PV: Selling the Wrong Product

There’s been a lot of discussion in RenewableEnergyWorld.com lately about the importance of marketing, and the lack of it, in selling photovoltaics to consumers.  SolarFred has been blogging about this – a shout-out to you, Fred! -- and I’ve posted a couple of comments.  It’s basic marketing, and common sense, that to sell a product successfully, you must have the right product to sell.  But the PV industry has been selling consumers the wrong product.

I’ll come back to that in a moment.  But first, a little solar history.  In 1977 the Carter Administration created SERI, the Solar Energy Research Institute (now known as the National Renewable Energy Lab).  At the same time it also created four regional centers around the country to accelerate the market adoption of renewable energy technologies.  I worked at the Northeast Solar Energy Center in Boston (the others were in Atlanta, St. Paul and Portland, OR).  Our mission was to identify barriers to the use of alternate energy, and to overcome them.

One of the biggest barriers, of course, was the lack of information and understanding about how renewables worked and the benefits they could provide.  Without the Internet, we had to rely on workshops, open houses, media coverage and – gasp! – printed materials to get the message across.  At the time the federal government offered a substantial incentive, in the form of a grant, to encourage homeowners to purchase solar water heating systems.  But people weren’t buying.  So we undertook a major marketing and public relations campaign, “Operation Sunpower”, to extol the benefits of solar.  And in less than a year, we doubled the number of solar water heaters installed in our region (New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) from 5,000 to 10,000.

You might think that kind of success was a good reason to press on.  But Ronald Reagan did not.  His Administration terminated the regional centers (on Christmas Eve 1981), slashed SERI’s budget, declined to renew solar investment tax credits enacted under Carter, and dismantled the solar water heating system Carter had installed on the White House roof.  Without support from the federal government, a lot of solar businesses went under.  With no jobs available in solar, I moved on to do marketing and communications for computer software, cable TV and consumer electronics.  That’s given me an invaluable perspective on how PV is being marketed to consumers today, and why it’s wrong. 

In large part the problem stems from an unfortunate vestige of solar’s early days, the concept of payback.  It was used then and is still used today as the primary measure of whether a solar system is a good investment.  Yet I can’t think of a single consumer product – and yes, PV should be a mass-market consumer product – sold on the basis of payback.  When people spend big bucks to create media rooms in their homes, does anyone ever think about payback, except in terms of personal enjoyment and satisfaction?

Suppose you got a call from a cable TV salesman, and he offered you this deal on what cable calls its “triple-play”:  pay for ten years worth of TV, Internet and wireline phone service in advance, at $150 a month, and after that it’s free.  Would you write him a check for $18,000?   No way.  You’d rather just get billed every month, like other cable subscribers do.  Yet the PV industry is offering homeowners just such a deal: pay up front for the electricity you’re going to use over the next x years (x = the payback time for a system), and after that it’s free.  Yes, some people are buying, but for most, it’s the wrong product.  Many homeowners who would like to go solar are not, despite the substantial federal and state incentives available to them.  Haven’t I seen this somewhere before? 

That’s why I’m getting back into solar, as president of start-up Solar Electric Service Corporation, to sell PV on a pay-as-you-go basis.  That’s the only way residential PV will become a mass-market product, used in millions of homes, and make a serious dent in our use of fossil fuels.