We make decisions based on one core metric: carbon avoided per dollar invested. That’s it.

As the world grapples with climate change and environmental degradation, the shift towards renewable energy has never been more critical. Innovative companies are at the forefront of this transformation, developing sustainable energy solutions that reduce carbon footprints and promote a greener future. How are these companies driving the renewable energy revolution, and what impact are they making on the environment and the economy? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lassor Feasley, a product designer and entrepreneur, and the co-founder and CEO of Renewables.org, the Global South solar crowdfunding nonprofit. At Renewables.org, he leads product, brand, and strategy, channeling philanthropic capital into high-performing solar installations that expand energy access while reducing carbon emissions. Trained at the School of Visual Arts’ Products of Design program and having previously worked as a design consultant both independently and at firms including IDEO, Ford, and Gehl Architects, he believes a design-first approach is essential for creating iconic, category-defining organizations and products.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I grew up in New York City and have lived here my entire life. People often ask what it was like growing up with more independence than you might have in the suburbs. Honestly, I was a bit of an introvert and something of a rule follower, so I didn’t take full advantage of the city the way I could have. That said, it’s still hard to imagine living anywhere else, especially outside of a city. Over the years, I’ve built an incredible network of friends and collaborators here, and that community has really grounded me.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

In 2022, I launched a for-profit solar crowdfunding startup focused on U.S. solar projects. I went all in, spending more than two years building it — but the model didn’t work. Institutional capital was already abundant in the U.S. solar market, and there just wasn’t a real role for retail investors. It was a hard failure after a lot of effort. Right at that moment, Premal Shah, a social entrepreneurship guru famous for helping to build PayPal in its early days, reached out to me. Unlike some of his peers — many of whom have become divisive public figures or cutthroat businessmen — Premal chose a very different path. He’s best known for founding Kiva.org, the Global South microfinance nonprofit that’s helped billions of dollars flow to underserved entrepreneurs across Africa and India. Premal had been toying with the idea of applying the Kiva model to the climate crisis. When he asked me to help build that vision, I didn’t hesitate. We worked closely to shape what became Renewables.org: a 0% interest lending platform that allows anyone to finance solar development in the Global South and get repaid from the clean energy those projects generate. Building a startup can feel thankless — you’re betting everything without guarantees, often in isolation. But that experience taught me something valuable: when you swing for the fences, people notice. What may seem like a failed gamble can turn out to be the credential that leads to your next big opportunity.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Right now, I’m leading a full redesign and rebuild of Renewables.org’s tech stack. Our original site was built on a dated WordPress infrastructure, and while it got us off the ground, it’s no longer keeping up with our needs. This new implementation will be far more flexible, scalable, and easier to work with as we grow. Over the past five or six months, I’ve taught myself a new set of software development skills, and I’m excited to combine that with my background in UI design to push the platform forward. There are so many directions I want to explore. For example, we could integrate with certain companies to let users invest in Renewables.org as a form of carbon offsetting. Or, we could allow users to upload their heating bills and generate AI-powered investment suggestions to offset their energy use. A more modern tech stack plus the emergence of powerful AI development tools makes this kind of functionality not only possible, but surprisingly achievable.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. What innovative technologies are you implementing to enhance renewable energy production?

Renewables.org is a Global South solar crowdfunding nonprofit where anyone can invest in sustainable infrastructure across India and Africa and get repaid over five years as those projects generate and sell carbon-free electricity to the grid. In essence, we’re a consumer fintech platform that raises capital from philanthropically motivated investors and lends it to solar developers, on the condition that they deploy it into the highest carbon impact per dollar projects they can find. My background is in product design, and I’ve always been fascinated by how homeowners with rooftop solar love checking in on their energy savings and carbon offsets. Millions of people open those dashboards daily, even when there’s no actionable reason to. That behavior got me thinking: what if we could embed a call to action in that experience, allowing users to finance even more solar right from the same interface? My co-founder, Premal Shah, had a similar insight in the microfinance space. At Kiva.org, lenders could follow their loans in real time, see repayments come in, and get to know their borrowers. It made the experience personal, tactile, and meaningful. So, we’re innovating on two fronts. First, through financial innovation — connecting people who want to take direct climate action with solar developers who are best positioned to translate that intention into impact. Second, through user experience innovation — adapting the kind of interactive, rewarding platform that solar homeowners love, and channeling it to drive deeper engagement and real environmental progress.

How do you balance economic viability with environmental responsibility in your renewable energy projects? What are the biggest challenges your company faces in the renewable energy sector, and how are you addressing them?

We direct the funds we raise to finance and build the highest carbon impact per dollar solar projects we can find. That means projects in regions with high grid carbon intensity, low construction costs, and more annual hours of sunshine. We’re actually able to quantify these three metrics as a kind of investment criteria — we call it the ‘Impact Multiplier,’ and you can look up the exact specs for every project we’ve helped to finance. On average, the solar projects in Renewables.org’s portfolio are about 550% more effective at avoiding carbon emissions than solar built in the U.S., and because all of our investors lend at 0% interest, we take our obligation to seek out the highest-impact solar very seriously. But balancing that with economic viability means we also have to think hard about risk. Our goal is to return 100% of the funds our users lend to us. The risks we think about most are: the chance that a developer could run into financial or operating issues, the reliability of the businesses buying the electricity, political or regulatory instability, and currency risk. The way we manage those is by working with developers who’ve built strong programs to account for them. For example, a developer might be selling power to a multinational firm that operates in dollars or euros — that helps reduce both offtaker risk and currency exposure. If a developer can check those boxes and meet our threshold for quality, then the guiding principle becomes carbon impact. That’s where we focus.

How do your renewable energy solutions contribute to reducing carbon emissions and combating climate change?

Our message to people who want to use their resources to fight climate change is pretty simple: not all impact investments are created equal. The effective altruism community is known for applying a kind of utilitarian calculus to giving, asking where each dollar can do the most good. We take a similar approach, but apply it specifically to carbon impact. My co-founder, Premal, is especially passionate about this mindset. He calls Renewables.org’s approach the carbon war room, meaning we make decisions based on one core metric: carbon avoided per dollar invested. That’s it. We constantly challenge ourselves to imagine what kinds of investments we’d be making if we had top experts advising us and a real mandate to deploy society’s resources to solve the climate crisis. We genuinely believe that if you were running the “war room” for carbon mitigation, you’d be funding exactly the kind of Global South solar projects we focus on.

Can you share a success story where your renewable energy initiative significantly impacted a community or industry?

One of my favorite projects is a tea plantation processing site in rural Tamil Nadu, India. As the developer told me, the facility had been struggling to meet its energy needs — the local grid was unreliable and heavily polluting, so they relied on backup diesel generators to keep operations running. The solar project we helped fund changed that. It brought down their electricity costs, made their business more resilient, improved their standing as an employer, and made those expensive, carbon intensive diesel generators obsolete. We’ve got some striking photography from that site and others. It really gives you a sense of the kinds of places where Renewables.org investors are enabling progress and where clean power isn’t just a climate win, but a lifeline for economic and environmental stability.

Ok, thank you. Here is the main question of our interview. What are “5 Things You Need to Know to Create a Successful Renewable Energy Business” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. It’s called the ‘solar coaster,’ so buckle up.

The solar industry is notoriously volatile. Seasoned professionals call it the solar coaster for a reason — every segment of the business gets hit with unpredictable booms and busts. One year the hot spot is Germany, the next it’s China. Many technologists who thought they had a winning innovation have watched it get commodified by competitors in a matter of months. Prices fall fast, margins vanish, and even the best-laid business plans often don’t survive contact with the market.

2. Be policy agnostic.

There was a time when you could build a business around the assumption that generous climate policy, like the Investment Tax Credit or even speculative policies like carbon pricing, would save you. But the political landscape has changed. The right has become increasingly comfortable ignoring precedent and even legislation, and that’s scared off a lot of capital. If your business only works when policy is favorable, it’s not robust enough. You need a model that survives whether or not lawmakers are paying attention.

3. Solar is for squares.

The people running solar finance and operations are, for the most part, just finance and ops people. Some are true believers, but most are pragmatic and opportunistic. That’s not a critique, it’s just reality. It’s great when your product lines up with someone’s values, but don’t expect that alone to carry you. If your idea doesn’t solve a practical business problem, you’ll be ignored — no matter how “green” or visionary it sounds.

4. The industry is regional.

Solar is deeply local. Don’t try to launch with a national or global product out of the gate. Deployment, permitting, and incentives all happen at the state or even city level, and the entrepreneurs doing the work are often focused squarely on their region. That might feel limiting, but it’s actually empowering. It’s a lot easier to win over a regional installer or developer than it is to break into a massive multinational. If you’re building something for this market, go to the state-level solar conferences. They’re way more accessible than the Las Vegas mega-conventions.

5. The wind is rising, so play the long game.

Despite the headwinds faced by the industry, it is also true that climate change is not being adequately addressed and this will lead to impacts so profound that democratic societies will demand action. When they do, whether it is instigated by political formation or in response to an apocalyptic crisis, many business opportunities will emerge as governments and societies mobilize to resolve it. It may be years, it may be decades, but the industry will eventually mobilize on a massive scale. There are plenty of opportunities today — solar, after all, is by far the largest source of new energy coming online in the United States — but innovation is still stymied by a conservative investing and policy environment. These days are numbered.

What are the long-term goals for your company’s renewable energy projects?

Our mission is to accelerate solar adoption across the Global South. Electricity generation in many parts of India and Africa is still incredibly carbon intensive and polluting, so transitioning those markets to sustainable technologies is critical. That said, it’s important to understand that existing generation capacity in the Global South is still relatively small. Climate-wise, the real emissions burden has historically come from the Global North. But here’s the thing: energy demand in the Global North has mostly plateaued. In the Global South, it’s growing every year as more people gain access to modern lifestyles. That’s why this moment is so important. It’s far cheaper and more efficient to build renewable infrastructure from the ground up than it is to replace fossil infrastructure after it’s entrenched. We need to make sure that clean energy becomes the default before carbon-heavy systems get locked in. In Global South development, there’s a well-known concept called “leapfrogging.” A lot of markets across Africa never invested in capital-intensive landline telecom infrastructure. Instead, they jumped straight to cellular and satellite communications. They skipped the legacy tech entirely, and, in some ways, ended up with more modern, flexible systems than we have. We believe energy can follow that same pattern. Solar and batteries are already cost-competitive with legacy power systems. Our job is to help accelerate the adoption of these proven technologies where they can do the most good. Right now, our focus is on solar, but our long-term mandate could absolutely expand to include other categories as new solutions emerge.

How do you engage with and educate the public about the benefits of renewable energy?

I sometimes say that with most nonprofits, you throw your money over the transom, and in return you get mailed literature, gala invitations, and the occasional meeting with a development officer to help you understand your impact and feel good about it. Renewables.org doesn’t do any of that. Every dollar goes straight to a Global South solar developer. We don’t have the resources for high-touch engagement, and honestly, we’d rather put the money to work. Instead, we repay our investors every month with revenue generated from the sale of clean electricity. In a way, those repayments are more like “proof of impact” than financial remuneration. More than 95% of the repayments we’ve issued to date have been reinvested, which tells me that our nonprofit investors aren’t just looking for their money back, they’re looking for validation that their dollars are doing real climate work. My goal is to make Renewables.org so well designed and intuitive that people learn about sustainable infrastructure and Global South development just by using it. We’re only scratching the surface of that right now, but over time, I think we’ll get there. We don’t do paid advertising. We don’t host events. We don’t even have a formal content strategy beyond my own personal communications with investors. But what we do have is a repayment mechanism that quietly but consistently reminds people: this is real, and it’s working.

How do you measure the environmental and social impact of your renewable energy efforts?

I mentioned earlier our investment criteria for selecting the highest carbon impact solar projects we can find. What makes the Impact Multiplier so elegant is that it’s both our selection tool and our effectiveness metric — it tells us which projects to fund, and then it tells us how much impact those projects delivered. Since we know the cost per watt of solar installed and the average sunny hours that watt will receive each year, we can get a solid estimate of the energy it will produce. Then we look at how carbon-intensive the local power grid is, and from there we can tell investors a fairly precise estimate of how much carbon their investment helped avoid. Social impact is harder to measure. We’re a climate-first nonprofit, and that shapes all of our decisions. But because the projects we support are in underdeveloped regions, there are a lot of secondary benefits. Cleaner air when diesel and coal get replaced. More economic resilience when businesses have access to cheaper, more reliable power. Many of our users, especially those who come from the Kiva world, are drawn to those impacts as well. Even if we can’t quantify them as precisely, they’re real, and they matter.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I’ve been thinking lately about how many so-called “thought leaders” were passionate about climate mitigation when it was fashionable, but now brush it under the rug because it’s become less of a priority. With a few exceptions, when climate comes up among this crowd now, it’s usually minimized or excused, as if the damage is just acceptable collateral for more robust economic development. We’re not in climate Armageddon yet, but every leading indicator suggests we’re headed there, and that even the most pessimistic forecasts from ten years ago failed to grasp the full scale of the problem. I don’t think the shift in tone is about new information. It feels more like social signaling and opportunism. I think a lot of people used climate as a way to build social capital, and then dropped it as soon as some newer, shinier affinity (AI, crypto, etc.) came along. If I were a person of real influence, I’d want to moderate that conversation differently. If you have a public audience or influence over decision-makers, you should be embarrassed by your ignorance on climate, and ashamed if the only reason you ever talked about it was to virtue signal. The movement I’d want to inspire would help shape public sentiment to demand a greater level of rigor and care when discussing these issues. Think about it: today, if a public figure tried to minimize the health impacts of cigarettes, they’d be rightly seen as a dangerous corporate shill. You’d better come with a lot of receipts if you want to say something like that. People know those industries lied for decades, and we’ve adjusted our standards accordingly. I hope we get to that same level of accountability around climate change. And I hope Renewables.org can be part of making that happen.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Anyone can get started on Renewables.org by visiting the site and making an investment in Global South solar — it takes just a few minutes. The minimum investment is $25. We have hundreds of investors who start with that, and plenty who invest or donate tens of thousands toward the cause. Once you invest, you’ll start earning repayments right away — your first repayment hits just 30 days after your initial investment. You can view the solar projects in your portfolio and, in some cases, see live data from the solar sites themselves. Each month, you have the option to withdraw your repayments or reinvest them in even more solar. We also offer a gift card product that lets you give the gift of climate impact — one that pays back in cash. It’s been a popular option for both friends and family, and also for companies looking for sustainable corporate gifts.

This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!

Lassor Feasley of Renewables.org On How They Are Creating Renewable Energy was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.