RJ Noble’s asphalt crushing facility, down the street from its new solar project.
When a California asphalt manufacturer wanted to control its electricity bills with solar power, it wasn’t quite sure how to pull it off. The RJ Noble Company didn’t have enough free space onsite to host the kind of power it was looking for. But it started a conversation with local contractor Tenco Solar (No. 216 on the 2025 Top Solar Contractors List) to see if it could still be possible somehow.
RJ Noble came into the project as a highly energy-educated solar customer — not necessarily the norm when it comes to commercial clients, even in California.
“They really controlled their energy very closely already. So, when we were talking to them, we started to do our typical education of an [electric] bill and how demand charges impact their rate structure and how much they pay. And they’re like, ‘No, we know. We know all of that, not just some of it, but all of it,’” said Dan McIntyre, owner and president of Tenco.
As they began diving into the project, the Tenco team learned RJ Noble also owned a storage facility across the street from its manufacturing operation, with shipping containers used for customer storage units. That space was much more promising for siting solar, but it required some creative planning to use the energy off-site.
Solar Stack adhesive mounts made this unusual solar project possible.
“The idea was to install the solar there and somehow figure out a way to route it to the power plant, which wasn’t really possible by running conduit or sending a wire across the street,” McIntyre said.
The best solution turned out to be virtual net energy metering (VNEM), offered by the local utility Southern California Edison, where the power generated at the storage site is sent to the grid, then allocated by the utility to a common meter across the street. This setup is typically used on apartment solar projects to spread solar savings across multiple units but worked well for this project too.
After figuring out the electricity logistics, the team had to solve the issue of actually installing solar on storage-container rooftops that cannot be penetrated or withstand heavy ballast loads.
“We worked on a couple of different engineering concepts — welding, doing other things — and then just kept thinking, kept ideating. We wanted the project. And I think when you have that attitude that, ‘We’re going to figure out how to do this,’ you typically do,” McIntyre said. “We had to brainstorm some ideas. And of course, one of the best ways to do that is to go to RE+.”
The team remembered an adhesive-based mounting manufacturer called Solar Stack from the previous year’s tradeshow that promised damage-free, non-penetrative mounts. The product that uses a spray polyurethane foam adhesive proved to be the perfect solution for the metal container rooftops, even though it took some convincing for the AHJ to approve the plan.
Tenco was able to install 1 MW of solar on the nearby storage facility’s rooftops.
“It did take some time and some working with [the AHJ] and getting additional engineering documentation done to show that the uplift value was going to be fine,” McIntyre said. “But it was absolutely great for a metal roof application. I would encourage anyone to try it there.”
NEM 3.0 was coming down the pike when RJ Noble started planning this project in 2022, so it was critical to get the project approved under NEM 2.0 before compensation rates were reduced. Tenco met that goal, delivering a project that would offset 40% of the manufacturer’s energy usage, and learned a new method to install modules on fragile rooftops along the way.
This story was featured exclusively in our 2025 Top Solar Contractors issue. See the issue and full list of top U.S. solar installers here.
