Lithia Motors runs more than 450 business units across three countries. It’s the largest automotive retailer in the United States. And like every company with a footprint that size, it is concerned about energy.
Carson Bristol is Lithia’s Program Manager for Energy Efficiency. His job is to help individual dealerships get their energy costs under control, support EV charging infrastructure that manufacturers are requiring, and make incremental progress toward the company’s broader decarbonization goals — all without a centralized command structure. Each Lithia location operates with its own profit and loss. What works in a high-line store in South Florida won’t work in a domestic store in Alaska. Carson has to meet every operator where they are.
He came on the Renewable Rides podcast recently to talk through what he’s built and what he’s learned. A few things stood out.
The business case doesn’t need sustainability to work
When Lithia started its sustainability program, the framing was about doing right by customers and the planet. That’s still true. But Carson is direct about how rarely that framing comes up in his actual project conversations. Nine times out of ten, he said, sustainability doesn’t enter the room. The project works on straight economics. He built Lithia’s solar strategy to be apolitical, meaning an administration change or an incentive rollback wouldn’t sink the business case. When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed, there were some nervous emails internally, but the confidence in solar as a sound financial investment didn’t waver.
Carson’s long-term goal is to get to a place where you can evaluate a solar project without walking through a stack of incentives to justify the IRR. “These systems should stand on their own merit,” he said. They increasingly do.
Partner selection is the most important decision you’re probably making last
Lithia went into its early solar deployments the way most companies do: by analyzing sites, modeling economics, and then approaching the market. What they underestimated was the weight of the partner selection itself. Carson was frank about the challenge. Solar has a reputation problem — earned over decades of bad actors — and auto retail doesn’t make due diligence easier.
“Solar salesmen talking to car salesmen,” he said. “It’s the worst of both worlds.” Add lawyers to the contract phase, and you’ve got a room where everyone’s incentives point in different directions.
The lesson from those early projects is to run a real competitive vetting process before you commit to a supplier. Evaluate contractors the way you’d evaluate any capital partner. Companies that treat vendor selection as an afterthought, like a box to check after the financial model is done, are setting themselves up for execution problems. The quality of the team building your infrastructure determines whether the project delivers.
EV charging is a grid infrastructure problem
Lithia is selling EVs and servicing EVs, which means Lithia needs to charge EVs at scale, across hundreds of locations, in markets with wildly different grid conditions. Carson ran the numbers: there are 1,500 charging ports across the network. If every port were in use simultaneously, the combined peak demand would be roughly equivalent to the average power draw of Santa Monica, California. A single DC fast charger draws the equivalent of hundreds of homes.
With that much potential demand, powering those ports becomes a serious infrastructure question. And in more than a few cases, Lithia has been locked into years-long waits for utilities to deliver the grid capacity manufacturers require, only to watch the EV market shift before the power arrived. Battery storage is the logical tool for managing this, and Carson admitted Lithia is still catching up there.
The lesson for any company adding EV infrastructure is that the energy strategy has to precede the charging installation. What your grid connection supports, what your peak demand profile looks like, and where storage fits — these are decisions that can’t come after the fact.
Start before you’re ready
Carson was direct about this, too. Lithia moved on to solar before it had everything figured out. They picked up bumps and bruises. They learned what works and what doesn’t for their specific footprint in ways that no amount of pre-deployment analysis could have told them. His advice to organizations still sitting on the sidelines was to get one project in the ground. The learning curve accelerates sharply after you start. The financial homework is necessary, but the real education comes from doing.
For companies managing multi-site portfolios, that’s a useful frame. You don’t have to solve the entire energy strategy before you start. You have to start in the right place, with the right partners and on the right site. The rest compounds from there.
