SOLAR COASTER by Jared Schoch is part business memoir, part history of the modern American solar industry, and part reflection on faith, purpose, and leadership. Schoch traces his path from an ambitious young professional in high tech and corporate energy to an early leader in solar, eventually helping build TurningPoint Energy. Along the way, he explains why the phrase “solar coaster” fits an industry shaped by changing tax credits, politics, utility rules, interest rates, supply chains, technology, and public opinion. What gives the book its personality, though, is that Schoch treats all of those professional twists as part of a larger personal journey. From the beginning, he connects business decisions with the question of what makes work meaningful and argues that purpose should sit at the center of a career.

Some of the most engaging sections for me come from Schoch’s years at SunEdison, where the young solar industry feels unpredictable, competitive, and full of possibility. He describes losing major deals, learning how utilities actually make decisions, developing relationships in rural communities, and eventually winning projects that changed his career. His stories give the reader a useful insider’s view of how solar projects come together through a complicated mix of finance, land, regulation, politics, community support, and persistence. His account of SunEdison’s later collapse also becomes one of the book’s strongest business lessons. After watching rapid expansion, excessive spending, and executive pride undermine the company, Schoch sums up what he took from the experience in five words: “Ego kills great companies.” That line captures Schoch’s larger belief that character and judgment matter just as much as strategy.

The story becomes more personal as Schoch moves through the difficult SOLON years and eventually starts TurningPoint Energy. Building the company becomes the clearest example of his ideas about resilience, disciplined risk, teamwork, and what he calls soul-driven leadership. He recounts putting his own money into projects, enduring years-long development processes, abandoning projects that no longer made sense, and learning how to build a company around talented people who could eventually operate without him. He’s also unusually open about how demanding that kind of life became. The pandemic and his midlife struggles force him to reconsider his health, family life, work habits, and priorities. Those chapters make the business successes feel more complete because Schoch is willing to examine what all that striving required from him personally.

Faith is the thread connecting nearly every part of SOLAR COASTER. Schoch talks openly about prayer, discernment, Jesuit spirituality, generosity, and his belief that God has guided the major turns in his life. His recurring prayer, “Give me the wisdom to see the path, and the courage to walk it,” works almost like a summary of the book’s philosophy. Schoch doesn’t keep spirituality in a separate compartment from business. He presents it as the moral framework behind decisions about employees, partners, money, philanthropy, risk, and eventually his own exit from TurningPoint Energy. The later chapters make that framework even more explicit, with discussions of strengthening the soul, surrounding yourself with “A+ players,” recognizing the importance of timing, and developing a company culture that can survive beyond its founder. His decision to step away at forty-eight, after years of succession planning, gives those ideas a practical conclusion.

What I liked most after reading SOLAR COASTER is how closely Schoch connects the growth of an industry with the growth of a person. The book covers more than two decades of solar development, from an emerging technology struggling for credibility to a major part of America’s energy system, while showing a career changing alongside it. Schoch clearly loves the solar business, including its maddening uncertainty, and his firsthand experience gives the industry sections energy and authority. At the same time, his final measure of success has less to do with megawatts, money, or titles than with whether his work helped other people and whether he followed the purpose he believed he was given. By the end, his exit from daily management, his renewed attention to family and spiritual life, and his continued concern about climate change all feel like natural extensions of the same question that drives the entire book: what should we do with the opportunities, talents, and time we’re given? SOLAR COASTER answers that question through the story of one career, but its real subject is how a person builds a life around work that feels worth doing.

Pages: 272 | ASIN : B0H8DYN9MB