There's a version of energy development that treats the host community as a backdrop — a place to put steel in the ground, with the real benefits flowing somewhere else. We don't think that model holds up anymore, and we don't think it should. A utility-scale solar and storage campus has two distinct phases of work, and both are opportunities to hire the people who actually live where the plant is built.
The first phase is construction. Building a hybrid plant is a major undertaking — site preparation, foundations, mounting and trackers, panel installation, the battery system, electrical work, and the interconnection. That's a wave of skilled and semi-skilled jobs concentrated over a couple of years: electricians, equipment operators, laborers, and the local trades that support them. Hiring regionally for that phase keeps the economic benefit close to the project, and it builds the relationships that make a plant a welcome part of the community rather than something done to it.
A construction boom that hires from out of state leaves a community with a power plant and not much else. Hiring locally leaves it with skills, income, and a stake in the project's success.
The second phase lasts far longer: operations and maintenance. Once a plant is energized, it runs for decades, and it needs people to keep it running — technicians for the panels and trackers, specialists for the battery system, vegetation and site management, and the security and administrative roles that come with any long-lived facility. These aren't a temporary surge; they're durable, multi-year jobs anchored to a specific place. A solar campus that's hired and trained locally becomes a stable employer in its community for the life of the asset.
There's a financing dimension here too. Part of our capital comes through the EB-5 program, which exists expressly to channel investment into projects that create American jobs. That aligns our incentives with the community's: the program is built around real, verifiable job creation, which means the work of building and running these plants has to land with American workers. Doing right by the local labor force isn't only good practice — it's woven into how the project is funded.
Local-first hiring isn't charity, and we won't pretend a solar plant single-handedly transforms a regional economy. But over a thirty-year life, the cumulative effect of construction wages, permanent O&M jobs, local procurement, and the tax base a project adds is real and lasting. When the people maintaining the plant are the people who live alongside it, everyone's interests point the same way — toward a facility that's well-run, well-maintained, and genuinely part of the place it powers.
What it means for Solyx
We develop projects that are meant to last decades in one place, so we approach hiring the same way — local-first, across both the construction surge and the long operating life of the plant. Paired with EB-5 financing that's built around American job creation, it means the communities hosting our projects share directly in the work and the benefits, not just the view of the panels.