Funding Opportunity: Technology to Market 2
SunShot Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: Washington, DC
SunShot Award Amount: $1,250,000
Awardee Cost Share: $1,648,525

This project builds a platform to enable the sale of community solar at a significantly lower cost per acquisition than comparable residential solar sales. Ethical Electric will be the first competitive retail electric provider in deregulated states to offer community solar—creating the customer acquisition, finance, and development tools needed to offer solar as a subscription at scale. This project will generate the demand for community solar and a method to deliver it at scale, dramatically increasing the availability and cost-effectiveness of community solar projects.

Approach

The project team will develop the new platform, develop modules and tools, port existing tools to the community solar experience, and use open-source and licensed software for the project. They will also develop a consumer propensity model to identify the most likely customers while cultivating and expanding a solar developer pipeline and project directory. In addition, they will develop subscriber contracts that meet consumer protection, disclosure, and marketing rules. Contract templates will be developed for multiple states that are financeable and can be part of a credit-enabled master project agreement with renewable energy finance partners.

Innovation

This project will advance residential solar adoption by delivering large-scale, direct-to-consumer operations that can enroll residential customers at lower-cost. More efficient construction, lower cost of capital, and improved solar renewable energy credit utilization will bring down costs and make community solar highly competitive and available to far more people than residential solar.