It was news to me that California actually voted in a law requiring all new houses built after Jan 1, 2020 to have solar panels.
I Bought a House with Solar Panels
101–110 of 298 posts
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#102>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…
> Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with.
As opposed to... your electrical utility?! Do people not remember the electricity crisis? It was an enormous, deliberately engineered market fixing scam that produced widespread power outages and a $40B windfall for the power producers financed by emergency state spending. Yet it was totally legal because they managed to get their lobbyists to fool the legislature into writing it into the law before pulling the trigger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
Seriously: I'm sure Sunrun is scummy. But... come on.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#103>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…
That's ancient sales wisdom, not anything new. MCI and AT&T perfected those techniques during the long distance wars in the 80s and 90s, and it was ancient sales wisdom back then.
A corollary is that they are your family. That's my favorite red flag: some employer or vendor or other non-family entity tries to tell me I'm part of their family. Uh, no, I'm not.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#104A few points this person probably didn't think about: •Nobody knows what California electricity prices are going to do in the next 20 years. By terminating the system, they just traded certainty for volatility. With that attitude I hope they financed using an ARM loan. •They whined about how expensive it was, but also expressed a desire to have one or two kids someday. When you have kids, your electric bills tend to…
You don't need AC at the beach.. Very rarely, maybe 4 days a year during Santa Anas it gets that hot... and then you will probably have evacuated due to wildfires anyway.
And thank you for shopping at your Goleta Home Depot store.
I respect what you say, but it'll be $532.78 for that window air conditioner. Cash or charge?
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#105When you get down into the meat of how the tax credits and Sunrun's financing work it's astonishing. Essentially it sounds like Sunrun's investors are paying to install solar panels on your house so they can claim the tax credit to offset their own income. Meanwhile you are paying Sunrun for the electricity generated by the solar panels. There doesn't seem to be much benefit for the homeowner. You're better off buyin…
When Sunrun got started, no one wanted to issue loans for residential solar. It was a new unproven technology, and the accounting departments at places big enough to provide these kinds of loans at scale just didn't know how to factor the risk.
The article calls these TPO's, but in the industry the more common term is PPA's -- Power Purchase Agreements. That's more how large solar farms work -- they find a buyer willing to pay a fixed price over 20 years and use that contract to raise money in the capital markets. Sunrun kinda took that model and applied it residential, because that's what the financial industry that could supply the capital knew.
Now that we're a few more years into this grand energy transition, PPA's are falling out of favor. Now that the capital markets see this home solar thing is more or less as reliable as promised, has expected depreciation, etc., personal loans are becoming the more common way of buying home solar.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#106>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…
> Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with. As opposed to... your electrical utility?! Do people not remember the electricity crisis? It was an enormous, deliberately engineered market fixing scam that produced widespread power outages and a $40B windfall for the power producers financed by emergency state spending. Yet it was totally legal because they managed to get their lobbyists to fool the…
One incident that happened almost 20 years ago, in one of the worst-governed states in the union, in a way that immediately inspired one of the biggest landmark examples of corporate regulation in history.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't wrong, but, unfortunately a lot of consumers weren't aware of the real costs and were misled by companies offering these kinds of deals. I feel like it has done a lot of damage that is going to cost the residential solar industry a lot of money over the coming years.
> You aren't wrong, but, unfortunately a lot of consumers weren't aware of the real costs and were misled by companies offering these kinds of deals This is the same model mobile phones have operated on in many countries for many years. Up front costs are subsidised by the carrier, who then proceeds to gouge you over the 12-24 month term to recoup that cost + a return. > I feel like it has done a lot of damage that i…
A loan is a better option than a lease, IMO. The terms are generally less obfuscated with loan agreements as well.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the huge issue is that if it's a back-heavy payment scheme: A future buyer will only see the heavier portion. Which makes your house less attractive to a buyer, and devalues your home, which also hurts any potential cost savings.
The growth rate of the payment is 2.9%. This is only very slightly higher than inflation, on average. Also, assuming that the lower home value came true, the original purchaser of the solar installation did put his money where his mouth is, and paid a financial cost to his environmental interests, which is the moral thing to do, regardless of whether he was "tricked" by the negative cash flows showing up in later yea…
> Also, assuming that the lower home value came true
It did, the estate paid off the cost of the contract.
> the original purchaser of the solar installation did put his money where his mouth is
He did not. He was dead, as you've noted, and the inheritors of his estate paid that price instead.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#109>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…
Not just a 20 year contract, but a 20 year contract that holds a lien on your home. This lien is great for sunrun. It has near zero risk profit backed by a lien on a home. The financial engineering at the expense of the public is quite good.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#110>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…
Is this really all that different than putting segment.io onto your site, instrumenting every button click, and A/B testing which color or CTA phrasing results in the highest conversion rates? Just yesterday, there was a front-page post here about the top pricing experiments you can run, full of neat behavioral psychology tricks like decoy pricing and anchoring. Our industry does the same emotional manipulation... we…
Yes, it is really that different.
What you're talking about is better connecting with a customer's needs and promoting the product's benefits. There's no losers in that situation, just a customer with more facts of which to make their decision.
What that training manual is describing is exploiting someone's primal fears to manipulate them into something they wouldn't have otherwise done: apples and oranges.
A better analogy might be those beauty ads that call the customer ugly then offer their product as a solution. Seems both that and the Sunrun technique rely on primal fears and worries to get sales.