Light Manufacturing: Engineering Solar-Powered Production
Light Manufacturing arrived at HOST Park with a bold vision: eliminate fossil fuels from manufacturing by harnessing Hawaii's abundant sunshine. Using sun-tracking mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto rotating molds, they produce water tanks without burning fuel, running an entirely off-grid facility powered by solar energy and rainwater collection. By manufacturing locally, they eliminate expensive mainland shipping and provide affordable rainwater collection solutions to Hawaii customers while also producing specialized aquaculture tanks for other HOST Park tenants. What began as an experiment in Kona has become a scalable model for sustainable manufacturing with global potential, proving that industrial processes can run entirely on renewable energy while serving immediate community needs.
One of the best parts of my day is coming out to Light Manufacturing. We work in a beautiful place—sunny, with an ocean view. When I get to work, I see the sun, and we capture that energy to make products for the local community. It's amazing, and it gets me stoked every single time.
Hi, my name is Ben. I'm the lead engineer at Light Manufacturing. We're here in Kona at one of our flagship rotational molding facilities. What Light Manufacturing does is we use solar energy to do rotational molding. Rotational molding typically burns fossil fuel for heat, but we realized the sun could provide all the energy we need. So we're a 100% solar factory. We use sun-tracking mirrors to concentrate sunlight on our molds, make tanks, and eliminate fuel completely from the process.
Light Manufacturing has focused on tanks. Our factory is entirely off-grid—we use solar power and rainwater collection tanks, and our days are organized by rain, wind, and sun. A lot of the things we do are similar to what our clients do. We're manufacturing rainwater collection tanks here, and this technology can be launched not only in Hawaii but all over the world.
Light Manufacturing has benefited the local community because we've set up a local factory that's off-grid, sustainable, and makes parts right here on the island. Our tanks are not shipped expensively from the mainland, and we don't pay for fossil fuels, so the cost to our customers goes down. That's a real benefit to our technology.
We've also benefited other companies in HOST Park by modifying some of our tooling to create aquaculture tanks, and we're really proud of those partnerships.
The future at HOST Park is presenting a lot of opportunities to us. HOST Park has helped us achieve our company goals by connecting us with vendors and providing strong security for us to experiment with this technology. Being at HOST Park has let us launch, test, and improve our solar molding systems in one of the most beautiful and challenging environments in the world. We've learned so much from Hawaii, and we're grateful to be able to supply useful products to the community. I think this can really make a difference.
Visual Chronicles: Explore the Journey
Dive into our curated gallery to glimpse key moments from our success stories. Click any image to enjoy a detailed lightbox display, bringing each narrative to life.
