño factors and La Niña factors. These are big cycles and they are not very friendly to businesses that want to run 24/7 being attached to a grid that is primarily fed from hydroelectricity.
David Roberts
People think of hydro as stable. People think of hydro as the iconically stable baseload source. But it is really true that it is —
Mike Silvestrini
It’s not stable at all.
David Roberts
— quite variable with weather? I don’t know if people appreciate that.
Mike Silvestrini
It’s completely variable. Your price can go up 800% overnight.
David Roberts
Yeesh.
Mike Silvestrini
They need solar and solar is quick to deploy and it’s cheap. Solar is a super technology as far as energy infrastructure goes. I may have gotten in this industry at a time when it was very environmentally driven and that’s how I made my career. The reality is that as you get older and you understand the way the world works a little bit more, I’m here now because this is the finest asset class for energy infrastructure and we need tons more energy all over the world. It does not emit carbon dioxide the way some other fuel types do. Even if it did, it would still be the best technology in energy on a cost and deployability basis.
David Roberts
The reason, and I’m sure this is the question on a lot of listeners’ minds, which is the reason institutional capital is hesitant to go in these places, is that there are risks. There’s the risk of political instability, there’s currency risk. For instance, Brazil, paying you in the real, but the real has been volatile. Then there’s regulatory risk. There are unique risks to these kinds of markets. I’m curious about your attitude toward risk management, how you think about those risks?
Mike Silvestrini
In the way you phrase that question, it made it seem like those are considerations when working overseas.
David Roberts
The minute I said political instability, I was like, “Oh, right.”
Mike Silvestrini
These are risks that every market can be measured by and needs to be measured by. Political risk affects every single solar project no matter where it is, including the United States as we know it. Currency risk affects every single project in every single market no matter where you go. It’s not a question of are we entering the fray and exposing ourselves to these new risks. It’s about measuring those risks and diversifying exposure to those risks so that we have the highest probability of making our money as projected for our clients.
The reality is where I’ve dealt with the most political instability has been the United States. The project that gets robbed the most is in the United States. There are a lot of security-related issues that we have here. The dollar has weakened against foreign currencies. The country that we work in that has the most geopolitical, foreign exchange, and security-related risks thus far at Energea in the last five years has been the United States.
I’m not saying it’s going to be like that forever. That’s why we have a position in the United States. Ultimately we believe the United States is the gold standard for low financial volatility, low political volatility, and security. That’s not been the case. Diversify. Diversify. In this asset class, I think that we’re bringing to our clients the best concoction of solar energy investment strategies.
David Roberts
I wanted to dwell on the politics for one more second. You say you don’t go talk to the politician. I’m curious how you think about, for instance, Colombia. In this new venture in Colombia, you are working with a government agency that has been created specifically to spread solar and battery systems to small households. You got a big policy and public money tailwind. What happens if Colombia elects a very different kind of government? How do you think about political risk? I know this is embarrassing to ask from the US right now for reasons you just laid out, but how do you think about those countries? How do you think about political risk?
Mike Silvestrini
First of all, you have to understand that the United States built our solar energy industry in the most complex and unnecessary way of any country. We had tariffs. We have tariffs on one side and tax credits on the other.
Make any sense? Then we have every single state has its own strategy and it’s a nightmare. Other countries aren’t like that. In Brazil, there’s no government intervention. The only time I call upon the government is if the utility company isn’t upholding its end of its obligations and I need to compel them to through a regulator. Other than that, it’s without government intervention. I buy the solar panels, I import them, I install them, I sell the energy to my customers, I collect the money, I send the money back up to the US — there’s no government involved. I don’t need a tax credit. I don’t pay any tariffs.
David Roberts
Are they subsidizing at all? Are they doing anything to —
Mike Silvestrini
No, it’s not needed in Brazil.
David Roberts
It’s just purely happening based on money.
Mike Silvestrini
It’s every market except for the United States, where you unadulterate the energy markets. Solar energy is extremely competitive. I feel I could go to any country in the world and figure out how to pencil a solar energy deal without any government subsidies. We only believe we need government subsidies because we have electricians that make $500 an hour and we have these types of issues. The cost basis for our projects is so blown out. The reason why they’re so blown out is because of the presence of artificial capital.
You’re starting off on the basis that solar energy is cheaper to install without any government. That’s why I have such a light touch point with government agencies when I do most of my business. You brought up the Latin America portfolio, where in this portfolio, one of our investments is a loan to a company called Helios.
David Roberts
Which is different. Just to underline this, in Brazil, you are investing in projects?
Mike Silvestrini
Right.
David Roberts
In Colombia, you are loaning money to this agency which is doing the projects?
Mike Silvestrini
Yeah, they’re a utility company. This utility company has become particularly good at providing solar energy to folks that are disconnected from the grid. We call this rural electrification. In Colombia, the entire architecture of their grid rate structure is geared towards enabling Helios to do what Helios does. It’s not like a policy. It is the architecture of it.
What I mean by that is they take the entire society and they divide them into six baskets by zip code. There’s the wealthiest, down to the poorest. The folks that Helios are serving are in the lowest basket. The people in the wealthiest baskets — this is beachfront property in Cartagena — pay the highest energy price, and it goes all the way down through the four wealthiest layers. The two poorest groups don’t really pay much or anything at all for energy.
David Roberts
That’s interesting. Their electricity rates are progressively structured.
Mike Silvestrini
Yes, exactly.
David Roberts
What a thought. What a novel and interesting thought.
Mike Silvestrini
I can’t make commentary as to whether or not it works on a societal level, but that’s the way they do it. The money from these wealthier groups goes into a fund. The only time I met with the Colombian government was to go meet with the administrator of that fund and confirm that the money was cash sitting there, and that was truly and exclusively used for its stated purpose, which is constitutional. It’s beyond law. It’s the strongest format of law.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Mike Silvestrini
I wanted to verify that this wasn’t all smoke and mirrors. I see the money coming into Helios’s bank account. I’m checking their bank statements. I know that they’re telling me how the law works. That’s all well and good, but I want to go shake hands with the guy and make sure that it works the way everybody says it works, and it turns out it does.
We felt really comfortable loaning money to Helios so they could expand more energy services to these rural communities and have confidence that as they perform their service, which I think they are the best in class at doing this, they should be doing this around the world. They are amazing.
David Roberts
Service meaning literally going to these little places, installing a solar and battery —
Mike Silvestrini
Yes.
David Roberts
A functional solar and battery system —
Mike Silvestrini
And then keeping it on. There are so many of these projects and free projects that just don’t work. It’s a crisis among do-gooders throughout the world, especially in places like Africa. I see it all the time.
David Roberts
Do they do maintenance?
Mike Silvestrini
Yes.
David Roberts
They do follow-up maintenance. Yeah, that’s so important.
Mike Silvestrini
Yes, they monitor them. They use radio networks to keep the cost of monitoring down so they can see the performance of every asset. Really smart guys, and it works. I would love to see this whole thing copied and pasted in certain African countries and other South American countries.
David Roberts
Helios has around 20,000 subscribers.
Mike Silvestrini
Yeah, you have done your homework, Dave. Nice.
David Roberts
Depending on which angle you look at that from, it’s either big or small. I’m wondering —
Mike Silvestrini
To put it into perspective, there are about 280,000 households remaining with no access to electricity whatsoever. We believe that the loan architecture that we put in place with Helios, back to back with the capital origination architecture we have at Energea, can aggregate capital from American investors, serve that up as debt to Helios, and knock out the remaining homes that need electricity in that country.
David Roberts
No kidding. 280,000 more. Presumably one constraint is —
Mike Silvestrini
About 100 million bucks.
David Roberts
Capital is one constraint, but presumably there is workforce.
Mike Silvestrini
Yeah, but these guys, that’s what they do. They have hundreds of offices, these little offices. You have a community leader. That leader helps communicate directly to the homeowners. When the homeowners have an issue with their system, they can go to that community leader. There’s somebody they can speak with.
David Roberts
What a cool model.
Mike Silvestrini
They have this whole thing set up. It’s awesome and it really works. Then you have all these unanticipated things happen. When people start getting electricity who never had electricity before, what are they going to do with this electricity?
David Roberts
I’m so fascinated by that question. What are they doing? I’m so interested in what happens.
Mike Silvestrini
There are a lot of really cool stories out of this and we tell them at Energea as best we can. One of my favorites is that they make these bags called Mochila, which is a bag that you hang across your chest and put stuff in it. Boys and girls both wear these types of Mochila bags. It’s a craft made by the Wayuu communities, which is the people of La Guajira, which is where one of the groups of 20,000 installations that have been done is.
They took the inside of a dryer — a clothes dryer — which has a spinning capability, and they powered it with this new solar array that they had. They used that to become a thread spinner so they could make more yarn. They’re using a dryer, repurposing a dryer with this new solar array to dramatically increase their production of Mochila bags. Who knows what they’re going to do with it.
David Roberts
I’m such a sucker for those stories. I could listen to that all day. Giving electricity to people who have not had it. I know we talk about that a lot, but I still don’t think we talk about it enough. I am excited to see what 280,000 people are going to do when they have power — pump water. Imagine all the creativity you’re bringing on board, that you’re enabling. You’re enabling creativity and innovation.
I want to talk a little bit about Regulation A, about the structure of this thing. Regulation A does come with some restrictions. It’s a lighter weight version. You don’t have to do a full IPO, but you do, when you’re doing Regulation A, have certain disclosure and reporting requirements, really tight disclosure and reporting requirements. I’m curious if those requirements, if the requirements bounding what you can do with Reg A, if you experience those as a constraint at all. It also has a $75 million a year cap for what you can do under Regulation A. I’m curious whether Regulation A is giving you the freedom of movement you want or if you’re looking around for other things, other ways around it.
Mike Silvestrini
First, with regards to disclosures, we think that what is required of us to disclose is nowhere near enough. We want to disclose everything. We want to show people exactly what it is. There is no obligation for us to go down and make a video of the Wayuu people and show the installations and then demonstrate through a mini documentary how this thing really works. But that is what we want to do. We want the people to understand this. There are some financial requirements that we have to report on. We would do that anyway. From a regulated communications standpoint, it falls short of Energea’s goals. It is not an impediment at all.
The $75 million a year is also not an impediment because, number one, it’s $75 million a year per Reg A. We have four Reg A’s right now. That multiplies it a little bit. We’ve only raised — we’re just rounding the corner on half a billion. We’re at $470 million. That’s over several years. This is every 12 months, you can raise that $75 million. We have a lot of growth that we can handle before we would start bumping up to that, but we really opened up that parallel Reg D. The larger check writers are coming in through a different channel that does not bump up against that regulation limit. For all those reasons, we think that we can scale this puppy as big as we can get it.
David Roberts
You can imagine a scenario down the road where you have maxed out the capability of retail investment. That would be a good problem to have.
Mike Silvestrini
I haven’t dropped my Italian portfolio in there yet in our $75 million. Then I got my Southeast Asia portfolios in our $75 million. You stack different products out of this and then you pipe your biggest checks through the Regulation A offering. I think that this can work at multibillion dollar scale without a problem.
David Roberts
As you said earlier, the solar business in its early days was filled with do-gooders, mostly top to bottom. That ratio has been steadily changing over time as it grows and scales. I’m guessing the institutional investors coming in through Reg D are probably mostly unromantic yield chasers. I’m curious about the retail side. Are you getting a bunch of do-gooders or are those just people wanting to make money too? What is the do-gooder ratio? Maybe you don’t know for sure.
Mike Silvestrini
When somebody decides that they want to be a client of Energea, they come to Energea.com and we only ask them for the minimum amount of information that we need in order to satisfy our regulatory obligations. There’s some know your customer type stuff that we need to ask. With the exception of one question from the very first day we set up on the onboarding process a meter that ranges from all the way left — “I’m here to save the world” — and all the way to the right is “I’m here to make money.” We ask our clients to set that, that best describes what brought them to Energea.
It’s been interesting, but it’s been very consistent and it’s about 60% pegged towards making money. Slightly leaning towards “I’m here for the yield.” It makes sense. This is money that people may be saving for their whole lives. This could be grandma’s retirement, this could be your kid’s college money. This money has a purpose for you and your family and it is sacred stuff. We treat it, we operate this all the way pinned to the right. We have an exclusively capitalistic — do not lose money, it’s a sin — type of approach to running this business.
We do want to know how our clients feel about our product. Some clients will come in and say, “This is disposable income and I’m going to go ahead and do this because I think it’s cool to power these rural communities and community solar in Brazil and African businesses and stuff,” and they’ll move that needle to the left, but it averages leaning towards the financial returns.
David Roberts
Do you in the operation of Energea ever encounter tension between the make money side and the save the world side?
Mike Silvestrini
No.
David Roberts
Are there tensions or do you think you have a lot of runway where you are just getting both?
Mike Silvestrini
There are so many beautiful — it just turns out that impactful projects are also projects that are commonly overlooked by institutional capital. That’s where we make our money. It just naturally aligns itself with impact because that’s where our capital is most useful.
David Roberts
The places you’re building, maybe it varies on your different portfolios, but are you — in Colombia or in Brazil, when you build a solar field, are you introducing a community to electricity or are you bolstering an electricity system typically?
Mike Silvestrini
It ranges all the way to one side. You have the story we just told about rural electrification in Colombia where it is brand new energy infrastructure for people who have never had power, all the way to the right. You have utility-scale projects like we are developing a project in Texas to sell all the power to a big tech company to power an AI data center.
In between you have things like South Africa where they have access to a grid. Most of our customers, all of our customers have access to a grid but the grid is unreliable. We’re providing them what we call microgrids. They have solar plus batteries to depend on for a consistent flow of energy. When the solar and batteries are unavailable, then they pull energy in from Eskom. It’s a little bit of a tweener, but the full range is fair game for us.
David Roberts
The fact sheet you sent me, the risk disclosures — I think this is boilerplate — but it says suitable only for investors who can afford the loss of their entire investment. I’m guessing that is boilerplate, but I’m curious.
Mike Silvestrini
I think it’s every investment.
David Roberts
Is there anyone who should not do this?
Mike Silvestrini
No.
David Roberts
Is there anyone you would warn away from it?
Mike Silvestrini
I don’t know what my regulatory restrictions are on answering this. But I’m going to answer you how I feel, which is that I search far and wide for places to park my personal capital and I keep ditching alternatives and going back to an asset class that I know best. For Mike Silvestrini, I can wrap my head around steel in the ground that produces power that’s sold under contract to an underwritten client on a long-term basis to make a dividend yield. That makes sense to me and I’ve been doing this now for 20 years. I’ve never made a dollar doing anything other than this. This is my expertise.
For me this is a wonderful asset class. There are years where the stock market will beat the crap out of solar energy yields. We’ve averaged a little bit — 12.03% return on investment since the day we opened our doors. Not a bad investment return for energy infrastructure. In fact, I think we’re a top quartile at the very least across anything you can invest in in energy infrastructure.
But we have underperformed versus the S&P 500 during that same time period. We’ve overperformed versus real estate during that same time period. We’re one of the best asset classes in the private markets. I would say that we’re competitive and complementary to public market investments.
David Roberts
Have you ever invested in a project and lost it or lost money or lost the project? Have you had a big disaster or have you had a money loser? A lemon?
Mike Silvestrini
I’ve had two in my career, but neither of them were complete losses. One of them was in Connecticut, where I’m from. This is my first company. We did a project for a marijuana growing company and it was a new law. Seemed like a cool idea. Seemed like these guys had a lot of capital to roll around.
David Roberts
I remember that hype cycle.
Mike Silvestrini
We finished the project and then sent an invoice and they never paid it. “Guys, I don’t know if you’re high over there, but you have to pay this bill.” Eventually they did, but it was after I had sold the company. There’s one project at Energea that did not affect our clients at all because I knew it was exceptionally high risk. I wrote the check myself and it was only 20,000 bucks. I put 20 grand into a project in Zimbabwe, which you do not have to be a rocket scientist to not invest in Zimbabwe.
I was working with a company. We had bought maybe 15 or 20 great assets from this company called Sun Exchange, and they wanted to do it. I said, “That’s too risky for my clients, but let me give it a go.” I pulled up with some other investors and bought into a project. After the installation of the solar plus battery project for a farm somewhere in Zimbabwe, the police came and said that they’re pretty sure it belongs to them and they just took the array.
David Roberts
As I was saying about the risks earlier, that’s what I was referring to.
Mike Silvestrini
Zimbabwe is a risk, but South Africa, where all of our Africa-related portfolio has been concentrated thus far — I just came back, I was there for the last two months. What a spectacular country that is. It has issues. So do we. I think it’s a fantastic place to do business. There are some really intelligent people doing some great things there.
David Roberts
Can you briefly review — you have four portfolios. Just briefly tell us where they are and what rate of return you have gotten on them, because that is different from portfolio to portfolio.
Mike Silvestrini
Yes, that’s true. Our first portfolio we launched was Brazil, and that has been squarely around a 14% return since the day we opened our doors, in dollars.
David Roberts
That’s real good.
Mike Silvestrini
That’s after our fees. In dollars. It’s a good return because when we first got there, everything looked like a 22, and then you deal with the realities of Brazil. Brazil is a really hard place to do business. I think the hardest, in my opinion, the hardest place in the world to do business has got to be Brazil. Even after taking our lumps, we managed to hit our target, which was a 14. We’ve been right on that the entire time. We’re really proud of that. It takes a lot of work and a lot of grit to accomplish that.
Our second product that same year in 2020 was the Solarize Africa portfolio. Our goal has been a 10. We’re at a 9.8. We’re fighting to get that extra couple basis points up there. We will. I know exactly where it’s going to come from. That market is just so exciting. It’s become the easiest market for me to manage because there’s so much investable inventory there. There are good debt markets, you can buy and leverage projects.
David Roberts
Investable inventory, meaning solar fields already built? I would think that would be the iconic “there’s nothing there” market.
Mike Silvestrini
What happened was there’s a bit of a contraction of the South African industry and when that happens, a lot of stuff goes up for sale. The South African grid only worked for 60% of the day for years. It’s called load shedding. You get an email in the morning and say, “You’re not going to have power from 6 pm till midnight.” Great, thanks. They solved that mysteriously right around the time of the last election. It just went away like a fart in the wind. Everybody had power 24/7. When that happened, a lot of solar companies were really banking on that to sell their products.
They hadn’t really taken the time to get more cost efficient because they didn’t need to. Everybody wanted solar and batteries at any price. The bad companies all tanked when load shedding went away. That threw up a bunch of inventory onto the marketplace, which we’ve acquired some of. Now the energy markets are really improving very rapidly in South Africa. They were scarred by this load shedding stuff. They almost had a political blowout about this. It nearly killed the country, this load shedding. They’re paranoid about energy availability now, rightfully so.
Finally they’re starting to do stuff about it. This huge onslaught of new renewable energy is going to make sure that that never happens again. They’re putting in place some policies that they should have had a long time ago that allow us to do what we want to do, which is buy huge chunks of land, put big chunks of solar on it, and then sell that power to whoever I want. As long as I’m willing to pay for the transmission and delivery of that, who cares?
Now we’re at a place where you have to string together a couple licenses and then you can do that. That’s what we’re building a lot of right now. It’s insatiable. I love the African market and it’s one of — it’s 400 basis points lower than Brazil, but it’s less risky. South Africa is a less risky country than Brazil, period. End of story.
David Roberts
That’s interesting. Why are the returns lower? Is it just the price of electricity is lower?
Mike Silvestrini
It’s less risky, it’s appropriately priced. I thought it was off. I went over there and was hooting and hollering saying, “This isn’t priced right. This market is riskier than you guys think it is. The Rand is riskier than you guys think it is. Stop treating these deals like I’m in Manhattan.” I was proven wrong over a number of years and having this great vantage point of working in the US and Africa and Colombia and Brazil, I get to really compare them in my mind as to what the real risk is of these places.
South Africa is a wonderful country and it has poverty, extreme poverty in a lot of places. They need to deal with a lot of their demons. But it also has robust public markets, robust business class, great wine regions and luxury restaurants and scalable companies and telecoms. They are the Manhattan of the African continent. It’s a cool place to do business and it’s not as risky as I had initially anticipated.
David Roberts
That’s Brazil averaging around 14%.
Mike Silvestrini
Yep.
David Roberts
South Africa averaging around 10%.
Mike Silvestrini
Yeah, 9.8. LatAm, which we just launched. After three grueling years of research, due diligence, we finally picked some investments that I feel really great about. One of them being that Helios investment, and we have some others coming that we’ll disclose once we put pen to paper.
David Roberts
These are in what countries?
Mike Silvestrini
We’re starting off in Colombia because Colombia is the hot hand right now. Colombia is where Brazil was four years ago. It’s such an obvious thing that this country needs tons more solar. We’re excited to be there. There are a couple competitors, but it’s a small market. Believe it or not, even though it’s the third largest economy in Latin America, it is still a fairly small market and overlooked by large players because who wants to learn everything there is to learn about Colombia only so you could do a couple hundred megawatts. We do.
David Roberts
That’s three. Is there a fourth?
Mike Silvestrini
The US.
David Roberts
Right.
Mike Silvestrini
Yep. Which is a 7.1% return realized over the last, I think about four and a half years. Its dividend yield last year was like a nine for a good chunk of the year. Its actual cash distributions have exceeded its IRR at certain points because the portfolio is very stabilized. All of our off-takers in that portfolio are either municipalities or utility companies. It’s a good investment grade product. We get paid on time almost all the time. Eversource in the Northeast doesn’t pay on time, but everybody else does. You can count on that portfolio to deliver. It’s why it’s a little bit lower yield.
David Roberts
Are you expanding that portfolio? Are you pursuing projects in the US as aggressively as you are in these other —
Mike Silvestrini
Yeah, I’m in the process of buying 15 megawatts up in Maine’s community solar program, which took a shot in the jaw — change of policy risk. We’re buying it after that change in policy, so we’re really comfortable with where that’s landed. We’re also developing that project in West Texas I mentioned, with the tech giant off-taker.
David Roberts
In none of these cases, in all four of these portfolios, do you lose sleep about political winds shifting and yanking the rug out from under you?
Mike Silvestrini
I’m appropriately paranoid about every characteristic of every project in every portfolio, and I drive that into my team. We have to be on our toes. We have to be ahead of the curve, and we have to make our money fast. Things do change. A lot of our clients come in, they see the 14 in Brazil and they pump all the money into Brazil. Brazil raises $2 out of every $5 that we raise. It is a big number.
But Brazil is Brazil, and you should diversify. We made it really easy. We made this thing called the Core, which you can say, “I want to put 100 bucks in.” Then you can move some toggles. “How much LatAm versus how much South Africa versus USA?” I really do believe that we built this intentionally to be a cocktail. The ice in the drink is the US and these other countries are the flavorful booze. You mix it all together and you have the best thing.
David Roberts
Towards the end of time here, but I’m curious about the scale. I think probably the reason big institutional investors don’t do this is, I’m guessing, just these soft costs. If an investor comes to you with several million dollars, it’s one set of conversations and then you’ve got a million dollars. You now are raising a million dollars from 50, 100 people, 200 people. How do you keep those transaction costs in line? There’s a reason big investors are not doing this.
Mike Silvestrini
What transaction costs?
David Roberts
I guess I don’t know. I’m asking you, are there more transaction costs?
Mike Silvestrini
No, we’ve gotten rid of most of the costs. That’s why this product overperforms — because there’s not as much BS between you and the asset. The only BS you have is paying us. But we’re providing service. We originate the deal, we manage the deal, we do everything for the deal. That’s a service worth paying for. All those returns I stated are after our fees. We pay for ourselves by finding the right investment opportunities, I believe. We have investors that range from 100 bucks to 63 million bucks. Anybody can come in and participate on the platform.
Our hope is that over the next few years, you start to see more family offices and professional investors engaging Energea. I’ve managed solar energy projects for Goldman Sachs, US Bank, and Rabobank, and you name a big bank, I’ve probably done business with them in my career.
Now we’re taking that same level of professional integrity and making it into a product fit for any investor. I hope that we’re giving people who don’t normally have access to the types of investment strategies that I’ve been doing for the last 20 years the chance to come directly to the source and participate at Energea.com.
David Roberts
It’s $100 —
Mike Silvestrini
$100 minimum.
David Roberts
There are — I meant to ask this earlier — other companies out there raising small amounts from retail investors and investing them. You said no one is doing what you are doing. I’m curious about this.
Mike Silvestrini
Not even close.
David Roberts
I’m curious about this landscape. What are those other people doing and how is what you are doing different?
Mike Silvestrini
I won’t name names or talk down to my competition. I think there’s enough room in this world for multiple successful retail energy infrastructure companies. I just don’t see anybody that even comes close to the services that we’re providing. I think it’s because we didn’t come up with this idea in a college dorm room thinking, “We could build a website and everybody can invest in solar.” We came at this as solar professionals and experts first — developers, having serviced customers like Amazon and Target and Walmart for my career — and then learning in the crucible of sophisticated financial institutions, kicking my ass to get me to do things correctly.
I did that first. Then we decided to open up our services to the broader retail market. I see a lot of companies in this who aren’t truly solar energy experts. They have a good idea. It’s such a good idea that we did the same thing, but it’s just a different approach. I think that we’re head and shoulders above anybody else out there.
David Roberts
This is a dumb question, but just to make clear, Joe Schmo, who is listening right now, can go to Energea, choose a portfolio, put their credit card number in, bada bing, bada boom. You do not need lawyers or any institutional anything.
Mike Silvestrini
You should read, watch the videos we’ve given you, different levels of due diligence. We hope that everybody reads the offering circular. That’s the main document that describes what we’re going to do with your money. It also describes how our fees are charged. It describes all the risk factors that we can think of exhaustively so you know what you’re getting into. They come in, they drop 100 bucks in. We take that 100 bucks, we’re going to park that in a solar energy asset amongst other solar energy assets in a portfolio.
That’s another thing. You’re not buying one project, which would be a concentration risk. You’re getting access to a thematic approach to a niche solar energy market somewhere in the world. You can even diversify that across all portfolios. Put $25 into each one. You really spread those dollars around and minimize your exposure to catastrophe. I think we’ve made it really easy to invest. On Energea.com, we’ve got a great CTO named Gray who does a phenomenal job with the user experience. With a couple clicks, I don’t think there’s anything on the Internet that you can open up a retirement plan and invest tax efficiently the way you can at Energea.com through our IRA product.
David Roberts
It’s really cool because I get this question all the time, Mike. Tons of people contact me. Either, “I can’t get solar in my house,” or “I already have solar on my house. I’ve done what I can in my personal life. I still want to do more good in the world. I still want to invest in this. I’m not a millionaire.”
Mike Silvestrini
We made this for that guy.
David Roberts
As a final question, scale — as you say, you’re not solely retail. You’ve got a mix of investors. You got some big ones, some small ones. I’m curious about the retail side of it. Let’s say you’re up to 500 million. That’s not what retail investors have given you. I think that’s more like 120 million or something. That’s all the money you’re managing. You’re up to 500 million, which is — if I’m a poor farmer in Colombia, looks plenty big and exciting — but from a global perspective, is pretty tiny. It’s a rounding error.
What is the scale possible for retail investing? Do you think this could be more than a niche pocket of the investment landscape?
Mike Silvestrini
The answer is, who knows? But here is what the data looks like. How much money does the average guy walking around have in America? This is just talking about the American general public. The savings accounts of Americans — just savings accounts — is about $18 trillion. Private investments, when you pick up and make an investment through an app on your phone, are $67 trillion. The workers of America have $45 trillion of retirement accounts, which we can accept. That is $130 trillion being wielded by guys like you and me and your neighbor and the people who we live amongst here in our country.
A very small fraction of that is being won over by consistently delivering on financial promises backed by real assets, adjusted for inflation, diversified. If people can find room for renewable energy infrastructure in their investment purview, then I think that the sky is the limit for Energea.
David Roberts
I’m sure you would be happy with just one of those trillions.
Mike Silvestrini
That’s right, just a trillion. That’s all. We’ll see where this goes. I do think that we play a role in the long-term architecture of the energy grid because most investors buy these projects with the intention to eventually sell them or they’re being bought with a time-limited fund. They have to eventually trade and we don’t. Our plan is to hold them forever to create the dividend yield which can be reinvested each month, creating a compounded return for our clients, which 90% of our clients do. That is what we’re here for.
We’re the last stop of many projects’ long journey. We think we can continue to gobble up stuff and consolidate some of these markets and be a useful drop-down option for people looking to move on and exit a project position.
David Roberts
Absolutely fascinating, Mike. This is all just Energea.com if people want to go look, read more, look at videos. Thank you for sitting with us today, walking us through this fascinating little corner of things that I had not really looked into. It’s booming — like everything else in solar. Thanks for coming on.
Mike Silvestrini
Dave, real pleasure. I remember meeting you over at Yale one day, maybe a couple years ago. I don’t know if you remember that.
David Roberts
Yeah, we talked about doing this someday and I’m still going to take you up on your offer to come hang out in Brazil and look at some solar panels up close.
Mike Silvestrini
I’m heading down there in a couple weeks. Invitation’s open.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at Volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.
Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
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