Earth Day ecology flag
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI previously wrote about SolarCity, the California outfit trying to make it easy to get greener electricity.
It seems fitting, for Earth Day, to talk about another vendor who's trying to make it easy, Sungevity. These guys, like SolarCity, offers pretty much a turn key solution. Contract with them, and they handle the planning, paperwork, financing, and installation. There is major motivation to make a go of it, because California has put 3.3 Billion USD worth of incentives in place. (why I think that's not necessarily a good idea would be the topic for a different post... the point is, the money's out there for California residents to get, so if they can, they should)
The twist in the business model here is that the folk at Sungevity think they can reduce costs by using satellite imagery to understand your house's layout, south facing roof configuration, and so forth, allowing them to design an installation without ever actually doing a site visit. I'm somewhat dubious, but they are claiming a 10% price advantage over the competition. Basically their process has you enter your address, choose what you want in a system, and they generate a plan and quote from the imagry
It's good to see competition and different ideas being tried, it will be interesting to see how things turn out. But I have my doubts.
Meanwhile I'm continuing my search for a vendor that's local... stay tuned on that, I may have found someone, we'll see...
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