The Gutsy Utah Residential Solar Company Seizing The Future with Batteries
Utah is pioneering the future of residential solar energy in America. Four years ago, Rocky Mountain Power, the state’s energy utility, rolled out its Wattsmart Program, offering homeowners financial incentives to install intelligent, grid-connected batteries alongside solar panels. Over 3,500 residences across the state are enrolled.
As of 2023, 263,000 Americans work in solar across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Some 170,000 work at installation and project development firms, 33,000 in manufacturing, and 30,000 in wholesale and distribution. Many firms focus on hiring veterans, a substantive effort that has grown the industry’s veteran workforce from 13,000 to 21,000 individuals. Women comprise a large portion of the industry, surpassing 30% of the solar workforce in December 2022.
In short, the industry is not just growing; it’s increasingly diverse and inclusive.
Snapshot
- In 2020, Rocky Mountain Power, the state’s energy utility, rolled out its Wattsmart Program, offering homeowners financial incentives to install intelligent grid-connected batteries alongside solar panels.
- Rocky Mountain Power weaves the batteries together to form a “virtual power plant,” enabling it to draw power instantaneously when necessary and creating numerous benefits.
- However, a decline in overall solar incentives in Utah caused many solar companies to abandon the state, putting the solar-plus-storge plans in doubt.
- One residential solar company, ES Solar, went all-on on batteries. Today, thousands of Utahns participate in what’s become the nation’s most innovative solar energy grid, and ES Solar has installed 96% of all home systems participating in the program.
Listen to Zach Randall, VP of ES Solar, on Supercool
Challenges Facing Residential Solar
Old gripes and new technologies dominate the conversation among industry participants, who refer to wild pricing fluctuations and ever-changing rebate programs as the solarcoaster. The critiques boil down to production inefficiencies and misalignment across the grid.
For instance, California was so overloaded with solar production that its utilities began paying other states to take excess energy off their hands. Yet, California still had to run expensive, dirty “peaker plants” during high consumption hours in the evening when people are most likely to be home with screens on, recharging a plug-in hybrid, and running the air conditioner at full tilt. That means home solar solutions produce energy during the day when the sun shines, but home energy consumption is relatively low. The same inefficiency happens at night; it is reversed – no production but high consumption.
The second old gripe with solar seems trivial at a glance but has an unquestionably outsized effect on the psychology of buying and selling solar. Here’s the issue: Very often, even though my home creates power, I am not necessarily powering my own home. That’s just plain weird; most home buyers expect to consume the energy they produce.
Utah’s leading solar installation and project development company has solved these industry gray areas by collaborating with the local utility company.
Creating a Virtual Power Plant to Replace Peakers
Rocky Mountain Power—the energy utility company in Utah— incentivizes battery installation with new solar sales and retrofits of existing residential rooftop solar systems. The battery means less stress on the grid during peak hours and increased energy autonomy for homeowners, aligning customers’ expectations for the solar power their systems generate with the reality of how it gets consumed.
Rocky Mountain Power weaves these home batteries together to form a “virtual power plant,” enabling the utility to draw power instantaneously whenever necessary. This is a pivotal industry advancement, like antibiotics or cloud computing. Life and business stand to improve dramatically.
Key benefits of solar-plus-batteries combined with virtual power plants include:
- Keeping energy rates low.
- Cutting carbon emissions.
- Avoiding the need to fire up peaker plants or build them.
- Stabilizing and fortifying the energy grid.
- Propelling the clean energy shift to electrification.
Despite headwinds, ES Solar learned how to sell solar-plus-storage systems to homeowners and profitably install and maintain them. Today, those installations number in the thousands, and ES Solar is responsible for 96% of all installations under the Wattsmart program.
Unsurprisingly, ES Solar is having its best financial year to date. It’s also expanding across the West, opening new sales territories in California, Idaho, and Wyoming. Zach Randall is ES Solar’s Vice President of Sales. He helped grow ES Solar from 20 employees when he joined the company six years ago to 500 employees today.
Leading a highly motivated and successful sales organization that understands how to entice homeowners to adopt solar-plus-battery systems has already unlocked a new era of residential solar energy in Utah.
Zach explained ES Solar’s breakthrough as a series of solutions to challenges widely known throughout the industry, “Their [Rocky Mountain Power]goal [was] to get rid of these peaker plants, but they didn’t know how. They found this company called sonnen, a German battery manufacturer. They had done these virtual power plants in Germany for years and years.”
Working alongside the developers of the Soleil Lofts Residences in Herriman, Utah, ES Solar installed their first sonnen batteries in 2019, which doubled as a prototype for a new type of peaker plant. “So whenever the grid needs help, they call on these batteries. They call it the hive. And within three seconds or so, these batteries can respond and kind of jolt the grid.”
The hive can shock the grid when it drops below 60 hertz, which has a stabilizing effect. Says Zach;
“We have 80,000 homes in the state of Utah that have solar panels. So we could actually fill these batteries full of clean renewable energy. We could have a big enough hive that we can get rid of these peaker plants. It’s cleaner, it’s more effective.”
Batteries Add Complexity, Time, and Cost
As the ES Solar team was figuring out how to communicate the value and sell solar and battery systems, they also encountered the complexity of installing them. New customer installations went from taking a half-day to nearly a week. “It’s just a completely different ball game. You have to have a licensed electrician on every job, have to install additional sub-panels, critical load panels, all sorts of things for the battery,” Zach said.
The learning curve was steep and expensive, but eventually, they overcame those challenges. Installation times were lowered from five days back down to one, and costs were optimized. With its lean operations again intact, ES Solar effectively sold batteries to people who had already installed solar and, in many cases, had been abandoned by the original company that had installed them. Retrofitting older, potentially defunct systems is now commonplace at ES Solar.
After the success of Soleil Lofts, several thousand solar-plus-storage installations, and ES Solar’s impressive track record for overcoming business hurdles, Rocky Mountain Power came to view ES Solar as a partner.
Zach explains, “I’ve been in solar for a decade now, and it felt like a fight with the utility company to be honest. It always was like us versus them. It’s been a win, win, win. Customers have always wanted this. Customers have always said, ‘How [can] I be more self-reliant? How do I actually utilize my solar at night?’”
Solar energy’s market share of new electricity generation has grown steadily in the U.S., from 3% in 2014 to an estimated 45% in 2023. Solar power capacity has grown tremendously, from 15 GW in 2014 to over 200 GW in 2023. The continued partnership between ES Solar and Rocky Mountain Power for the Wattsmart program is a successful model for the solar industry, a clear path to sustainably low energy costs, carbon reduction, and electrification.
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