Solar is booming, and the technology is cheaper than ever. Yet 80% of Americans are effectively locked out of the solar market, including those who rent their homes, own a condo, have inadequate credit, or possess a non-optimal roof. Solstice deploys “community solar,” which enables households to subscribe to a shared solar farm in their neighborhood. Participants immediately begin saving 10% on their monthly utility bill, and there is no cost to join or roof required. Solstice’s mission is to make affordable solar energy accessible for every household in America, particularly low-to-moderate income (LMI) households and other underserved communities.
On the supply side of the market, solar developers lack the capacity to find and manage thousands of customers at a time, but their community solar projects cannot get built until they aggregate demand. Solstice’s digital platform is the turnkey customer solution for the fast-growing community solar industry, undertaking every customer interaction--from customer targeting, underwriting, acquisition, billing, management, and service. We put more projects in the ground by using technology to tap into the power of organizations to make it incredibly easy for households to sign up for community solar and to spread community solar through their networks.
Since community solar developers and long-term owners need customers to earn revenue on their projects, Solstice is the market maker for community solar. However, FICO scores are currently the most common metric used to qualify households for community solar, but half of Americans can’t meet the typical credit requirement. In partnership with the DOE, Solstice has built the EnergyScore community solar qualification metric; it represents a 40% accuracy improvement over FICO in predicting utility bill payment behaviors and is 10% more inclusive of low-income households. This innovation helps developers to reliably expand their pool of potential customers (lowering customer acquisition costs) and it will open up the clean energy market to millions of Americans for the first time.
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