Namaste’s Jones honored at White House

Boulder company as poster child for jobs created by stimulus act

| Feb 20, 2010

SOLAR TALK: Namaste’s Blake Jones with President Obama and Vice President Biden in Denver a year ago. Jones was honored at the White House Wednesday.
Blake Jones, co-founder and CEO of Boulder’s Namasté Solar, was a guest at the White House Feb. 17, 2010, helping commemorate the one-year anniversary of the federal stimulus package formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

You may recall that in Feb. 2009, Jones introduced President Obama at the signing of the Recovery Act at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, at which time the entire Namasté Solar staff was featured on stage.

This time, President Obama welcomed Jones to celebrate progress made since the bill’s signing. President Obama commented:

“And Blake at Namasté Solar – it’s based in Boulder, Colorado. One year ago, Blake gave us a tour of one of his company’s solar installations, on top of a museum in Denver, right before I signed the Recovery Act into law. And at the time, Blake was pretty sure that the recession would force him to lay off about half of his staff. One year later, because of the clean energy investments in the Recovery Act, he has instead added about a dozen new workers, and expects to hire about a dozen more by year’s end. His company continues to install solar panels all over Colorado, from the Governor’s Mansion to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science … (F)or those skeptics who refuse to believe the Recovery Act has done any good, who continue to insist that the bill didn’t work, I’d ask you to take that up with Blake and his employees.”

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) estimated that, thanks to the stimulus bill, U.S. solar companies are likely to create nearly 140,000 new green jobs in its first two years. Namasté Solar plans to Keep growing and increasing its workforce

Namasté has installed more than 950 systems since 2005.