Sungevity Blog

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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Sungevity ends the year up!

A lot of you may be surrounded by bad news, and you might expect a young company that launched in 2008 to be somewhat glum, with the economic downturn and all. We are glad to report that contrary to those trends Sungevity is looking up.

We have exceeded our expectations for the year and helped 150 families in the Bay Area go solar. As you know, our aim has been to make it easy and affordable for residential homeowners across America to go solar and we started in the Bay Area. In the coming year, we want to take our unique approach to more people in more places starting with the rest of the US and then abroad.

If you are waiting for us to be able to serve your area, you can be sure that we’re working extra hard to bring Sungevity’s unique model to you soon. Don’t think we’re moving slow: 150 sales may not seem like a lot at first blush but given that we’ve only been in business 8 months it’s a pretty remarkable number. For conventional companies of our size, it would take as long just to get the quotes out to all those customers.

Of course there is still a lot of work to be done – take these numbers for example:

-    Inside the Bay Area there are over 2,000 people who have received quotes from us who have yet to go solar.
-    Outside the Bay Area, which is as far as we currently have coverage of crews to install for us, there are 6,500 more who have requested quotes for their homes!

If everyone on these lists were to buy a solar system that would represent 25 megawatts of solar installation or more than 300,000 tons of CO2 saved from the atmosphere. We would love to hear from you and help to make that happen.

The Sungevity model is simple: by bringing the sales process online, we’ve been able to speed up the process and save everyone involved time and money. We’ve passed that on with average prices 10% less than our competition. As a result, we’re already the number one seller of small solar systems in San Francisco.

More importantly we’ve educated thousands of people about their solar options with our interactive quotes. And most importantly, we’ve started to make a dent in carbon pollution, which is why Sungevity was set up to mainstream solar power in the first place. In total, our customers have offset around 5,000 tons of carbon pollution. That’s real world action!

As we work towards being able to serve all of you please let us know if you have any questions or comments. It has been great to be of service spreading our sunshine online in ‘08– we hope ‘09 will be just as great!

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Here’s an odd story but I like the attitude of the people who organized this unconventional solar installation:

“The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations. That is our leitmotif,” said Esteve Serret, director Conste-Live Energy, a Spanish company that runs the cemetery in Santa Coloma and also works in renewable energy.

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Sungevity was honored to be one of six companies invited to present at Web 2.0 Summit’s Launch Pad event.

We were last to present and you can check out the whole session here.

For Sungevity’s presentation, go to minute 41.

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Update: We’ve had a few readers wondering when we’d be available in San Diego. At this time, we’re looking at installation partners and working to assure quality across the board for all Sungevity-powered solar installations. We hope to be set to go in San Diego by year’s end.

Shine on!

I thought you’d like to see what we have been up to in support of our mission to bring solar to scale:

That’s my reason for not blogging last week: we were in San Diego for - Solar Power International, the biggest industry convention in America. It was awesome to see how far this business has come and how fast it is growing. The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, opened the event - you can see him speak here and lots of other sessions are also online.

To give you a small sense of how the industry is growing (and in spite of the broader economic downturn) there were 18,000 people at this event compared to 12,000 a year ago. And two years ago, when the event was held in San Jose, and there were about 6,000 participants. So even though the growth of the solar sector is only usually cited as being 30% annually it seems to attract even more great people per annum to its ranks as it thrives.

But what is this video about eSignatures?

Sungevity took the opportunity of the gathering of our solar peers to call for a single, simple step to be taken to streamline our business. Just as we work for our customers to make solar easy and more affordable, we sought to work with everyone in San Diego to reduce some of the painful paperwork we deal with every day. We called for on utilities and the Public Utilities Commissions, which govern solar installations in each state to reduce the red tape and accept digital filing of all the forms we fill out.

It sounds mundane but there can be up to 70 pages of forms to process for each solar job. Many contractors told us they take 20 hours or more to fill out the required forms and then take more hours to collect the wet ink signatures required currently. That’s hundreds if not thousands of dollars of cost. And then when the paperwork - literally paper - is posted in to the program administrators for rebates and interconnection it is re-processed, which is incredibly inefficient.

So we suggested to the solar powers-that-be in this business accept electronic signatures as a small step towards the eventual digital filing of all the forms needed to complete a solar installation. We aim to save everyone time, money and paper. The video comes to you thanks to the amazing people at RandomTV who streamed footage of our ask and activity straight to the web from the San Diego Convention Center on Tuesday, October 14th.

Cool new TV technology in support of using online technology to streamline installation of the best technology - solar! Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Shine on, dannyk.

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There is a silver lining for the current cloud over our financial system: in the “bailout bill” that was passed last Friday there was some excellent news for the solar industry. The legislation extended solar tax credits for 8 years, and more importantly, it eliminated the $2,000 cap on residential installations, allowing homeowners to get a real 30% credit off the cost of solar.

As was reported from Fortune to the San Francisco Chronicle, this is going to create a boom in the solar business.  The reason is simple - it pays to go solar! If you are a prospective customer, now is a great time to sign up for a solar system - call and we’ll walk you through it.

For Sungevity customers who have signed up for a system D (approximately 5.6 kW, our fourth largest residential solar electric system), they would be more than $2,000 ahead if they now buy a system E (approximately 7 kW, our largest home solar system). On average, the return on investment that our customers see is going to be above 20% for many homes.

The tax credit extension is great news for our customers, because the economics of going solar are even better. With a warranty-backed solar system that will save you tens of thousands of dollars over 25 years, there is no better investment in 2008. Shine on!

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It has been an incredible six months since our launch–we’ve sold nearly one hundred solar systems and provided quotes to over fifteen hundred customers interested in solar. In order to meet this fantastic demand, we have enlisted an installation partner to help us get solar systems installed in a timely fashion.

Our partner, Shamrock Renewables, has installed over seven hundred residential and small commercial solar systems in California and brings over thirty year’s experience in the construction management business.

The warranty and contract terms with Sungevity will remain unchanged. Heath Galloway, Sungevity’s Manager of Field Operations, will oversee every job, both those installed by a Sungevity crew and those installed by a Shamrock crew.

We are pleased to be able to provide excellent customer service and a more rapid installation timeline.  Teaming up with Shamrock Renewables will allow us to install systems before the end of the year and get you on the road to your solar-powered future.

Onward and upward…

Shine on,

The Sungevity Team

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