There are many articles written almost daily about the growth of solar as a renewable energy alternative to fossil fuel generated electricity.

However, what seems to get very little coverage is how effective local solar energy business owners can be at competing with national players. National solar companies seem to focus on large scale projects such as solar farms and utility scale projects, yet the biggest opportunity is distributed solar.

Distributed solar, by definition, is solar systems which are installed on existing roofs, and that business is usually won locally. Solar systems installed on existing roofs don’t require any new construction, tree removal, or new asphalt – it’s simply leveraging existing roofs as energy generation platforms for solar systems.

Using the latest rendition of Google Project Sunroof as a reference tool, of the roughly 160 million properties in the U.S, one can conservatively project that about 75%, or 120,000,000 roofs, are viable solar roofs. With the average property in the U.S. consuming an average of 25 kWh of electricity per day, and the average 5 kW solar system generating about that much electricity per day, it becomes very clear that one of the biggest business opportunities in the U.S. exists in the area of local renewable energy services.

The challenge for national solar installers is that to be competitive and to play in that large scale industrial space, they have to incur the expense of full scale infrastructure from production, distribution, and sales to engineering, design, and installation, which makes it very difficult for them to be nimble and price competitive enough to effectively tap into the biggest and barely tapped local market of residential distributed solar.

As Civic Solar brilliantly stated in their 4 simple reasons why local installers will dominate residential solar: Cost & Quality, Service, Financing, and Energy Storage.

"For the majority of installs, the most important factors are cost and quality (economics). Independent installers have an advantage over national installers’ economics. Both independent installers and national installers are using tier-1 Asian poly, SolarEdge/Enphase and racking systems that protect roof warranties. In addition, independent solar installers have great access to high-efficiency modules such as Panasonic and LG that cost less than SunPower. The biggest difference in value-add is that independent installers can complete installs for less money."

About Us: CARBON RECALL® is an Atlanta based clean, renewable energy services company. We provide our partners the opportunity to offer the nations only complete solar energy franchise system to their local residential and commercial property clients. Click one of the links below to view our franchise, or to request more information.