St. Anthony: Minnesota solar firms, including Eden Prairie’s EVS, growing at hot pace

President Andy Kim of Eden Prairie and his solar engineering company EVS are riding the renewable energy wave.

EVS, which does much of its business in huge, sunny Texas, has grown from 50 to 120 workers since 2019.

The company just expanded its headquarters by 40% and is managing demand from developers and utilities for big solar installations — now considered with wind the cheapest forms of energy — as well as battery storage installations.

“We think we’re going to reach 200 employees within the next two years because of all the work, as well as diversification into battery storage, transmission and substation work,” said Kim, whose father, Dennis, founded the company as a commercial engineering shop in 1979.

That said, Kim and other renewable energy players this week acknowledged the immediate future is partly cloudy.

EVS has several projects on hold amid solar-component supply chain issues from China and inflationary cost hikes on steel that threaten all construction generally.

They are worried about a one-year investigation by the U.S. Commerce Department into whether Chinese companies are circumventing existing duties on solar panels and cells by using four Southeast Asian countries as bases.

Auxin Solar, a U.S. manufacturer, lodged the initial complaint. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) said the Biden administration is “wreaking havoc within the industry” by moving forward with the investigation. The result could mean new tariffs for most solar panels and cells used by EVS and similar companies.

Largely because of feared tariffs, half of the respondents to a SEIA survey reported that more than 80%…