Sunrun has announced it has been named a SunShot Prize Change Champion by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative for slashing the time it takes to get solar on a home. BrightPath, Sunrun’s innovative software platform, powered the substantial time reduction by streamlining Sunrun’s installation process.
The SunShot Prize: Race to 7-Day Solar launched in September 2015 with the goal of motivating local governments, communities, solar companies and electric utilities to reduce the time it takes to go solar to one week. In some regions across the United States, it takes up to six months to connect to the grid. Sunrun was selected as a Change Champion from among five organizations participating in the race for permitting, installing and flipping the switch on more than 3 MW of rooftop solar in approximately one month. As a Change Champion, Sunrun will be awarded $100,000 and will continue innovating time reductions until March 2017 when the SunShot Initiative will award two grand prizes totaling $4 million.
“Sunrun’s proprietary technology, BrightPath, is designed to make the process of getting solar simple, quick and affordable for homeowners,” said Gary Wayne, vice president of strategic projects at Sunrun. “We’re honored to announce that with BrightPath we’ve successfully exceeded DOE’s installation challenge and earned the distinction of Change Champion.”
BrightPath was developed in part with support from a SunShot Initiative Incubator 8 award. The software provides workflow automation, automatic design generation, shade analysis, energy simulation, pricing and contract generation, real-time change order management, and automatic permit-set generation. It significantly reduces wait times and lowers soft costs of installing residential rooftop solar, which can account for more than half the price of the solar system.
Sunrun invented solar-as-a-service to help homeowners go solar without the high upfront cost and hassle. Today Sunrun is focused on innovating new solutions like BrightPath and Sunrun BrightBox, a solar power plus energy storage product, to continue to drive down the cost of electricity and offer customers more choice and control.