Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of solar energy, according to research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Yet only one out of every five people has the means to put solar panels up on their home.
“We are finally at a stage where we can have an honest conversation about how to get solar to more people,” said Steph Speirs, the co-founder and CEO of Cambridge-based Solstice.
Speirs said Solstice is partially an enterprise software for solar developers to manage customers, and partially an e-commerce platform for customers to sign up and learn about how they can connect to farms.
“We’re not the people that build solar farms, there’s actually thousands of them already, they’re really good at putting solar in the ground,” Speirs said. “What we do is we’re the kind of turn-key customer solution for the developers that are building the farms.”
Founded in 2014, Solstice is working with solar farms, community organizations and homeowners to make shared-solar a viable option for consumers. Speirs said people are often restricted from the rooftop solar market due to individual rooftop eligibility, homeownership status, and access to financing.
“Essentially what happens is you have a shared, centralized farm, and the electricity from that farm goes back to the grid and people see a credit that shows up on their monthly utility bill for the portion of energy that they’re using,” Speirs said.
Solstice currently connects their network of 20,000 customers with energy from 17 solar projects in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and D.C., and is looking to partner farms in Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, California, and Rhode Island.
The Solstice development team was also recently awarded rights to build about 70 shared solar projects on affordable housing buildings in Queens and Staten Island.
“Not only is it more inclusive and it is serving people who can’t access residential rooftop, but there is an added element of low-income populations benefitting too, which is another pretty important focus about Solstice.” Speirs said.
Solstice has also created The EnergyScore, which leverages data from customer payment records to predict future payment behavior, without using their credit score. Speirs said doing away with the FICO requirement has helped Solstice tap into a market of qualified low-to-moderate income customers.
“Residential solar is a multi-billion dollar industry that actually on serves very few people in the country,” Speirs said.
The organization was a Top 3 Winner of Harvard Business School Energy & Environment Startup Competition, the winner of 2017 Vinetta Pitch Competition, and a semifinalist in MIT Climate CoLab competition. Notable investors include Techstars Boston, Echoing Green, Obvious Ventures, and the Department of Energy SunShot Initiative.
Speirs said she and her team came up with the concept for Solstice while working on a micrograde project in India.
“We realized that no one we knew back home in America got solar,” Speirs said. “And when we looked into it we realized that it’s because there are about 80 percent of Americans are locked out of the residential solar rooftop market.”
