Founder

Penn State Engineering. He failed ROTC, bought a motorcycle and traveled.

Mexico, employed by Ingeniero Eduardo Saucedo. Designed vacuum concrete handling equipment and managed installation crews.

Formed Kenin Associates, Inc. “Youth Concept” Philadelphia agency. Clients: Newport Music Festivals, Martin Guitars, Schmidt’s Beer, Crawdaddy Magazine, BMW Motorcycles.

Allen Ginsberg speaker at 1st Earth Day in Philadelphia said, “Go find solar.” Steve did.

Apprenticed to Steve Baer, early solar innovator at Zomeworks, Albuquerque, NM.

Anasazi Clift Dwellings at Mesa Verde, NM. He saw they were passively solar heated.

Formed Solar Room Co. Taos, NM to test prototype solar greenhouse collectors. Received 3 DOE Contracts and an AIA Design Award. LANL managed the contracts.

J. Douglas Balcomb, LANL’s Solar Group Leader, reported Kenin’s work “one of the most significant passive research and development projects in the country.”

Solar Tax Credit 1.0. DOE invited him to D.C. to tell the benefits of the pending Solar Tax Credits 1.0 to NM Senators Harrison Schmidt and Pete Domenici. They cosponsored it.

Solar Resources, Inc. was renamed Solar Room Co. It was financially supported by local investors, the DOE and SR Kenin Contractors. Solar Room production facility was built, staffed and managed. Astronaut Senator (Jack) Schmidt joined the Board. Jack became the product spokesman and profitability soon smiled. Hundreds of Solar Room® kits were shipped.

Kenin was Invited by DOE to the Solar Venture Capital Conference at UC Santa Cruz. The VCs asked, “How do you monetize it?.” Investments were made in photovoltaic companies.

Solar Resources, Inc. was bankrupted with the demise of Solar Tax Credit 1.0 under President Reagan. There had been no solar market until the feds supported its development.

Certified Home Inspector. Board of Realtors invited him to be Taos’s first Certified Home Inspector. He took the inspector exams and performed thousands of inspections over 30 yrs. He built five passive homes and consulted with hundreds of home buyers. Taos at 7000’ has about the same heating requirements as Chicago.

Founded the 54-acre green subdivision of affordable and market rate housing, including a 30-acre conservation easement. www.arroyopark.com

Retired from Certified to introduce Solar Rooms® to photovoltaic distributors. They had no interest. One said, “Passive is passé.” www.solarroom.com- You Tube

VC Steve Jarvetson inspired Kenin’s “eureka” moment by exclaiming, “There’s no interest in passive.” From that thought evolved Kenin’s novel concept, Universal Solar Thermal Cladding®, a retrofit solar collection system in kit form for heating existing buildings.

Filed Non-Provisional Utility Patent. Steve’s Patent Attorney has not discovered any other patents concerning the solar thermal retrofit systems for building heating.

He Designed Solar Thermal System Prototype. Solar Thermal Kits that can be assembled and installed on any sunny area of a home or big-box store and circulate the heat inside. Global emissions were 36.3 billion tons of CO2 in 2021, IEA reported. Buildings provided about 30% of those emissions. At scale, how many gigatons of CO2 would buildings decarbonize using solar thermal heating?

Solar Bubble Collector Kits® (their affectionate name). As they are being installed, they should stimulate additional solar thermal retrofit designs by architects and engineers for multi-story buildings, hopefully well before 2030.

Bubble System Prototype Finalized. Extrusion dies and castings finished and extrusions manufactured.