Chase Weir

Chase Weir is co-founder, co-chairman and CEO of Distributed Sun (D-SUN) – a commercial solar developer, platform services provider and Solar Energy Investment Company (SEIC) manager. Mr. Weir leads capital formation, strategic partnerships, and the design of the company’s business, policy and finance intelligence tools and filings with the USPTO. Under his leadership, D-SUN has secured eight closings of operating and project portfolio company finance. His Washington, DC-based firm owns and operates profitable SEICs, sunONE through sunFOUR, with performing solar assets in 6 states, serving power to Hilton, Sheraton, and US Foods properties, and commercial and school sites nationwide.

In 2012, Mr. Weir’s firm launched the Distributed Solar Network™ – a development and finance platform with over $1B of finance capacity that screened more US commercial dealflow in 2012 than the entire segment installed. During the first year of operations through Q2 of 2013, the network team sourced nearly 1.8 GW of commercial pipeline from more than 400 individual projects, evaluating almost $5B of solar capacity from 126 network members in 29 policy jurisdictions.

Together with DuPont, Mr. Weir and D-SUN co-founded the truSolar® initiative in 2013 that includes ABB, ABM, Assurant, Booz Allen Hamilton, Mosaic, SMA, PanelClaw, Underwriters Laboratories and others as founding working group members, with support from the US national laboratories NREL and Sandia, and the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s. truSolar® provides the industry a uniform and reliable approach to credit evaluation and pricing risk for commercial project screening, scoring and selection.

A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Weir has led multiple equity, debt, and M&A financings in Principal, CEO and Chairman roles, and launched market-leading products and services across industries. He has been a retained advisor to Fortune 50 companies and presidential campaigns. He chairs the EarthShot Foundation, and previously served as an executive-in-residence to a global alternative energy portfolio in Dubai, UAE. Mr. Weir launched Terranaut Almanacs in 2010. To date, the series has filmed interviews and audience discussions with more than 50 of America’s foremost clean energy and economy leaders.

Mr. Weir earned a BS magna cum laude in Management from UNC. He is a multiple-time grant and scholarship recipient, patents holder, and serial adventurer. He is an active alumnus of Mindshare and Aspen Institute, member of ACORE’s Leadership Council, and serves on a number of clean energy working groups and councils, including the White House Clean Energy Roundtable.