Solar Power World
By Ben Zook, founder, Belmont Solar | October 21, 2026
The solar industry has been through a lot over the past 25 years: major advancements, setbacks and plenty of ups and downs. But what needs to change next isn’t the tech. The next chapter of solar depends on how we conduct ourselves, run our businesses and work with our communities.
The way I see it, if we improve our businesses, we can improve our relationships with our customers and work together to help the public better understand what solar can do.
An early Belmont Solar installation.
After 25 years in the solar industry, I’m still optimistic about where it’s headed. When times get rough, it helps to remember where you started.
When I first began, I was young, my team was young and residential solar, at least in our area of Pennsylvania, was pretty young too. Money was tight. At more than one point, the thought entered my mind of just going to work somewhere else, but I knew that what we were doing was important, and I figured someone had to care about the potential for solar power in my community; it might as well be me.
Of course, the technology is quite different today. The improvements we’ve seen mean that installers can add systems much quicker, there’s much less clutter in a mechanical room or power conversion area, the arrays are nicer, everything is a lot neater, people get more value out of the systems as a whole and we see solar being used for more people, not just benefiting those early adopters.
We’ve learned how to do things better than ever before. But some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have very little to do with the technology itself.
A mid-2010s installation by Belmont Solar.
People have always mattered most in this industry, and now, as they did 25 years ago, they have to come first. Doing good work and growing, either as a business or as an industry, requires good relationship-building and good friendships, and those relationships have to be based on trust.
Dishonest sales practices or leaving a customer with an unrealistic expectation about what their solar system can do damages everyone. The solar industry experiences rises and falls; I’ve seen several throughout my time in it, but what helps you make a sale is providing genuine help to your customers and understanding their specific needs.
Solar power has had, and I think it still has, a huge amount of untapped potential. That’s what you have to consider when you’re thinking about solar long-term. Then you have to be able to communicate to your customers and your community that investing in solar has benefits for tomorrow, benefits for five years from now, and benefits 20 years down the road.
For someone entering solar today, I’d start with this: take the long view. Be dedicated to the technology and learn all you can about changes and advancements, and never stop chasing the full potential of solar power. When you work to help everyone around you succeed, you lift up your whole community. When one person wins, everyone else should be able to win as well.
Build, design and install a system that genuinely meets your customers’ needs. Be honest about where it might fall short of expectations. Moving solar forward is a group effort.
Early community education efforts by Belmont Solar.
Taking the long view also means never stopping learning. Learning is not meant to start or stop in the classroom.
My team and I started in the industry very young. We had to be willing to learn so much about what we did not yet understand. My team was all still in their 20s at the beginning of the 2010s. Our youth is part of what helped us. When you have an always-learning mentality, it’s much easier to embrace and question the areas where no one has all the answers yet. To be able to learn, you have to admit what you don’t know and then dive into it to figure it out.
Starting young meant learning work, responsibility and what to do with a sense of purpose at a young age. At the same time, we also got to help our community be less polluting and more sustainable in terms of energy and finances, which is a blessing.
Now, I see younger generations coming into the solar industry. It’s important to me that they contribute, ask their questions and develop their own expertise so that the collaboration inherent in this industry becomes that much more effective.
Training, sharing your knowledge and professional curiosity are all part of the job. You lose out on a lot if you treat education as something that ends after you get a certification or a degree.
One of my main focuses with my business is workmanship. Over the years, the technology has improved, which helps installations a lot. Standardized components and systems weren’t around or accessible to us when we first started. But better, smarter equipment has not eliminated the need for thoughtful, skilled, design-oriented, problem-solving installers. You can have the best technology in the world and still fail if you’re not paying attention to detail, quality control and what the customer in front of you needs.
Workmanship matters. “Buy nice or buy twice” applies to solar too.
A more recent installation by Belmont Solar.
Solar’s progress has not been a straight line, so why would we expect it to continue to be? You have to go back to that long-term view of solar’s benefits. Work on educating yourself and your community about the benefits. That will save you as the market changes. We all know that solar improves people’s quality of life, their environment and their finances. To get through rougher times together, we have to let people know what it can do.
There are still so many misconceptions I run into today that have lasted since 2001 that I want to continually work to fix. You know the ones. People who think “solar doesn’t work,” that they’re “too old” to see the benefits, that it “would never be worth it,” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. People have to know that solar works and, when done right, works incredibly well.
As a solar professional, success looks to me like building a company that delivers value to its community over the long term while also building and maintaining meaningful relationships with that community. We just participated in the ASES National Solar Tour; it’s events like this that connect us to our local community and allow us to tell people all that solar can do for them.
The solar industry has and will change again. But learning, staying focused on doing good work and putting customers first will keep solar afloat even as changes happen.
I’d like to challenge you to try or learn something new every day. The way I see it, over the next 25 years, solar can exponentially grow as long as we all work to exponentially improve.
Ben Zook is the founder, owner and NABCEP Certified Master Electrician at Belmont Solar, a solar panel installation company based in Gordonville, Pennsylvania.
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