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Dr. Charles Gay has left his post as the head of ASE Americas to follow his dream of spreading solar energy to the developing nations with the Greenstar Corporation. Gay co-founded the company in the mid-1990s to find ways of generating wealth for people who are living in rural areas through solar energy. »It’s a different drumbeat,« says Gay concerning the move. »What ASE is about is being a manufacturing company.«
»The emphasis in the business has changed,« says new ASE Americas CEO Dr. Ralf Peters about Gay’s departure. According to Peters, who retains his co-CEO role at ASE’s parent company in Germany, Gay will not be involved with ASE Americas anymore. Peters believes ASE needs to concentrate on the German market and that Gay’s ideas did not fit in with ASE’s market strategy. »We just do not have the capacity to satisfy every market,« says Peters. »If (Gay) is doing what he wants to do with Greenstar, he’ll have much more success and fulfillment.« Gay does not disagree. He wants to see solar help people in emerging lands. »With solar, we’ve tended to use the build-it-and-they-will-come kind of model,« he says. Instead of selling electrons, he thinks the time is ripe to start combining what he calls »smart« electrons with solar-powered communications. »This allows us to go anywhere today and set up a very high-speed up link and do it for quite a low cost.« Greenstar uses solar to help village communities gain wealth by linking them to the outside world via the Internet where they can sell their products without having to move to metropolitan areas. Gay, who is moving to the Los Angeles area to be nearer the entertainment industry, says Greenstar sometimes records local artists in the field using solar energy, with the resulting CDs sold on the Internet for the benefit of the musicians. Greenstar is currently involved in a solar-powered reggae music project in the Swift River region of Jamaica. Gay began his career at Spectrolab in 1975 designing high-performance satellite solar cells for NASA applications, as well as working at Siemens Solar in California. In 1978, he moved to Arco Solar, eventually working his way up to president in 1988. Between 1995 and 1997 he served as director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) before taking on the CEO role at ASE Americas. Gay is also director of the Greenstar Foundation, the non-profit branch of Greenstar Corporation. When asked what where he might go after Greenstar, he says simply, »This is it, my labor of love.« William
P. Hirshman
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