Jim Johnson and another speaker argue that customer acquisition and dealer fees drive much of residential solar costs, with some installers charging 30-40% dealer fees. They call these practices theft and subsidy seeking behavior that should end.
Questions this video answers
About half of residential solar cost.
Charged dealer fees of about 30–40% are criticized; typical dealer fees for other financed items cited as 3–7%.
Chapters
I do believe that business models should be robust enough to stand on their own. The cost of solar itself has, especially residential solar has remained stubbornly high, even with tax credits and tax incentives. When you dig into it like the National Renewable Energy Lab did, you'll find that about half the cost of residential solar over the last couple of years has really been the customer acquisition and dealer fees. I call that subsidy seeking behavior. If you've got a way to capture that subsidy, there will be players out there that do.
Yeah, I'm blatant about it. I feel like they're thieves and they're taking the subsidy that should have been mine and taking it for themselves.
Absolutely. So will there be solar installers that fail because they've built their business model around a 30% margin that shouldn't be theirs anyway. It should be the homeowners. Yes, they will, in my opinion, with any solar installers are listening. Good riddance.
Yeah, 32% don't actually need like charging a 30 to 40% dealer fee is. It should be criminal, it really should. When everything else that you finance might have a 3 to 7% dealer fee and you're over getting 30, 35, 40. That to me says, hey, you're a thief. You're just stealing the substance. That's all you're doing.
And that's not, I mean, it's, you know, you take any group of 100 people and you're gonna find a sociopath in there or two. Right. You know, whether it's, whether it's oil or coal or solar or wind or you know, used car salesmen or whatever, right?
