A smarter approach to the solar business.
This item from Fast Company’s blog offers an interesting perspective on where solar power could be headed:
In the piece, Charles Fishman talks about SunEdison, a company that is supplying solar power to Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Staples, and many others. The company has an innovative approach to its business:
But here’s the twist that makes it all work: SunEdison owns the solar-panel installations. SunEdison’s customers simply sign up to buy electricity from SunEdison — electricity that happens to come from up on their own roof. SunEdison buys the panels, installs them, interconnects them, monitors them, and maintains them.
. . .
SunEdison gets the financing, the permits, the approvals, negotiates with the local utility, collects the rebates — and their business is made possible by three things: signing customers up for 20 years, the absolute dependability of sunshine, and the steadily dropping cost of solar technology. The new corporate concern about global warming helps things along.
Most analyses of solar power that I’ve seen have talked more about that last factor — the decreasing cost of solar installations as the technology improves. But SunEdison, while still a small company, is showing that the rate of progress in solar technology need not be a limiting factor. Or, as Fishman puts it, “Solar, it turns out, hasn’t been waiting for a technology breakthrough. It’s been waiting for a business model breakthrough.”
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The item that most people don’t mention about SunEdison is that fact that their business is based heavily upon the receipt of incentive payments from the states they work in. Once they build a project and get it online most states will give up to 50% of the cost of the system back to SunEdison. There has yet to be a true mass market solar model that applies to states with substantial solar power but without strong incentives.
I should rectify my last comment “most states” don’t give incentives - California, New Jersey, and Colorado to. And NJ has recently run out of funds for compensating builders which has resulted in a slowdown in business.
[...] struck me because of (1) the Fast Company item on solar power discussed the other day, in which Charles Fishman wrote: “Solar, it turns out, hasn’t been waiting for a technology [...]