Envision Solar

Envision Solar building investor base for market expansion

Envision SolarEnvision Solar expects 2013 to be a breakout year.

The company aims to build its investor base while simultaneously ratcheting up sales, design and construction of its patented Solar Trees – freestanding concrete pillars topped with large attractive dual-axis solar tracking modules.

At the beginning of the year, California-based Envision announced a deal to install 2,300 of its trees on a property in North Carolina. That one deal takes the company, which had until then installed a couple hundred trees, to a whole new level.

“Envision is the best kept secret in the solar industry,” said CEO Desmond Wheatley.

But he’s ready to bring the company out of the shadows and hired the MZ Group to manage the company’s investor relations.

“They’re the largest investor relations company in the world,” he said.

He’s hoping MZ will help to inform the world about Envision, let investors know the solar energy company exists and what it’s working on. The stock has been trading in the 18 to 23-cent range since the start of the year. And the trade volume is very low, which doesn’t make the stock very liquid.

Getting the trading volume up will help the company achieve greater liquidity in its stock, which will make growing easier.

And Wheatley said Envision is on a growth path. The company announced this week that it has found a way to modularize the foundation of its Solar Tree. That was the last piece of the modularized solar tree remaining. The rest of the parts, including the concrete pillar the solar modules sit one are manufactured ahead of time, making them easier to deploy and assemble quickly anywhere in the world.

 The new system for installing the foundation took what was a multiple-day process and turned it into a few hours, Wheatley said.

“We used to measure how long it would take to do this in days,” he said. “Now we’re down to hours and we’re about to be down to measuring in minutes.”

He said installing a solar tree from start to finish takes less than a week now, which will be valuable to retailers and businesses that might install solar trees in their parking lots.