Funding Opportunity: Technology to Market 2
SunShot Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: San Francisco, CA
SunShot Award Amount: $1,000,000
Awardee Cost Share: $1,000,000

This project develops a direct-to-consumer eCommerce platform called the PowerScout Community Solar Marketplace that aggregates tens of thousands of residential customers and connects them with high quality community solar projects, accelerating the maturation of a very fragmented market. The platform under development will reduce the barriers to deploying community solar to households ineligible for rooftop solar, representing the largest untapped market in distributed energy. It will also significantly reduce customer acquisition costs while expanding availability and community solar product options for consumers.

Approach

The project team will create an application that provides consumers with a transparent cost benefit analysis for their household from adopting community solar. This includes building data-driven models that estimate household electricity consumption and the economic and environmental benefits for that household from switching to community solar power. In addition, they will create a developer-facing application that will enable developers to intelligently price their offerings and optimize their customer portfolio, reducing inefficiencies in the community solar ecosystem.

Innovation

This project will dramatically reduce the barriers to deploying community solar and create value around the process of shopping for and buying clean energy. The PowerScout Community Solar Marketplace will reduce customer acquisition costs, increase development efficiency, and provide infrastructure for communities to drive community solar adoption. This technology aims to reduce the levelized cost of energy by $0.15 per kilowatt hour.