About Birchy, S-Curve's Creator
Andrew Birch (“Birchy”) is a dad, husband, physicist and pioneer in clean energy. He co-founded OpenSolar, the world’s leading solar software platform, and has been on the cutting edge of his industry for 25 years.
Growing up in (decidedly un-sunny) Scotland, his childhood fascination with nature earned him the nickname, “Captain Planet.” This passion stayed with him throughout his academic ambitions, as he gained early acceptance to study physics at Oxford and St Andrews Universities.
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In his “first career,” he dedicated himself to socially responsible investment banking, where he played a pivotal role in raising capital for pioneering solar electrification companies in the 1990s.
But seeing his brother-in-law serve in the Iraq oil War, he felt a profound urgency to advocate for a cleaner and more just future.
He left his banking career to pursue a Master’s Degree in Photovoltaic Engineering at the University of New South Wales, where he studied under some of the world’s leading experts in the field.
Birchy went on to be the Business Development Manager for BP Solar, where he developed innovative world-first financing solutions and designed the “Feed-in Tariff” model that kick-started the Australian solar market, which powers a third of all Australian homes today.
But it was the release of Google Earth that set him on his path as an entrepreneur: that day in the office, he didn’t just glimpse satellite mapping of the planet but an opportunity to leverage this technology to take solar mainstream globally.
With a vision to bring “sunshine online”, Birchy started Sungevity - with co-founders Danny Kennedy and Alec Guettel, and CTO Adam Pryor.
Theirs was the first software to provide instant online quotes, with sizing and measuring done remotely. No longer would workers need to scale buildings with tools to measure the pitch: it could be done from the other side of the world.
In just ten years, Sungevity emerged as one of the largest solar installers in both America and Europe. However, amid their IPO, the tumultuous political landscape of late 2016 dealt a significant blow to the U.S. solar finance industry and Sungevity’s American operations closed.
Birchy remained driven to scale solar for the good of the planet: along with Pryor, he started OpenSolar, disrupting the industry once again, this time by making their solar software package completely free to every contractor in the world.
Today the company is scaling rapidly, with over 25,000 users in over 150 countries, and a team of 120 passionate, mission-driven entrepreneurs, working 24/7 as the sun shines around the globe.
Birchy is driven by the belief that the climate crisis can be solved by empowering the global solar community, with digital tools for customers to adopt what is now the lowest cost energy on earth. On current trends, Birchy has shown how we will meet over 50% of energy needs with solar in a decade. But risks to this S-curve adoption curve exist and Birchy is now setting his sights on market fixes, to dismantle the remaining barriers to a world powered by solar energy.
In 2017 he started, SolarAPP+, a nonprofit organization dedicated to halving the cost of solar energy in America by digitizing and automating the permitting process, endorsed by the US Energy Secretary Granholm and now legislated by California.
He is now embarking on a global policy drive to create an Electric Protocol, a uniform set of rules for the world wide grid, to unleash the power of distributed energy - akin to Internet Protocol, which unleashed the power of information on the world wide web.
In his spare time, you can find him in nature, thinking about physics, hanging out with his girls and surfing near his family home in Devon.
Non-Profits
Andrew Birch’s founded SolarAPP+ which is is ready to halve the cost of solar in America. By making technology efficient, and offering anyone the ability to plug-in their address and connect to a global network of contractors.
Through his company, OpenSolar, Andrew Birch supports a commitment of 1% of annual revenue to Empowered by Light, a global organization that empowers underserved communities with renewable energy technologies.
Birchy's Company
​​Andrew Birch is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSolar, whose mission is to digitise and scale solar electrification globally for a world powered by sunshine by 2050.
A true market disruptor, OpenSolar offers the world's first free of charge solar software platform, supporting the entire workflow of the solar installer, from solar design to sales proposals, from embedded financing and payments to contract signing, from a solar-specific CRM to hardware ordering, the platform supports the largest communiity of solar installers in the world.
>520,000 systems sold
150+ countries
150+ partners