Brian Maughan: This is BUILT, the podcast where you meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial.

And those of us in this business, well, we know the buildings. But how many of us know the stories of the people behind those structures?

In this episode, we’re talking to Camelia Miu. For over fifteen years, Camelia has been involved in the financial side of the renewable energy space. She first worked on wind power projects. Now, her focus is on solar energy, as CFO of Nautilus.

Nautilus offers a different renewable energy solution for commercial real estate owners. In the past, developers of large-scale buildings had to purchase and install the solar equipment themselves. Now, they have the option to tap into solar power without the front-end installation cost by using a local solar garden.

Camelia Miu: What we focus on are smaller projects, generally in size between 1 and 10 megawatts, built over a smaller footprint and they can serve the customers that are within the immediate vicinity… The community solar gardens are sort of a subset of the distributed generation world of projects.

Brian Maughan: Here’s how it works. A nearby Nautilus community solar garden harvests the sun and sends that energy to your local utility company.

Your utility company receives the solar energy and sends it to the local area’s electricity grid. You and other subscribers in your area draw from that solar energy to power your home or business.

One of the greatest advantages of the community solar garden is the way it works seamlessly with an existing local power grid.

Camelia Miu: Think about it as a tree with branches, right? Like the tree is your distribution line. And then the smaller branches are your transmission lines that kind of go out and serve the smaller communities.

Brian Maughan: In solar energy, on one end of the spectrum, there are residential rooftop projects, which serve a single household. And on the other end, there are huge solar farms built far away—Camelia calls these utility-scale projects. And Nautilus? Well, they’re somewhere in the middle.

Camelia Miu: Again, a utility-scale project can be connected into a distribution line for it to put out that much power. There are a lot of infrastructure changes that would need to be made.

With a community solar project, they're much smaller so they can be placed and be connected into a transmission line. So these smaller branches, right, come off of the main trunk of the tree to serve the local communities and allow those consumers the opportunity to be able to buy power from a renewable source.

Brian Maughan: Nautilus has to operate at the local level to be cost effective. That means looking for the right place for their solar gardens, so that they can serve the entire community—whether for commercial or residential use.

Camelia Miu: It's generally agricultural land. We do lease that land from its landowner, and we put our projects on it. And we do environmental studies for all of our projects because we don't want to build a project in an area where, let's say we're disturbing an endangered species of a bird or an animal. We obviously look for land to make sure there are no wetlands or we look at soil composition to make sure that that soil can withstand the pressure from drilling in to fix our panels down and things of that sort.

There are projects that are built on-site. So a large distribution center, right? Because it's generally a fairly spread-out type of building, we can put a solar array on top of that building and then that building can use all of the energy from that array. During the day, we can service all the energy needs of that specific distribution center.

Our projects—because our footprint is a lot smaller—they can be built on a fairly small footprint in either a rural area or closer to an urban environment. But the beauty of it is, as long as the project connects to a certain utilities grid, right? You can virtually buy power that is produced not necessarily next to your house or next to your building…

it could be produced a hundred miles away and because it goes into the same grid that services all the customers within that specific area, you can still virtually buy power from a renewable energy resource.

Brian Maughan: Give me some sense of how many projects you currently have… Give us some sense of scale.

Camelia Miu: So we have about 200 projects in operation right now. They are spread out all over the country: from California, we have projects in Colorado, we have projects in Maine. Minnesota. Rhode Island. Maryland. Massachusetts. Currently, we manage about 23,000 subscribers for our projects. The company has grown significantly though, I think between 2020 and right now, we've more than doubled the megawatts of projects that we have in the ground.

And we're looking to continue that growth and make sure that we reach as many consumers as possible and allow them the opportunity, again, to purchase power that's generated by a renewable resource. And generally we actually offer that power at a discount to what they would pay to the utility.

Brian Maughan: Camelia’s mission with Nautilus is to increase access to renewable energy. As the company’s CFO, she has an interesting role in bringing these solar gardens to life.

I asked her what led her to the finance world and how that, in turn, led her into renewable energy development. 

Camelia Miu: I actually grew up in Romania. I was born and raised there. My parents migrated to the US when I was a teenager. I was 13 years old. We've sort of established ourselves in the Chicagoland area and I've been there ever since.

So I went to undergrad at the University of Illinois. At the time I didn't know if I wanted to be an engineer or do business, so I went in undecided. And, after taking physics and deciding that that is not my cup of tea by any means, I decided to go into accounting  and I got my CPA.

I also decided to go pursue my MBA, and I went to University of Chicago Booth and got my MBA there. And while I was doing that, actually it was kind of out of the blue that I got a call from a recruiter saying, “I have this perfect opportunity for you.” And they all are when they call you. [Laughter] But it was a small wind developer at the time in the Chicagoland area, and that was the time when I feel like renewable energy and green energy was just sort of starting to become a thing, right? That's kind of when the industry sort of got a lot of momentum and you know, newspapers were all over it. So that's when I sort of made the move into renewable energy.

The first eight years or so of my career were in wind. And then, after that I moved into solar, and I've been in that space ever since.

Brian Maughan: Ah, that's great. Well, sometimes the best moves are the ones that just are right in front of you. So I'm glad that you took that recruiter call, and I'm glad that they presented it as this perfect opportunity.

Camelia Miu: [Laughs] I am too.

Brian Maughan: Give us a sense of what a CFO of a distributed generation solar garden company does. What does it look like?

Camelia Miu: So I generally have three major areas of responsibilities. Accounting and reporting, which any entity would have, that's self-explanatory. We keep the books, we pay the bills, we publish financial statements, collect the revenue that we get from our subscribers.

And then on the second side of my responsibility is financial planning and analysis. So we do budgeting, we do forecasting, we look out ahead and try to put together a benchmark for a company to be measured against, in terms of a budget or a forecast. And then we do analysis. So once the financial results are published, we go back. Look to see “How did we do against that budget? How did we do against that forecast, against what was approved by our investment committee for that specific project? Are we doing okay? Do we need to change course? Do we need to adjust anything that we're doing—our business plan or strategy?” 

Third arm of my area of responsibility is what we call capital markets. And I think about it as an internal investment banking type of role. So what we do is we bundle up the projects that we're going to be placing in service over a period of time as a portfolio. And we go out and finance those projects.

Brian Maughan: Early in your career, the concept of renewable energy was everywhere, right? Is there a lot of investment money readily available for you and your team as you package that up and go look for investors? Or how much persuasion do you have to kind of put in place for your specific type of transactions?

Camelia Miu: You know, financing is available, but it is a limited resource. So you need to make sure that, you know, you have a good quality portfolio of assets, right? We need to do our due diligence upfront and make sure that the projects that are in our portfolio are good projects that are financeable. And I think we're doing something, you know, fantastic for the world as a whole. But at the end of the day, we also need to make sure that our company stays afloat and that we're making money to support our business.

Camelia Miu: Right. Do you consider yourself a development company that is focused on building up these community solar projects because … or do you see yourself as out there talking to the consumer to generate the demand, the individual demand, and to make it more accessible?

Camelia Miu: We do both. And I think that is one of our competitive advantages. You know, we generally buy projects at early stage development. We take them through the development phase. We build them and then we operate them long term. And we decided that we have enough knowledge, enough experience, and enough desire, really, to service our own customers. And we truly believe that nobody can service our own customers for our projects better than we can. So right now we are a developer and long-term owner of the projects, and we're also a subscriber management company.

Brian Maughan: Nautilus approaches their work on a state-by-state basis because of the nature of where they can place their solar gardens, and because states have different rules when it comes to renewable energy.

Camelia Miu Generally, our projects tend to focus in states that have RPSs, and that stands for Renewable Portfolio Standards.

Brian Maughan: A renewable portfolio standard is a state regulation that requires electricity suppliers to produce a specific amount of electricity from renewable energy sources.

As of December 2022, there are 29 states that have committed to a RPS goal.

Camelia Miu: Different states have different RPS standards. But those are the states that—they provide enough incentives for solar projects to be economically feasible. And generally they're concentrated in the northeast part of the country, believe it or not. You wouldn't think so, right? Because the solar resource is not the best there. But that’s where—those are the states that have these renewable portfolio standards. Illinois, my home state has one. Colorado has one.

We always look for more states to sort of put in place those renewable portfolio standards. There is plenty of additional square footage that is available for good solar projects in states that do not have renewable portfolio standards.

But there are solar projects that actually do become economically feasible even in states where there are no sort of direct incentives to them—California being one of them. And the reason behind it is that, the price for energy that a consumer in California has to pay is so high, that a solar project does make sense to be built in California.

Brian Maughan: Is the consumer making a swing towards being more aware of the climate change issues and therefore demanding this type of clean energy and this low carbon approach to their daily lives? Or are you still seeing that it really comes down to a cost basis… What is the consumer mindset that you see out there?

Camelia Miu: I do think there are a lot of consumers who are very environmentally conscious and they do realize that currently, we are destroying the earth. Right? And global climate change is real. It's here. And there are a lot of people who are advocating that we need to do more to try to curb that.

But on the other hand, there are consumers who’re also saying, “Well, why do I want to increase the cost that I have to pay for my electricity right now? Maybe I want to leave that as a problem for the next generation…” Which, in my view, that's not the right approach. But, look, I understand that there is a cost associated with us doing what I think needs to be done to get us to net zero or at least close to it.

Brian Maughan: Can you just give us a sense of how big—from a financial perspective—these developments are? When you group several of these projects that you have together, give me some sense of the size of investment that you’re seeking.

Camelia Miu: We look for debt financing and we look for what we call in the industry tax equity financing. On the equity side, we've gotten commitments of 50, 60, 70 million dollars for one of these portfolios. On the debt side, it's generally about the same, for a certain portfolio of assets. So that's the ticket size that we're generally looking for. That’s on a portfolio level.

Brian Maughan: If I see the mission of Nautilus and hear what you've been a part of, you're both looking at a way that we can create more opportunity or more availability for low carbon or renewable energy sources, and yet still make it be an enticing investment that will pay off. What factors need to be in play in order for those two things to live together? 

Camelia Miu: We are building projects that are profitable, right? That a bank wants to lend against, that an investor, an equity investor wants to buy a share of. And again, those things would not happen, or not happen to the scale that it is happening right now, if those projects were not economical. But, I do think that there is a lot more that we can do, through, you know, laws and regulations.

One of the newest things that has given our industry a boost is the inflation reduction act. There are a lot of things in there that are very, very helpful to the renewable energy industry to build more projects and to develop the industry further. And there are requirements on our end to provide prevailing wage, to provide apprenticeship programs when we build our projects, and then also throughout the maintenance part of the life cycle of the project as well. So it's a give and take.

It's good for the economy. It's good for our industry, and we very much look forward to being able to continue to grow our solar projects, but just renewable projects in general. It’s—those incentives are not available just for solar projects, they're available for wind projects, they're available for battery storage. So, I do think that it's a great step in the right direction.

Brian Maughan: What advice would you give to somebody who's kind of coming up or looking to be involved in renewable energy development projects?

Camelia Miu: Intellectual curiosity is one of the main things that I look for in potential employees. I think it is important for people to sort of want to learn more about anything, including renewable energy, right? I think that that drive to always grow your skillset and grow your knowledge of a certain industry or a certain sector is hugely important. That's for anybody out there, right?

And then if you're looking to either switch into the renewable energy industry or if you’re there and you just want to make a move, I think networking is one of the best ways to sort of find opportunities. And that's how you learn about what's going on. But again, I think it's that intellectual curiosity and it's that drive to learn more that's going to, hopefully, lead to somebody looking into these opportunities.

Brian Maughan: I appreciate your intellectual curiosity that has led you to where you are now and that you and your company are working towards trying to solve these big global issues in kind of a small, accessible community way.

Camelia Miu: I love sharing about what we do and hopefully, you know, getting the word out there, allowing people the opportunity to, the chance, right? The choice to buy power from a renewable energy resource. Whether you are a residential customer or a commercial customer, through these community solar projects, we're trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone to participate, to help us get to net zero, but still in a way that does make economic sense.

Brian Maughan: Thanks so much, Camelia. 

Camelia Miu: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Brian Maughan: Thanks for tuning into season three of Built. We have one more great story coming up this season. In two weeks, hear about the building of The IQHQ Research and Development District, San Diego’s newest life science mixed-use development.

You can find all Built episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please give us a rating or review on whichever podcast platform you use. It helps new listeners find us.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial, PRX Productions, and Goat Rodeo. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Jay Venables with Megan Nadolski. Our Senior Producer is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

The music you heard in this episode was from APM Music.

I’m Brian Maughan.

And remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.