Reducing the soft costs of solar installation has been a big industry topic for years. Though software isn’t the be-all, end-all solution, industry experts believe it has the potential to assist with some of that soft cost reduction and help scale the industry.
MJ Shiao, solar market researcher for GTM Research, addressed this topic in his opening remarks during GTM’s s3: the solar software summit last year.
“To tackle soft costs, we have to look at solutions that are not just going to solve one piece of the puzzle, but solve the entire puzzle together,” Shiao said. “When we talk about software, we need to think about things that can help us automate the tasks we’re doing, and we have to do it with intelligence. It also has to be integrated within a broader ecosystem so we’re solving this challenge together.”
Shiao sees software as important to the scaling of the solar industry, both by number of installations and geographic area. “When we think about the growing scale, we have to make sure when we double installations we’re not doubling effort and doubling costs as well,” he said.
Another opportunity he sees for software to help reduce soft costs is in supporting long-tail installers (those other than the top five) with the tools and resources that larger companies have without developing them on their own. He sees similar opportunities for software to help refine the installation and improve long-term asset management.
“Software isn’t the solution but a solution that helps us do things more intelligently and plan systems better,” he said.
Paul Grana, co-founder of Folsom Labs, spoke following Shiao at the summit. He said he is seeing software being used to improve processes such as customer education, acquisition and management, sales, system design, permitting and finance. APIs, which provide a way to automate two systems so they can talk together automatically, will also play an important role in solar software development.
Grana said he believed the industry will continue to see more software products that are smaller and more specialized.
“Five years from now, there’s going to be more software companies than fewer because the trend won’t be toward consolidation, but the big companies getting bigger and a lot more companies that can work with those big companies to have very profitable, very specific solutions, but don’t require the full infrastructure or investment of a true software company,” Grana said.