Sungevity Blog

With rising customer demand and steady growth, Sungevity announces $6m Series B and adds CFO, COO and VP of Technology and Product Development

BERKELEY, Calif.  September 22, 2009. Leading online solar provider Sungevity announced today that it has raised an additional $6 million led by Greener Capital, a new venture capital firm.

Charles Finnie, managing partner in Greener Capital, said. “This is the best business model we have seen in the residential solar space. Sungevity’s unique web-based direct selling model has enabled the potential for rapid deployment, great customer service and scalability at the lowest installed cost in the industry. We are excited to invest in Sungevity, as solar power becomes competitive with grid electricity across the US.

Finnie will join the Sungevity Board. The company has also added three key members to its executive team, doubled its salesforce, and plans to enter three new geographies by the end of the year.

We’re very pleased to welcome such a remarkable group to Sungevity, said Danny Kennedy, president and cofounder of the company.  We believe that the support from Greener Capital and our growing world class team will be a tremendous boost to our mission of giving more customers greater access to solar electricity. We’re making going solar easy, an excellent investment and a smart way for you to reduce carbon pollution.

Joining Sungevity are:

• Charles Ferer, CFO. Most recently Ferer served as CFO for SolarCity, the USA’s largest solar installer, where he helped raise over $60M in tax equity and launch a successful solar leasing program. He has more than 20 years of experience for companies including Gap and PepsiCo. Ferer has a B.A. in Economics from the University of Puget Sound, and an MBA in Finance from Indiana University.
• Daphne Li, COO. Li has held key leadership positions in marketing, product management, strategy and M&A at ADP and Apple. As Chief Strategy Officer and VP, Marketing for DoveBid, she helped start up business online auctions and grew revenue from $12M to $150M. She currently sits on KQED’s board. Li has a B.A. in Economics and an MBA, both from Stanford.
• Ariel Tseitlin, VP of Technology and Product Development. Tseitlin was most recently the Founder & CEO of CTOWorks, a software consultancy advising early-stage start-ups on their technology strategy.  Prior to CTOWorks, Tseitlin was the VP of Engineering at Playboox, a SaaS CRM start-up.  Tseitlin has also held senior management positions at Oracle and Siebel Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA with Honors from Wharton.

With our easy online service, we have the lowest-cost way of getting solar power into American homes said Andrew Birch, CEO and cofounder of Sungevity.  Now we have the team and resources to make sunshine online available to millions of home-owners.

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Numbers are in for kilowatt reservations for the month of August under the California Solar Initiative. And the greenest green shoot of recovery I’ve seen that we have proof of is the solar industry picking up. Certainly Sungevity experienced it’s strongest sales month ever, which is good news for all our new customers who are going to save money and good news for the planet because they’re saving CO2 too!

There is some question whether this spike was driven only by the rebate drop in PG&E’s turf, which I’m sure had a strong effect on motivating people to buy (basically the money you got back on a system dropped a chunk - see my previous post on this “The rebate drop is coming”). But now is still the best time to go solar in terms of economics for the end customer so we expect demand to continue to grow. Shine on!

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Thanks to the CarbonWarRoom, which provides this cool widget tracking the number of solar watts being installed in the USA this year…

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There’s been a lot of nabobs of negativity around the solar space in recent weeks because it has been hard going for some companies. And I don’t want to belittle their pain – manufacturers have big stockpiles and if they’re publically listed their share price is down; project developers can’t get bank finance or government cash fast enough, despite the stimulus; and installers may be seeing some consumer sentiment dropping in places.

But please don’t think that’s all she wrote. The future of photovoltaics is bright as the sun!

Just for one example of how serious a contender PV is becoming, consider Spain. Right now that beautiful country is copping a lot of blame because of changes in the incentive structure that have led to a major drop in solar sales there, large and small. Indeed, little old Spain is being held responsible for most of the oversupply currently being experienced by the PV manufacturing industry, which I think could be seen differently…

Another perspective on Spain is that it has championed solar and is way ahead of most of the world. As of May 09, 4% of electricity produced in the country came from el sol. Four percent! Little over 5 years ago there was almost no solar in the country so they have gone from zero to solar hero in almost no time at all. We’d love for them to continue to grow at this rate and it is a shame the government has pulled back on some market support schemes.

But if we take that example, of a small country going to 4% we can see the trajectory that will get us to 40% in a couple of decades, which is where we need to be to stop climate change. By then all these bumps along the road will look like shadows cast by clouds. But before I get too poetic about rain falling mainly on a plain in Spain, check out this video from our friends at Solon whose motto is “Don’t leave the planet to the Stupid”: Hail - Return of the Sun

(Please note this blog was first posted by the good people of Green Options - see http://cleantechnica.com/2009/08/19/more-sunshine-falling-than-rain-on-the-parade-of-pv-across-spain/#more-3153)

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We’re giving a heads up to all our prospective customers that the rebates available under the California Solar Initiative in PG&E’s utility territory are about to fall. We figured we should blog it as well because it is an important fact for anyone considering solar to know. Here’s why:

The rebate you get for going solar covers a good chunk of the cost of your system. The way the policy that creates this rebate was designed, it drops over time as more and more solar gets installed. This incentivises more solar to be installed sooner - and indeed it has.

In PG&E’s turf here in Northern California, incentive levels are currently $1.55/Watt and will soon be falling to $1.10/W – a 30% drop in rebates. We’re monitoring this carefully and updating this page as often as possible to provide you with the most up to date information on this rebate reduction.

The way it works is that the incentive level falls over time as more solar is installed per utility territory, and we are approaching the next drop. This will reduce the incentive for the average system size by about $2,000 and potentially much more for larger systems.

In PG&E’s territory there are 5 remaining megawatts of solar that will receive the current incentive, and the company received 0.5 MW of applications in a single week in July (applications will speed up considerably as we get closer to the drop).

What this means is that the best time to go solar is today. This is from an economic as well as environmental point of view. Some of the hardware costs are falling and Sungevity recently passed on the benefits in a price reduction for our systems. But don’t wait till the price comes down further and risk missing out on the best rebate you can get, which is while it is still at $1.55/ watt.

Remember, if you are considering buying from us or any vendor, your rebate is only reserved once all the application documents are submitted to PG&E and they review and approve them. So you better make your decision as soon as you can! Shine on.

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Recent headlines have caused people to call me, worried that Sungevity would feel threatened for our place in the sun. These included “Solar by Satellite: Who Has the Best System?”, in which we did get the yellow jersey, and news that one of our excellent coopetitors, SunRun, has been backed by a VC firm that helped Facebook in order to improve their online consumer brand and process’ (go here).

For the record, we’d love to let you all know we think these are great developments. Not for the simplistic reason that competition is good and will make us improve our game (although that too is true); but because the internet is a great channel to sell solar solutions to a mass audience. We have known this for two years now, since before we launched our “online sunshine” in April 2008, and are excited to see more come to that conclusion. Our gameplan is and has always been to spread solar for universal need, and by pioneering this approach to the market we feel we’ve added to that end.

Many barriers lie in the way of mass adoption of solar power solutions to climate change and one of them is ease and of convenience. We’ve made it easier, and while we can always improve our service and customers’ experience, it is clear that others want to emulate what we’ve got - straightforward shopping for information and solar options on the internet. Coming to www.sungevity.com our customers get a firm quote usually within 24 hours and can communicate direct with a professional sales team on the phone or email to make their decisions, buy their system and arrange their install.

Over time, more and more of the industry will move to this and related business models, passing the work of installation on to local contractors and so streamlining the sales process. Our software advantages in remote solar design (where we engineer systems without a site visit to produce firm quotes); plus auto-generation of documents (to kill the pain of paperwork for customer and contractor alike), will continue to hold us in good stead to sell solar direct. And long-term we want these and other innovations to become widespread; to become standard so that middle America can access solar power more simply.

So, we welcome Global Solar Center, SunRun and others to the race to take solar to the masses via the internet. There’s a growing number of us on this track and we look forward to a Tour De France like effort to sell enough solar to stop global warming. Shine on!

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Yesterday, Sungevity was presented a Green Business Award by the San Francisco Business Times for its leadership in solar installation! Pretty exciting, no?

We are very honored to receive this award—and ecstatic that our unique online platform is catching on! By cutting out those expensive site visits, we have been able to make solar more affordable for the average homeowner. We are proud to have the opportunity to educate and empower people to generate their own energy.

Glad to know the Business Times recognizes our online sales model as a bright idea!

To learn more, check out the full story on our award here!

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If you ever needed evidence of the tidal change sweeping through our world at the commanding heights of energy it is this snippet from the UN: “Clean energy has just overtaken fossil fuel investment”.

Green energy overtook fossil fuels in attracting investment for power generation for the first time last year, according to figures released by the United Nations.  Wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted $140bn compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation. The Guardian, where I got this from, noted that more than a third of the green cash is destined for Britain or the rest of Europe.

Shine on indeed, me hearties!

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(I WROTE THIS FOR ANOTHER BLOG BUT FIGURED I SHOULD POST IT HERE FIRST)

Like a tide turning, there’s a big shift happening in the solar market that many people aren’t really seeing because they’re bobbing about on an ocean of opportunity. The implications are huge in terms of who will get capital and attention in the industry, and the trend should lift all boats and take this solution to climate change further than before.

The power behind the seachange comes from the fact that that there is now more manufacturing capacity for producing PV modules than there is demand. It is manifest in a new focus on the customer and how you get solar solutions to them, not on hardware.

You might have noticed in the blogosphere for the last couple of years all the chat was about this gadget or that (Nanosolar, XsunX etc). And business press worried about Si wafer technology costs and other arcane aspects of the manufacturing process upstream.

Slowly, the coverage has changed and now much of what you read about is new ways to mount PV modules, or different strategies by integrators and customer financiers that seek to make it easier for people to buy solar. Sungevity is one of those companies.

This is a classic industry cycle – for awhile the gadget greats get the glory (think Wang or DEC) and then their products start looking more like commodities. Brands that bundle these components (think Dell) to deliver services (MS or Google) inherent in the product come to the fore. Obviously there is oversimplification in this view but it has some use.

And what it portends is that the next wave of innovation will be after the factory gate, i.e. how to get the customer the service of solar electricity more easily and at a better price?

The truth is there are a lot of great gains to be made by applying a wind tunnel to the process’ we use to market, sell, deliver, administer, install and maintain solar systems. Our remote solar design technology – based on software we built in a year – saves 10% off the cost of going solar for a residential customer and is available over the internet.

There are lots of other great examples of new business models like1BOG or SunRun or the property tax payment model pioneered by cities in California. In some ways these are more important in spreading solar than any of the tech breakthroughs of the last decade.

We need innovation up and down the value chain but for now let’s celebrate the mom and pop shops who persist with clunky channels to get PV on peoples’ roofs. Even more key -  let’s welcome new players making it easier to bring sunshine online everywhere. Shine on, dannyk.

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Sungevity just celebrated its first birthday - having launched on Earth Day 2008 - and we marked our anniversary with the announcement that we’re taking our service to the rest of the state.

Our “online sunshine” of remotely engineered solar quotes, via the web and on demand, is now available in San Diego and other parts of Southern California. We are working with a network of preferred installers there, which means we can serve customers in 65% of the state.

We’re very proud, for example, to be working with Sequoia Solar in San Diego and Solar Forward in LA as some of the first contractors to use our online platform. We are taking this step in order to make it easier and more affordable for customers in these places to go solar, and to make it easier and more affordable for these companies to serve more customers. It’s a virtuous spiral!

Because of our slick web-based process we save everyone involved time and money; and we believe over time we’ll help save the planet. So, now that we have a bigger service area, we hope lots of people will start getting their solar quotes and service options from www.Sungevity.com.

We also marked our birthday by looking back on the year that was to celebrate our success. Without too much hubris we like to think we have made an impact in the solar industry and are driving this solution to climate change, by making it easier and more affordable (see above!).

We now have over 150 happy customers around northern California, and we were the fastest growing solar sales company in 2008 - going from zero to the 8th largest. We made over 100 of our sales - or two-thirds - without a site visit, which means we reduced the cost and saved time and effort in serving these people. We hope to significantly expand on these numbers in 2009.

And we’ll try to keep you posted on our progress more often than every Earth Day - indeed I’ll try to blog at least once a week. After all, every week should be Earth Week! Shine on, dannyk.

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