Ryan Wartena is a Burner – that is, someone who goes into the far reaches of the Nevada desert every year in late August to create art, music and community at Burning Man. He’s been part of the weeklong event for 21 years, and it’s where he got the idea for Dragon Wings, an off-grid solar and storage system that can be set up almost anywhere, from a parking lot to a construction site to remote locations — like Burning Man — miles from the nearest power line.
As Wartena tells it, he had been creating large-scale art pieces incorporating LED lights at the event for several years, using a gas generator, “and that broke me. How can I build something beautiful and power it on something ugly?”
An electrochemical engineer with an impressive list of degrees and post-doc research positions, Wartena figured what was needed was “something that can set up faster, that can be transported, that can be super easy, no wiring in the field … And then, yeah, I mean, I saw it. I saw Dragon Wings in my mind’s eye.”
That initial inspiration is now one of the coolest solar and storage systems ever — an unfolding canopy of solar panels with storage underneath, all of which can sit on top of a standard shipping container or large flat-bed truck.
A basic Dragon Wings unit can generate 30 kW of power, and Wartena says multiple units can be “daisy-chained” together to produce up to 1 MW.
The first systems were, of course, rolled out at Burning Man, where, since 2022, they have generated 24/7 power for kitchens and whole “village” campsites of up to 400 people. Wartena also recently announced a deal with a major automaker in the United States, which will be using Dragon Wings to power electric vehicle chargers at one of its testing facilities.
But the startup’s primary target is the commercial and industrial, or C&I, sector that includes solar and storage projects for small and medium-sized businesses and institutions, like hospitals or schools — a long-time weak spot in the U.S. solar market.
The latest figures from industry analyst Wood Mackenzie show that while the residential sector added more than a gigawatt of new solar projects in the third quarter of 2025, C&I grew by only about half that much, 554 MW. The gap is even larger between commercial and utility-scale, which accounted for 9.7 GW of new power.
C&I projects can range anywhere from 20 kW to 1 to 3 MW, Wartena says. “Everyone wants to do those larger ones, but a majority of the buildings in the United States are these 20 kW to a megawatt needs,” he said.
“If we really want to deploy enough solar and storage in our lifetime to [get] this planet to 100% renewable operation … we need a product for the commercial-industrial space that can be built in a factory like a car, put together quickly and delivered quickly.”
A billion-dollar market
Due to my total lack of technical background, I am a sucker for cool technologies, so was absolutely knocked out the first time I saw a video of a Dragon Wings system unfolding (check it out on the company’s website).
But wide-eyed wonder aside, I knew the story here was important for another reason, which was all about how solar and storage are becoming increasingly indispensable for electric system flexibility, reliability and affordability — all vital for meeting rising power demand.
While solar and storage have always had the potential to be modular, designing these smaller, flexible systems has occurred on a case-by-case basis, often as pilot projects. At his first startup, a storage company called Geli, Wartena recalled, an off-grid project similar to Dragon Wings might have taken two or three years to develop and construct.
But the solar and storage systems now hitting the residential and C&I markets are making clean energy widely accessible and convenient. “Balcony” solar allows apartment dwellers to plug panels and a battery into a regular wall socket to immediately cut their electric bills.
Similarly, Dragon Wings can go virtually anywhere and meet a broad range of uses that can help businesses cut electric bills.
Dragon Wings powering an equipmnt trailer on a solar construction site.
The system is, for all intents and purposes, a microgrid in a box. Once unfolded, it can plug into local power lines or a backup generator, or operate independently off-grid without having to go through complicated permitting or approvals to connect to the grid.
A company presentation shows the system powering a parking lot at the 2024 SuperBowl in Las Vegas and the office and equipment trailer at a construction site for a 200-MW solar project.
At Burning Man, it provides night-time lighting and serves as a shade structure during the day.
Dragon Wings providing night time lights at Burning Man.
Jigar Shah, a serial entrepreneur and former director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, sees a billion-dollar market for this kind of “temporary solar,” which Dragon Wings is poised to meet.
Right now, the need for temporary power — at a concert or construction site — usually means bringing in a diesel generator, and diesel fuel, at a total cost of $3/kWh, said Shah, who is an early investor in Dragon Wings. Wartena’s “unit can generate power below $1 [per kWh], so it's actually quite cost effective, and … it's beautiful. So a lot of people [would] like to see this instead of using a diesel generator.”
He sees opportunities for Dragon Wings to attract major customers, for example, Netflix, which needs power on movie sets, or the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, which is looking for clean power for its sporting events.
“The bigger thing to recognize is that we're now at a point where the solar panels and the batteries that are in this unit are so cheap that this kind of solution pays for itself,” Shah said. “For a long time, you really had to strain your neck a little bit to make these numbers work. But today … these numbers are easily half the cost of current temporary power solutions, and I think over time, with mass manufacturing, it could be a third of the cost of temporary power solutions.”
The off-grid opportunities on island nations and for disaster recovery are another potential market. Wartena says that queries about Dragon Wings are coming in from Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico and Barbados, and Ukraine — “anywhere it’s difficult to get a barrel of fuel.”
Two Dragon Wings on a flatbed.
“Dragon Wings will offset 10 to 20 gallons of fuel a day,” he said. “I put two Dragon Wings on a 53-foot flatbed, and that’s basically 55 gallons of fuel a day avoided.”
A common goal
Wartena describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur and scientist focused on a plan to operate the world on renewable energy in our lifetime.”
He sold Geli, the storage company he started in 2008, to Hawha Q Cells, a South Korean solar manufacturer, in 2020. Banyan Infrastructure, a 2018 startup he cofounded, has developed an online platform for clean tech financing.
Wartena also cofounded Black Rock Labs, a nonprofit incubator that supports the commercialization of clean energy and other sustainable technologies developed at Burning Man and similar events.
Southern Beams, the startup producing Dragon Wings, currently has eight units in the field, a handful of employees and a 13,000 square-foot industrial space in Chattanooga, Tenn., where the company aims to produce 50 of its unfolding solar and storage systems in 2026. Wartena’s five-year goal is 1,000 per year.
That level of growth could be critical for bringing system costs down even further. Right now, Dragon Wings sells for $220,000, before a 40% federal tax credit, which will be available through the end of 2026. According to Wartena, the system’s storage pack may still qualify for a partial tax credit through 2032.
The Dragon Wings units used at Burning Man — five of them — can be rented for short periods of time the rest of the year, and Wartena also offers a five-year leasing plan to make the systems more affordable.
So here is what is totally cool about Ryan Wartena. For the past 26 years, he’s been running a spreadsheet tracking how long it will take for the world to run 100% on clean energy, factoring in advances in solar and storage technology and the impact of China’s rise as a leader in the industry.
When he started his calculations in 1999, “solar panel production was all from silicon, was from offshoots from the computer,” and the horizon to 100% stretched out 1,000 years, he said. China’s quick ramping of cheap solar panel production in the early 2000s cut the timeline to 100 years, but the rise of solar and storage systems has been a game changer..
The ongoing spreadsheet now has the date for 100% “pinned [to] June 23, 2034,” he said.
Of course, progress toward that goal is not always even or linear, but Wartena said, “I’ve stuck with that date for a while. … Things can happen in the world that really push it. I do think this is the first human race where all humans are working together toward a common goal.”