Story by Matt Chapuran, Sustainable Homes Inc.
Darrel McMaster comes from a family of homebuilders. By his count, his family has produced eight general contractors since 1945. “All we do is build,” McMaster says. “I kind of followed in line.”
Where McMaster has distinguished himself is in the pursuit of building net-zero homes at scale. His company, Sustainable Homes, Inc., boasts on its website, “Building Tomorrow’s Homes Today,” yet this strategy did not originate in a political or ecological ideology. McMaster’s father impressed upon him that the goal for anyone in construction should be to bring down the price of a home, constructing it faster and better. He began to wonder if the most economical home for a buyer wouldn’t be one that ran off the environment, generating its own utilities.
Since moving from California — where McMaster’s observation was that the solar power movement was once limited to “some old hippies who lived in the mountains” —
to Texas, McMaster has...
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