Casual meeting spaces were at a premium at this year’s Intersolar, the four-day solar conference and trade show co-located with SemiCon West in San Francisco, CA. With estimated attendance at around 15,000, over 120,000 square feet of exhibit space, and three days of panels discussions and presentations, it seemed like the only thing missing was more places to have impromptu meetings. Many industry colleagues packed their days tight with conference sessions on market analysis and new products, pounding the carpet in the four floors of trade exhibits, and- of course- meetings.

With the pinch of a tight economy still overshadowing even the successful growth of the solar industry, many conference-goers noted the absence of top industry names, including a Greentech Media guest post overview of the conference by Steven Smith of solar project development firm Solvida Energy Group. Gigaom journalistic blogger Katie Fehrebacher rounded up top themes from the show in her “7 Trends that Will Dominate Intersolar” post. Photovoltaics International journalist Tom Cheyney takes on the R&D, production, and BOS chain exhibited at the show in his comprehensive PVTech post. All posts are great reads so I won’t duplicate their efforts here.

What was noticeable about Intersolar this year was, as Smith pointed out, the elements that were missing. We have all heard plenty and seen the evidence of China’s rise in the manufacturing space. The race-to-the-bottom in the price-per-watt module game is intensifying. The star of the microinverter is on the rise. Non-concentrating solar thermal technology is still not seeing the market uptick many had hoped on the back of the CSI Thermal Program. But what was missing, and perhaps the item that is most on the lips of solar companies, especially those in the design/build space?

Financing solutions.

Had the successful boutique financial solutions providers to the solar industry like SunRun or Sungevity exhibited at Intersolar, they would have surely been overrun by throngs of representing installers vying to pitch their company as a viable installation partner. Moreso, if traditional bank financiers such as US Bank Corp, CitiGroup, or any number of upstream lending institutions that have invested in the aforementioned firms exhibited at the event, they too would have been met with similar enthusiasm. The puzzle piece missing from the successful picture of many design/build solar firms is the financing piece, which when lacking often turns a “maybe” project into a “no.” Major market opportunities await businesses that can create slick and easy-to-understand financial solutions packages to residential, small commercial, or large commercial solar providers. But a complicated road littered with a glut of tax codes, moderate but long return-on-investment cycles, and many other challenges lay ahead. The industry is starting to see headway in these areas, and many of the highest growth design/build companies in the last year attribute their success to the ability to extend in-house financing solutions to end users.

The Crowd at the Solar Battle of the Bands

Intersolar hosted a number of enticing extra-curricular events. As with any conference, exclusive parties with open bars abounded, but nothing made a stir quite like the sold-out out first-year Solar Battle of the Bands, a fundraiser for the Norther California Solar Energy Society, that sold out in a matter of days after organizers and sponsors announced it. Several Bay Area solar companies formed bands to compete including SolarCity, Zep, QuickMount PV, Sungevity, and SunPower. With nearly 400 in attendance, the crowd celebrated the homegrown talent within the solar industry. Check out some great photos from the event. Don’t miss it next year! It was THE networking party of Intersolar.

Waving "Hello!" from the Intersolar Tweetup

Looking for something a little lower-key? Tor Valenza (a.k.a. Solar Fred) and several others have hosted a “Tweet-up,” a meetup for Twitter users, at each conference which has been slowly growing in size over the last few years. This event, a smaller, more casual get-together, has brought together marketing professionals, social media managers, and social-media-savvy industry professionals to continue to grow and interconnect the online solar professionals community.

Want to see more? Check out my Flickr photoset from Intersolar. See you at the next one!

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• Are you a Twitter User who Will be at Intersolar? Join the Tweetup!
• Do Environmental Preferences or Peer Pressure More Affect if People Go Solar?
• Move Over Green Drinks: EcoTuesday is in Town
• Marketing Residential Solar: How do We Make Progress?

Solar Power International has invited Chaolysti to share expertise in the expanding Northeast US residential market with conference attendees as part of the panel “Expanding Residential Solar Markets” as part of the Markets conference track.

Please join Pamela Cargill, Principal of Chaolysti along with panelists JP Ross, VP of Strategic Relationships at Sungevity, Charles Boortz, CEO of Dallas-based distributor SES 21 USA, and Ethan Sprague, Director of Government Affairs at SunRun. Wilson Rickerson, CEO of Boston-based energy and sustainability consultants Meister Consultants, will serve as panel moderator.

Please join us at SPI in Dallas, TX on Thursday, October 20, 10:30 am – 12 pm for an exciting session for solar professional interested in entering the Northeast markets or operate more effectively in their current Northeast business territory. The audience will leave this session understanding the potential of the small-scale residential and commercial PV markets in different regions, including the challenges and opportunities.

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Join Chaolysti and Heatspring Learning Institute for a free webinar short course entitled “Strategies for Small Business Solar Success: Lead Generation and Operational Efficiency” which will take place on September 13th.

Learn successful tactics for solar lead generation and managing those leads to improve profitability and customer service. Set your small renewable energy business up for success with a Total Digital Office(tm)! Using Google Apps, cloud-based data storage and applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and social media, today’s renewable energy companies can save money, manage more operations internally, track data better, scale faster, and spend more time on what’s really important- providing stellar customer service and focusing on driving sales through marketing.

• Learn how to set up and execute a world-class marketing plan using low or no-cost tactics. We’ll cover a little of everything from branding your company and utilizing social media to event-based marketing. Key for any small business looking to get their first projects, or grow sales after their first couple projects.
• Learn how to manage leads, customers, and sales pipelines most effectively using databases or Customer Relationship Management software.
• Learn simple steps you can implement for setting up easy-to-manage business operations. From websites, web profiles, and email to efaxing, shared calendars, shared documents are more.

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Is it “Keeping up with the Jones,” predisposition to sympathy with environmental concerns, like owning a Prius or electric vehicle, or marketing by solar companies that is driving adoption? A webinar recently put on by Agrion explored recent research exploring why and invited Sungevity‘s Danny Kennedy to speak about how their company is revolutionizing delivery of solar energy systems.

In the webinar, NYU Stern School of Business Assistant Professor of Marketing Bryan Bollinger presented preliminary findings of his solar adoption research “Environmental Preferences & Peer Effects in Diffusion of Photovoltaic Panels,” a study he co-authored with researcher Kenneth Gillingham. Using California’s San Francisco Bay Area as a study radius, Bollinger’s research explored possible reasons for a very visible clustering of PV installations shown clearly in a two slides:

SF Bay Area: Clustering of PV Installations from 2001-2003

SF Bay Area: Clustering of PV Installations from 2001-2006

Bollinger and his colleague poured over CSI data from 2001-2009 covering 34,110 installations in order to analyze for possible correlations both within complete zip codes and then on a street-level basis. Some top-level findings include:

• The average time between adoptions in a given zip code was 64 days with a 21 day median.
• When crossing demographic information with a zip code, peer influence was clearly influential amongst populations with higher median home values.
• Perhaps somewhat shockingly, a trait that generally shows to lead to solar adoption, hybrid vehicle ownership, did not to carry much peer influence in further solar adoption.
• As with other studies, populations  that were highly educated and over 65 were shown to be adopters.

So far, the clustering behavior does seem to be influenced by both peers and environmental leanings, but with peer leanings showing far greater statistical relevance with 1% driving a 1% decrease in time until the next adoption. Peer effects were also shown to correlate with specific contractors especially within a small geographic area, such as a street. This shows that companies that rely on word of mouth/social networking, who reward customer loyalty, and who provide excellent customer service will win business.

Strangely, great environmental leanings showed to decrease the peer effect. Why is this? It’s unclear, but perhaps those with high environmental leanings were more self-motivated in their purchase decisions and lifestyle choices and less likely to succumb to peer influence. We will have to see with the next iteration of the study!

After Bollinger’s presentation, Danny Kennedy presented a case study on how Sungevity is using the “solar as a social network” principle to drive its business and move toward mass-market adoption. While virtualizing much of the purchasing procedure and positioning itself as “the Netflix of solar,” the business is seeing its success in its services-oriented solar leasing program.  Kennedy recounted that 50% Sungevity’s sales last month were due to the leasing program.

Kennedy predicted that the continued growth of the residential industry would be driven by leasing or other third-party ownership models. He likened traditional solar ownership to purchasing a cell phone and paying for all the calls you would ever make up front. While traditional ownership might still be a better option for most people, he hypothesized that 3rd party ownership models would take solar to the mainstream, as evidenced by Sungevity’s explosive growth and entry into the Northeast markets.

The take away: Start driving customer loyalty programs, neighborhood marketing, and ride the natural peer influence wave to help catapult your solar business to success!

Visit the webinar event page for more information.

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• The Solar Leasing vs. Ownership Debate

I’ve written previously about how those working in the solar industry can help journalists write better articles about solar energy and how to use current events as a PR platform. Unfortunately, it seems as though I should have also included PR advice about the danger of positioning your own product or company against another within the solar industry. A June USAToday article highlights exactly how infighting in the solar industry of “my next-gen product is better than your dinosaur 1960′s-NASA-tech” serves as fodder for mainstream press to make the solar industry look like a child throwing a tantrum.

The solar industry this year has done a lot of great navel-gazing in industry magazines and blogs about where we are going next, how we are growing, and the messages we are using to get there. We are finally starting to think about whether we have tucked in our proverbial shirts and our pressed our proverbial trousers. This is great progress! It shows that we as an industry are starting to concern ourselves with a mainstream image unlike in the past where we have sufficed to giddily talk to each other about all the cool solar technology instead of prioritizing making it simple to understand and purchase for consumers.

So, understanding that solar is still a small even if rapidly growing industry, it’s important even as we compete for business, marketshare, or ideaspace that we work together to create an overall positive and progressing image for our industry.

Stephen Lacey, former Renewable Energy World podcast director and editor now serving as a reporter at Climate Progress, wrote a great rebuke of the USAToday article. The punchline according to Lacey, “the CNBC reporter made the story a technology issue, when in fact it’s a business and communications issue.”

Solar’s PR problem, as the reporter was starting to point out before he got sidetracked, was laid out in the SolarTech study: consumers need more data about how previously installed systems have worked, they need simpler proposals, they need it all demystifed.

The moral of this story for anyone, not just those involved in the solar industry? Focus on a positive PR stance and set of messages that positions why your company is new and unique. Using a negative stance where you tear down other companies and technologies not only makes you look bad and immature, it makes your respective industry look bad, too. And that doesn’t help us all make progress.

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• Using the SunShot Announcement as a Real-Time PR Opportunity

Join solar industry Twitter users for a fun “tweetup” lunch on July 13th during Intersolar. SolarFred, Free Hot Water, and Go Green Solar are spearheading the event.

Take time for an intimate lunch at Thirsty Bear, a microbrewery a few blocks away from the Moscone Convention Center. (Address below.)

It’s PFYOL (pay for your own lunch), so please bring cash to make it easy on the waiters.

We’ll gather at 11:30 AM, so that we’ll beat the rush and have time to catch up. PLEASE RSVP here via Twitter or Facebook, so that we can give Thirsty Bear an accurate head count for the number of tables.

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As a long-time attendee and organizer-emeritus of Green Drinks, I thought the event had cornered the market on green-focused networking events. Unfortunately, over the years my frustration has grown with the open format, to the point where I threw in the towel when Green Drinks SF announced it would be adding Speed Dating to the evening, confirming my suspicions that a lot of people use these events as an interest-targeted dating pool. Then I discovered EcoTuesday this week.
Two longtime friends Nikki Pava and Oren Jaffe founded EcoTuesday in San Francisco in 2007. The two brainstormed possibilities for an event that would provide a shared context for all participants so that people could connect with others while learning about sustainability. Taking place on the 4th Tuesday of the month, each event features a keynote speaker and an introduction circle where each attendee announces their name, affiliation, and a very brief reason why they are passionate about sustainability.

Ah! A little structured networking! Everyone in attendance was there with a purpose related to their business in mind.

This month, Sungevity’s founder Danny Kennedy addressed the crowd and spoke about the growth and opportunities in the solar industry. For the record, I actually found out about ecoTuesday because Sungevity mentioned on twitter that Danny would be speaking. For those who have never heard Danny speak it’s a real treat. Danny is smart, witty, entertaining, and unwaveringly passionate about creating a “rooftop revolution.”

Perhaps one of the most memorable, exciting, and yet disturbing facts Danny tossed out to the crowd was that the number of people working in the solar industry in the US is equivalent to those working in the steel industry. While it’s exciting to see solar growing so much, it’s also sad to stack that up against the decline of a once-great industry that put a lot of America to work. Hopefully, according to Danny, these crossing employment numbers will continue to rise and the creation of more jobs and opportunities in solar will continue to put more Americans back to work. Now that a better way of looking at that fact!

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Are you an entrepreneur with your own small solar or renewable energy business or considering starting your own business in these fields?

Are you attending SolarFest this year?

Join Pamela Cargill on Saturday July 16 at 1PM for an hour long presentation/discussion under the USA Solar Store Tent for “The Green Marketing How-To” and MORE! The presentation will cover low/no-cost start-up tactics from Total Digital Office to setting up effective business operations to developing sharp marketing techniques- many of which you can do yourself no matter what your technical aptitude!

Bring your questions, stories, advice, best practices, and lessons learned to share.

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Recently, there has been a lot of discussion on the American Solar Energy Society LinkedIn group after their April issue included an article highlighting some market research conducted by the Shelton Group, confirming many biases about the marketing of solar that I have held true and previously written about.

The editors of “Solar Today” magazine reprinted comments of mine left on the ASES LinkedIn group about this article in their reader response section in the June issue. Based on these comments, the new associate editor, Alex Abdallah, contacted me for a full interview. The results of this interview should be featured in the July issue of Solar Today so keep your eyes peeled!

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Earlier this year, I posted that one of the Zweig-White newsletter editors contacted me to comment on a study conducted by Sustainable Rhythm about the changing preferences amongst building professionals regarding green attributes. Read on to see how they folded my comments and critiques into the piece.

Thanks Julie for taking the time to interview me!

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