Outdoor
Solar store is a good place to get high-quality solar lights and other
solar powered products!

Dropping my son off at school on Wednesday, I ran into Danny Kennedy, a fellow parent and veteran Australian Greenpeace activist turned solar entrepreneur. How’s business? I asked. Pretty bloody good, as it turns out. Kennedy’s startup, Sungevity, took in more orders for rooftop solar systems in March than in all of 2009.

That solar flare is being fueled in large part, according to Kennedy, by a new lease option Sungevity recently began offering its customers. The option is financed through a $24 million deal with U.S. Bank. Rather than purchasing a solar array, customers can lease the system through Sungevity for a monthly fee, thus avoiding the considerable capital costs of buying the system outright. The popularity of lease options, which are also offered by bigger installers such as SolarCity, is another indication that creative financing is as key to getting people to go solar as the pesformance of the hardware.

As it happened, the Solar Energy Industries Association annual report landed in my inbox later that same day. It showed that Sungevity isn’t the only solar company looking at a very good 2010.

Although the United States solar industry’s overall growth for all types of solar energy slowed somewhat as the Great Recession reached its nadir in 2009, residential rooftop installers had a record year. Companies like Sungevity installed 156 megawatts of residential solar panels in 2009, up 101 percent from the previous year.

That’s an amazing number, considering one could reasonably expect that putting a $25,000 solar array on one’s roof would fall to the bottom of the home improvement list during the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But there were other incentives. The Obama stimulus package’s lifting of the $2,000 tax credit cap on home solar systems certainly helped. As did solar panel makers’ price slashing due to the oversupply that resulted from a ramp up in production. Solar module prices fell more than 40 percent in 2009, according to the SEIA report. That led to a 10 percent decline in the cost of an installed solar array. (Installation costs typically account for half the price of a solar array.)