Artisan Electric helped turn Vashon into a solar island. Why did it close? - Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

Artisan Electric helped turn Vashon into a solar island. Why did it close?

By Aspen Anderson

Jason Williams, founder of Artisan Electric, stands outside a Burton Peninsula home with solar panels his company installed. (Terry Donnelly Photo)

Artisan Electric founder Jason Williams stands outside a Vashon home with rooftop solar panels. (Terry Donnelly Photo)

Jason Williams doesn’t have to go far on this island to see his work. It’s on barns and garages, in meadows, on neighbors’ roofs: solar panels installed by the business he started nearly two decades ago.

“We did that, and we did that,” Williams says to himself as he drives the island’s roads. “It’s everywhere.”

Artisan Electric, founded at Williams’ Vashon home in 2007, grew into a Seattle business that installed renewable energy systems across Washington. On Vashon, it installed close to 350 of the island’s roughly 450 solar sites, co-owner Evan Leonard estimates.

Artisan closed in May, Williams said. Its owners attribute the shutdown to a steep drop in residential sales after the end of a federal homeowner tax credit, compounded by tight margins and long waits for payment on commercial jobs.

Its closure offers a look at how federal policy is changing the math for local solar companies — and for the homeowners who want to hire them. It also leaves Vashon without a solar installer based on the island, Williams said; other contractors serve it from off-island.

“It’s been a good run,” Williams said, “and although we are sad for this to come to a close we are proud of the work that we accomplished.”

An early bet on solar

Williams had spent years in electrical construction before a short solar course changed the direction of his career.

In 2005, near the end of a five-year union apprenticeship, he was learning about solar installation, electrical codes and incentives. His commercial work had become a cycle of gutting offices for the next tenant, throwing materials away and rebuilding. “It was just soul sucking,” he said.

Solar offered work he wanted to keep doing, and a way to act on his concern about climate change.

He started Artisan in 2007, taking residential electrical jobs while figuring out how to enter the solar business. In 2008, he estimates, the company installed five or six systems. By 2025, it was installing that many in a week.

Washington lawmakers had approved solar production incentives in 2005, two years before Williams opened his shop. He got in near the start of the market’s growth, and the business grew with it. By 2013, with more work off the island than on it, headquarters had moved to Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood.

Vashon took to solar early, Williams said, and Artisan helped it along. Each October, customers opened their properties for a self-guided solar tour. “You would take your map and go bounce around the island of different people’s homes, and they would tell you about their system,” he said.

Leonard turned up at one of those tours around 2008, a clean-energy student taking extensive notes. Williams handed him a shovel and put him to work digging a trench. He went on to run design and the office staff and became one of Artisan’s three owners, with Williams and Williams’ wife, Jen.

When Leonard joined, he said, Artisan had three people. Toward the end it was averaging three to four megawatts of solar a year.

Sheila Brown, who moved to the island in 2007, was among the early customers. Her roof wasn’t suitable for solar, so Williams proposed putting the panels in a meadow. She recalled a federal tax benefit of about 30% of the installation cost.

“The solar system went up, and I’ve been happy ever since,” Brown said.

In Dockton, Todd Currie designed a garage to accommodate solar, then hired Artisan around 2017. He wanted to offset his household energy use, charge an electric car and have power during outages. His system nearly eliminates his electric bill for much of the year, he said. During a recent Maury Island outage, his battery supplied power, then recharged to full once the sun came out.

“It just has always worked,” Currie said. “It just kicks in right away and no noise, instantaneous and that’s worked out really nicely.”

The solar coaster

For years, Williams said, shifting incentives, equipment shortages and competition made solar a difficult business to predict.

“We’ve always called it the solar coaster,” he said. Equipment lines disappeared, with months-long waits for replacements. Federal and state incentives expired, got extended or changed. Customers would wonder, he said, whether to “hold off until there’s a decision on this incentive.”

Then came the biggest swing. President Donald Trump signed the law commonly called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” on July 4, 2025. It ended the 30% federal tax credit for home solar systems completed after Dec. 31, 2025. On a $30,000 system, that meant a credit of about $9,000 against a homeowner’s federal income taxes.

Even before the signing, Williams said, “our phones lit up. People wanted systems installed before the end of the year.” By the third week of July, Artisan and its competitors were booked through December. Artisan added a crew and roughly 22 installation slots, which filled by mid-August. Calls kept coming from customers who wanted a place on the 2025 calendar.

When Artisan tried to book work for 2026, Williams said, “contracts dried up.” Residential contracts averaged about 16 a month across 2025, he said, but only about six a month from September through March.

On paper, Artisan looked like it was thriving, and rising revenue hid how fragile the business had become. Leonard said it grew from roughly $5 million around 2020 to about $15 million in 2024 and $18 million in 2025.

Commercial projects were larger and less forgiving. Delays or underestimated labor could erase a margin, Leonard said, and competition made it hard to build a cushion into bids while paying union wages. Artisan was “doing well to break even.”

Artisan paid electricians weekly and suppliers monthly, then waited 90 days or more for general contractors to pay after project milestones. “Our residential solar contracts was our cash flow that allowed us to do commercial,” Williams said.

When residential sales slowed, the company kept financing commercial jobs while waiting for checks. By early 2026, Williams said, “we were just pouring all the money that we had into commercial to try to keep going on those projects,” while residential crews sat idle and sales proposals went unsigned.

They still had commercial work. They no longer had enough money to sustain it. The owners explored “every angle and every possibility,” Williams said.

In late April, Williams called his crew in and told them Artisan was closing. Some of the roughly 50 employees lost their jobs that day; others stayed to finish projects. A handful lived on Vashon. The company officially closed at the end of May.

Williams said Artisan worked to finish projects and pay suppliers so customers wouldn’t face liens on their homes. Puget Sound Solar, which helped him get started in 2007, took on unfinished commercial projects. Leonard said that company’s maintenance operation is also a resource for former customers.

Across Washington, other installers faced the same abrupt change in residential demand. Jon Lange, president of Sunergy Systems and of the Washington Solar Energy Industries Association, said the group recently polled its roughly 40 installer members. Residential business is down “probably between 20 and 30%” from last year, he said. Installers had expected the credit to phase out gradually. “We weren’t ready to transition on a dime,” Lange said.

Nationally, residential installers put in 995 megawatts of solar in the second quarter of this year, down 12% from a year earlier and what trade publications reporting on the data describe as the lowest quarterly total in five years, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

SEIA ranks the state 40th for installed solar capacity and estimates 2.8% of its homes have solar. Will Sumner, CEO of Puget Sound Solar, told The Seattle Times in July 2025 that losing the credit could shrink the state’s residential market by 50% to 60%.

Who can afford solar now? Lange said most of his customers are “at least middle to upper income,” though favorable loan terms once helped middle-class buyers. Leonard said interest hasn’t faded, but solar became “harder to pencil” — harder to justify on the numbers — for a purchase most households see as nice to have, not necessary.

Another cliff looms, this time for commercial projects. Solar projects that begin construction after July 4, 2026, generally must be in service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the business tax credit; projects begun earlier can qualify under different timing rules. Lange said that deadline “could create a cliff event.” Third-party leasing, in which a company owns the panels and the homeowner pays to use them, is entering Washington. Because the owner can claim the commercial credit, installers hope leasing will win back customers.

Lange said he learned afterward that other circumstances contributed to Artisan’s closure. Still, he called it “a bit of a gut punch and a reality check.”

The industry loses experienced workers and installation capacity, he said. Customers lose their original service provider for systems meant to last decades. “They don’t have a service partner to service their warranties and that sort of thing,” Lange said. Sunergy and other installers are taking on service work.

Currie, who hired Artisan to rewire his house during a renovation, said the company closed while that project was underway. “It’s a loss for us,” he said, noting he knew Artisan “did a lot of good work.”

Katy Jo Steward, whose barn array was once, she believes, the island’s largest, said the loss means fewer well-paid island jobs and a harder path to solar.

“Just having them available makes it more accessible,” she said. She blamed federal energy policy: “That their policies forced him out of business makes me so angry.”

Williams remains hopeful about solar. “The tech isn’t going away,” he said. “And the need isn’t going away. It’s just taking a pause.” But he figured a policy turnaround could take three to five years.

After 19 years of running people and hiring labor, Williams wants to “step as far away from that as possible.” He is staying on Vashon to do the work he liked best: electrical troubleshooting and repair, “the type of work that I can do with my bag of hand tools and a meter and a minimal amount of parts.” That includes wells and water systems, which typically fail for electrical reasons.

He is calling the business Homegrown Electrical Troubleshooting and Repair, “an ode to Fred” — Fred Johnson, a friend who ran the Home Grown Cafe in the building where May Kitchen + Bar is now, later farmed in southwest Washington and died in August.

Brown, who said she was “devastated” when Artisan closed, still knows whom to call. “If I have electrical problems, I call Jason,” she said.

Homegrown Electrical Troubleshooting and Repair can be reached at [email protected] or (206) 567-7789.