Earth2Tech Week in Review
Craig Rubens - Misc
It was a short week with the holiday but that didn’t stop VCs from dolling out the dough and entrepreneurs from making new laboratory proclamations. If you were too busy cleaning out the barbecue we’ve got all the important headlines here from this week in cleantech.
Sopogy Scores $9M Funding from Omidyar, Hawaiian Investors: The small-scale solar thermal startup has officially closed a $9.1 million round of funding which included money from the investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Ohana Holdings.
Biofuel Buzz Term: "Verified Sustainable": Sekab claims they are the first to make a “verified sustainable” ethanol that conforms to environmental and social requirements.
Sapphire Squeezes High Octane Gas from Algae: This startup is skipping the whole biofuel debate by making petrochemical equivalents from algae, including 91 octane gasoline.
Major League Solar: Baseball Goes Green: America’s favorite past time is looking a little greener as more and more baseball parks add solar panels to help power the jumbo-tron.
Blacklight Powers Up, Disses Quantum Physics: This controversial startup claims they’ve created a hydrogen-based power source that makes electricity for a penny a kilowatt. The only problem is they say quantum physics is all wrong.
Marketing Residential Solar to the Masses
Craig Rubens - Startups
How do you convince home-owners to pay you to install solar panels on their roof tops? Even though solar is one of the biggest buzz words this year, it’s still tough. While we often discuss the market dynamics of silicon supplies, panel manufacturing and installation costs, we spend a lot less time on customer adoption. But the fact is for every on-site evaluation a solar installer does, Sungevity President Danny Kennedy estimates only 10 percent actually sign up for panels.
Not such good odds. So what are solar installers doing to get more potential customers aware of their offers? Below are a few different approaches solar installers are taking in their marketing. Take a look and let us know what you think.
Sun Run, a residential solar financier, has teamed up with folks behind the public television show Hippy Gourmet to create a short video pitch explaining why power purchase agreements are the hassle-free way to go solar. While founder and COO Nat Kreamer doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of electricity rates, he does a nice show-and-tell of how residential solar provides power to your home.
Sungevity, the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup that uses satellite imaging to size a solar system for your roof, gets points for adding a personal touch with a handwritten note. A few weeks after entering my home address information to get a solar panel estimate I received this snail-mail note (seen below) thanking me for my interest and pointedly asking me if I had received the iQuote email they’d sent me.
It’s a nice touch, but also pretty generic. More intriguing, and potentially creepy, is the marketing idea Sungevity President Danny Kennedy told us about that connects Sungevity’s satellite technology with direct marketing. The company could size up and calculate the design and cost of a solar array for an address, put that info, with a picture of that roof, onto a postcard and send it to that address. This idea was tested when Reason Magazine put satellite photos of each subscriber’s home on the cover in an article on privacy back in 2004.
Akeena had been planning a large media blitz with the anticipated passage of San Francisco’s solar incentive rebate program. Unfortunately, that program is still hanging in legislative limbo, but Akeena had already printed up thousands of doorhangers promoting those rebates. This is also a hard-and-fast example of how regulatory uncertainly is wreaking havoc on cleantech businesses’ ability to plan not only in the long term, but on a month to month basis.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment