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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

In the US at least, a huge fraction of costs for residential solar are in customer acquisition. Something like 20%-30% of the cost of a residential install goes to paying for lists of potential customers and marketing to them! This makes US residential solar much more expensive than in many other countries.

After that cost is reduced, there may be room for innovation in reducing install costs by bundling solar with roof replacement, or something similar.

I'm not so sure that transmission losses themselves are a huge win, since only about 5% of power goes to transmission and distribution.

However, if storage + solar allows the utilities to avoid transmission and distribution capital upgrades, that's a much larger chunk of the cost of electricity, about 36% according to the latest numbers and rising every year.

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When I got solar several years ago I watched as the various installers wasted a ton of time selling to me. It was clear that all the steps between when I was interested and when I gave the go ahead to start the install were extremely expensive in the big picture and in the long term the winners of residential installation would be those that will be able to drive that cost down and or spread that cost out to as many customers as possible.

They visited my house when I was just looking for a quote. The quotes were these large custom contracts with all the information which we would iterate a few times on.

I can imaging these days just going to a website, finding my roof, selection my option and getting a quote in real time. Maybe they would even let different installers all bid for the job, who knows. The website would have detailed information and information if I want it. Only if I did an initial downpayment would someone come out to confirm it could be installed. Someone like this could be able to drive the install cost down.

Or maybe "groupon deals" where if you and 4 other neighbors on your block all buy solar it is 15% cheaper or something. That would be one way to shift the marketing and sales to the consumer and not the installer.

That website exists, to some degree: https://www.google.com/get/sunroof

Here in SoCal, I have to fight off door to door solar salesman at least once per month. It's really annoying.

For what it is worth I do to. It is amusing to get to tell them I already have solar at which point they look up and then walk away. But think about it... What kind of margin pays to have someone walk door to door? That is the kind of waste that the system has not yet rung out and why residential costs don't seem to be going down as much as they should. As long as all of the installers don't drive their costs down they all get to enjoy growing profits!

> What kind of margin pays to have someone walk door to door?

If I had to guess, the door-to-door folks are probably lead gen companies that sell leads to solar installers. The economics work out largely because solar installations are such a big ticket item that good leads can demand a nice sum. As a thought exercise, Amazon will pay in the range of 5% to affiliates. If you buy a $100 pair of shoes on Amazon, that will net the affiliate $5. If a solar lead gen gets the same rate, then a single $30k system will earn them $1500. So that salesman only needs to sell a few systems per month to cover salary. Hence the door-to-door.

Also, it's worth mentioning that the residential solar market is pretty cutthroat. Quite a few companies have recently filed for bankruptcy. Part of the reason lead gen and marketing costs are so high is because these companies are fighting tooth and nail for customers. I am pretty sure most installers would love to cut back on that spending, but without it their business would collapse.

That's it! I just need to install fake panels on my roof!

The numbers bandied around make it look like fake panels wouldn't be appreciably cheaper than real ones.

Is there an attempt to go after multi unit residentials? Any incentives for builders to implement?

Asking this as a layman.

> In the US at least, a huge fraction of costs for residential solar are in customer acquisition. Something like 20%-30% of the cost of a residential install goes to paying for lists of potential customers and marketing to them!

Page 22 of the report[1] estimates sales and marketing/customer acquisition for residential solar to be 12% of the price, and says Vivint and Sunrun report it as 17% and 22%, so I think your numbers are a bit high. I also doubt that cost will actually fall- if anything it might rise, since advertising pays for itself. As costs drop it becomes more important to advertise the low costs!

[1]: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf

Ah yes, 30% was too high. But 19% is what's reported by other analysts, such as GreenTechMedia [1]. Like you, GTM also expects customer acquisition costs to remain high, which I find to be unfortunate. As pointed out above [2], Australia manages to have an industry with less money spent on marketing.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/costs-to-acquir...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15290269

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