Online Marketplaces Will Help Solar Installers
Online Marketplaces are good for buyers and Solar Installers alike. Installers can be easily frustrated with struggle to reduce their costs in marketing and advertising. This piece examines how an online marketplace can bridge the gap between the solar installer and homeowner, saving money and time by reducing the number of site visits needed to obtain bids and knowledge needed to analyze contracts.
The reason for this is startlingly simple: American consumers are being charged over two times more for solar than is the average consumer overseas. That’s USD $10,000 more for a typical 5-kilowatt residential solar system. The panels are the same — so what on earth is going on?
The answer: red tape
Here in the land of technology leadership and free-market enterprise, American regulation has more than doubled the cost of solar.
The regulation comes in three un-American guises: permitting, code and tariffs — and together they are killing the U.S. residential market. Modernizing these regulations, primarily at the local and state level, is the greatest opportunity for U.S. solar policy in 2018.
The Cost of Solar to a Homeowner in Australia vs. the U.S.To highlight the opportunity, let’s look at Australia, where nearly 2 million solar systems have been successfully and safely installed.
As of early December, installed costs in the main Australian markets were at $1.34 per watt, compared to $3.25 per watt in the U.S. What does that difference stem from?
In Australia, there is no permitting process. You simply lodge your request for interconnection online and go install it. The figure below highlights the relative mass of valueless work required to satisfy current city-level bureaucracy in the U.S., which adds between two and six months to delivery time and 47 cents per watt of cost directly to the installed system. That’s more than the cost of the panels themselves.
The solar installer’s cost for Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), can be about $5,373 per customer for an average-sized 5.37 kW project, according to Woodlawn Associates. This is a huge expense when considering that a solar system usually costs about $3.90 per watt.A lot of installers have small marketing budgets and might have trouble tracking expenses, leading to hidden costs and uncertainty about their true CAC.
Our identity revolves around one concept: The youth is our future. We’re bold and loud about Climate Change and take the health of our planet very seriously. We’re all in on sustainability and will do just about anything to help people go green.
INSOLAR is a technology company that connects solar customers with the best solar panel installers at the lowest prices in the market. INSOLAR customers can save up to 50% more by using the INSOLAR platform to go solar. Do get your own solar
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