Canadian Solar founder Shawn Qu is stepping down as president nearly 25 years after registering the company at his home address in Mississauga and growing it into a global renewable power juggernaut with more than $6 billion (U.S.) in annual revenue.
Colin Parkin, who headed up the Kitchener-based company’s battery manufacturing, will take over as president while Qu will stay on as chairman and CEO.
At the same time, Dylan Marx, who ran Canadian Solar’s utility scale energy storage project development, has been appointed chief operating officer.
“I am not retiring,” Qu told the Star. “Rather I will focus more on the strategy and technology innovation side. I will put on my scientist hat.”
From its first product — a solar trickle charger that made sure a car’s electronics would operate even after long periods without being driven — to its solar developments on six continents, Canadian Solar has navigated the massive growth of the renewables industry from its infancy to the powerhouse it has become, now representing more than 90 per cent of all new electrical generation added each year worldwide.
The Nasdaq-traded company, which manufactured solar panels in Guelph until 2022 and maintains a head office and operations in southern Ontario, now hosts plants in China, Vietnam, Thailand and the United States. It has also branched out to manufacture its own batteries, which pair with solar panels to make power available 24/7. With new leadership drawn from the company’s energy storage business, Canadian Solar is betting that the future growth of renewables will be in batteries.
The Star spoke with Qu, Parkin and Marx by phone. The interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.
Geopolitically, this is a fraught time for the renewables industry. But Canadian Solar has navigated crises in the past, whether it was the bilateral tensions between Canada and China, the collapse of the renewables industry in Ontario or the rise of North American tariffs on Chinese-made goods. What have you learned along the way?
Qu: In 1996, I was the first hire in the semiconductor field for Ontario Hydro. I never worked on nuclear or hydro. From day one, I was working on solar. But I never dreamed that solar would come to this central position in the (global) energy transformation. After I started the business, I never thought Canadian Solar would grow into an annual sales of six or seven billion U.S. dollars.
Obviously from 2001 to now, we have been through many ups and downs. Until 10 years ago, most of the difficulties, like technology, economic cycles, and Eurobond debt, those were all economic difficulties and industry cycles. Only in 2016 did geopolitics become an issue, become something a global company like Canadian Solar has to deal with.
Looking at Canadian Solar’s international footprint, it’s clear that this is a company built for a globalized age. Do you worry about the protectionism that’s going on now?
Qu: I’m still learning. I don’t think I’ve mastered all the skills to navigate these geopolitical difficulties and the change of landscape.
(For a long time) we all believed that nobody can stop globalization and the whole world will become a village. Yes, (now) there are trade barriers, but you navigate the trade barriers with economic positioning. For example, (I can) control my production and invest into new technologies and also put factories in different areas.
This year, the U.S. tariffs caught us by surprise. But we managed our manufacturing process. And so far Canadian Solar has been making money, making profit every quarter.
Anyone who listens to certain politicians might be left with the impression that renewable energy’s time has passed. But the numbers outside North America tell a very different story: there’s colossal growth. How do you navigate that as a company? Do you just focus on the parts of the world that want your business and wait for North America to come around?
Parkin: We are still doing a tremendous amount of business in North America. We have over five gigawatt hours of energy storage we’re going to be deploying in Canada. The U.S. is still a very substantial market for us both for solar and for energy storage and we’re investing in that market as well. There’s perhaps a current political trend and rhetoric around renewables in those markets. But I think over time, the most cost-effective technologies will win. It’s proven that renewable energy makes sense.
What we’re seeing right now is saturation of renewables onto all the global grids. What energy storage can do is give more capacity to those renewables for further expansion. And that’s why we’re seeing such a massive demand globally for energy storage. Given that we can now deliver very confidently energy storage and solar together, we see every market scaling for us.
Marx: From a project development perspective, if you look at the states where we have our most recent projects in construction and operation, these are states such as Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona. States that you would think may not be super-aligned to (solar power), if all you do is read the newspaper. But what we’ve seen is because of the economic story, the story behind AI and data centre growth, the U.S. is a very power-hungry market. And when you look at renewables and compare them to other traditional power generation forms, the economics just make a tremendous amount of sense.
In the solar space, the dramatic drop in price — something in the order of 90 per cent over the last decade — has been the biggest driver of uptake. Will the market soon be fuelled by batteries?
Parkin: We’ve always hoped energy storage would complement solar and in the past few years, it finally is showing that’s the case. I think that they will grow together and we’re seeing now even more adoption of hybrid solutions.
The technologies move together and I think the adoption and the growth will happen together. Some will lead and some will follow, but I think together they work really well.
