When Andy McCarthy moved to the heart of Victoria’s coal country in 2010 to start selling rooftop solar panels he was greeted with “open ridicule”.
But as his Gippsland Solar firm began “having a few wins and making a bit of a splash”, the response on the streets in the Latrobe Valley towns of Morwell and Traralgon, and especially the local footy field, took on a more menacing tone.
“People would abuse me or spit at me or send me abusive messages online. I had my shop vandalised,” McCarthy says.
“To a lot of people in the [Latrobe] valley, they directly relate the installation of a solar panel to it putting their mate Joe out of a job at the power station.”
In hindsight, the region, about 150km east of Melbourne, may have been “the worst place in Australia to start a renewable energy company”, he says.
Still, with doggedness, guile and a product that made economic sense for customers – even those working in coalmines and power plants – Gippsland Solar grew to employ hundreds of people. After a 2019 takeover by RACV, the largest member organisation in Australia, the group’s solar division has provided employment and industry exposure for more than 1,000 people.
McCarthy’s successes – and missteps – are detailed in his book, Here Comes The Sun, published 30 July. It’s an engaging tale, mostly about seizing the promise of the new but also the challenges of weaning communities off a fossil-fuel industry that has shaped their identity and provided income for generations.
It’s also topical as the federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, undertakes a tour of the seven sites where he would pledge to build a nuclear power station, including the Latrobe Valley. A future book reprint would add a chapter on why the valley might warm to a “white elephant” idea that would stall the shift to renewables, McCarthy says.
“A lot of people in the Latrobe Valley want to believe that we don’t have to make a really hard, painful, systemic transition,” he says. “These announcements bother me so much because they just prey on that fear, uncertainty and doubt and sell people false hope.”
“There’s a saying that an uncomfortable truth is harder than a convenient lie,” McCarthy says. “No one has the courage to say to people in the valley, I know you’re looking for an easier solution, but there isn’t one.”
“The sooner we acknowledge that and hold hands and walk together to create a better future for a region with an honest understanding where we’re going, the sooner we can start to build a prosperous future,” he said.
McCarthy’s book tracks his journey from his “turbulent” childhood marked by bullying, an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis and placement in a high school of “last resort”. Located in the lee of an abattoir near Geelong, students braved “choking fumes from the slaughtering process [that] added a literal bad smell to the energetic stench of the school”.
By Year 10, he’d had enough and dropped out.
Flinders Peak Secondary College would later fall into even greater disrepair, perhaps mirroring the fortunes of some of its students. “I believe it was turned into a drug and alcohol rehab facility in 2019, which sadly feels like a logical progression,” he writes.
“With little formal education, no circle of friends to rely on and more than a few destructive tendencies, the chips were stacked against me,” McCarthy writes. “But like many others with ADHD, there was a fierce energy and passion inside me that I could feel deeply.”
That drive would eventually settle on trying to make “a meaningful impact on the planet”, he says. “It was being able to channel it into this renewable energy mission that sort of saved me from ending up in a pretty awful place.”
The book at times provides a manual of sorts about how to build a business from scratch and manage rapid growth, particularly in a sector notorious for fluctuating incentives and unexpected impediments. But it might be the notes on humility that are most helpful.
For McCarthy, leaving Melbourne’s inner city “green belt” – where decarbonisation of the economy was viewed as urgent and inevitable – for Gippsland meant the risk of “belligerence and arrogance” that took time for him to shed.
McCarthy says he initially thought: “All of our largest trading partners effectively have a net zero target, and we are transitioning whether you like it or not, so you can agree with me and we can do this together, or you can get out of the way.”
“My approach was completely wrong and it took me a few years to realise that,” he says.
No wonder, then, that McCarthy, wife Kelly and three young children endured hostility. Some customers would place their solar panels on back roofs, out of sight.
Greater empathy was needed for people who had worked 20 years in the coal sector and their dads twice as long if they were to be “brought on the journey”.
Winning the “best new business award” in the region and getting solar panels installed on the roof of the Latrobe city council created a more positive vibe in the valley.
Now volunteering, providing advice to businesses, spending more time coaching his children’s sports team and considering a more public role, McCarthy says there was “no shame” in people seizing the opportunities offered by unstoppable technological changes.
“I’ve been referred to as a ‘climate capitalist’ in the past and at first I took offence to that,” he says.
“The more I thought about it, though … I see a chance to make the world a better place and create a legacy for our children that we can be proud of [and] do that in a way that creates strong businesses.”
Here Comes the Sun by Andy McCarthy will be published on 30 July by Affirm Press, RRP$34.99
