How to accelerate rooftop solar & household batteries in the US
How can the US make it easier, faster, and cheaper for homeowners to install rooftop solar? In this episode, Sunrun CEO Mary Powell shares her vision for boosting not only residential solar, but other forms of residential electrification too.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
In Australia, one out of three households has solar panels on the roof. In the US, it’s one out of 25. That probably has something to do with the fact that in the US, rooftop solar is twice as expensive, twice the hassle, and takes twice as long to get installed.
Why is the process so broken? And what could be done to make it smoother and faster?
To discuss these and related matters, I went to the source: Mary Powell, the CEO of Sunrun, the nation’s largest residential rooftop solar company — or more accurately, the nation’s largest residential electrification company.
Before taking the top spot at Sunrun, Powell spent more than 20 years in leadership at Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest power utility and a nationally recognized pioneer in clean energy. Sunrun brought her on to help the company move into products — batteries, EV chargers, virtual power plants — that were once thought the province of utilities.
I talked with her about how to speed up the rooftop solar interconnection process, the role of net metering, Sunrun’s move into vehicle charging and VPPs, and the future of distributed energy.
All right, then, with no further ado, Mary Powell of Sunrun. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Mary Powell
Oh, my pleasure. I was looking forward to chatting with you.
David Roberts
Mary, I'm looking at my notes here and I have — let me just count real quick — one million questions to ask you. So, we're going to have to move quick here because I've got so much. But just by way of framing, I was in Australia recently and was listening to them talk about their rooftop solar success story there, the sort of rooftop solar miracle. So the US is at, I think, something like 4% rooftop solar penetration. And Australia is up around 30%, 35%, something like that. One out of every three households, mainly because it is two to three times less expensive and way, way, way faster to get on your roof there.
Most of what I want to talk about are in different forms. How can the US process be made cheaper and faster? That's kind of, I think, the theme of our discussion here today. But before we get to the reality of why things take so long, let's talk a little bit about perception. So I guess Sunrun is now the biggest residential solar company in the world — I know, in the US.
Mary Powell
Yeah, certainly in the US. Yeah, we're the largest, not just residential solar company, but we are the largest in the combination of solar-plus-storage. So we really see ourselves as a clean energy lifestyle company, and we're really well positioned to meet customers wherever they are on their clean energy journey and help them transform their lives to something that's more affordable, certainly something that's cleaner. So we have solar, we have storage, we have sophisticated electric panels, we have EV chargers, and of course, we have that amazing partnership with Ford on the F-150 that you can use to back up your home.
David Roberts
Going to get into all that later.
Mary Powell
Good.
David Roberts
But
