House of Solar

How to REALLY explain the value of a Citizenre System
by Scott Burton

Sometimes we all face a customer who dismisses your best Citizenre pitch with a waive of the hand and the statement, “I’d rather own the system myself so I could get the electricity for free.” At first you may be a bit concerned how you are going to quickly tackle the challenge of convincing this person that it’s better to pay the equivalent of, say, 10 cents a kilowatt hour for Citizenre’s fixed price plan than to pay ZERO for electricity that comes off panels that a homeowner owns outright. The good news is, like all things Citizenre, this is easy. I just say:

“That’s an interesting point, and I’ve talked to a lot of customers about the trade offs of owning a system vs. signing up for Citizenre’s solar service. But it turns out that you are financially better off signing up for Citizenre than buying a solar power system yourself. Here’s why: The average solar power system for a home costs at least $30,000 (1). But even people with $30,000 ready to invest rarely choose to buy solar panels with it because of the very low return on investment of traditional solar installations. Depending on the cost of electricity that you are comparing it to, residential solar installations will break even only after a number of years well into the teens, something like 14 years. That means it takes 14 years just to get you back to zero…it’s not until your 15^th and 16^th years that you actually start to get the RETURN part of the investment. This is why you don’t see solar panels on a lot of houses yet, because it’s got a high upfront cost with a very slow return on investment. What you could do instead is put that $30,000 into a mutual fund for 14 years and you’d expect to do a lot better than just break even. In fact, that is what you should do instead buying your own system: sign up for Citizenre solar power system, pay the security deposit, and then put $30,000 in a mutual fund for the next 14 years. You’ll have solar power in you home and you’ll be much better off financially.”

There may be this follow up question: “We’ll how can you afford to offer this then?”

My answer is this: “Because Citizenre is building the world’s largest solar panel factory to support this business, and because we are taking all of the pieces of the solar power value chain in-house that are currently done by different suppliers…from the manufacturing, to the warehousing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing, installation, maintenance, and billing, even the sales that you and I are doing right now…all of those profit margins for all of those different players are brought under one roof, then with the volume and consolidation efficiency, Citizenre is going to be able to put a solar power system on your property for a fraction of  the cost of what you could do if for. So in our earlier example if you’re not interested in investing in a solar power project for your home that has a 14 year break even, we can do the same thing for about a 7 year break even, and we’ve found investors that are willing to fund a 7 year break even contract if we lock your rate for 25 years, because they are still going to have 18 years left on the contract after its paid for. But you don’t mind because you are happily enjoying a fixed price solar rental system we maintain to provide your energy at a non-increasing price. The investors are happy because they get to make money on the back end of the contract. And the environment benefits because another house was taken away from polluting power to clean, renewable energy. It’s a true win, win, win.