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That's in line with what a recentВ study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found to be the median price of installing solar nationwide, but about twice the installation costs of SolarCity.Д«erger rightly admires NRG's CEO David Crane as a solar visionary among electric utility chiefs. By my math that comes out to about $40,000 per customer or about $5.50 per watt of generation capacity. This represented about 3,000 customers, says Berger. In January Sunnova sold 22 megawatts of residential solar systems to NRG Energy for about $120 million. What's more, because the power is generated right where it is used, there are no transmission losses, and they cut out the middleman companies that own the power lines and extract a toll for every kWh that moves over them.Д«erger's model has already been validated. This aggregated asset is similar in performance to the giant utility-scale solar installations built on thousands of acres out in the desert, except that Sunnova doesn't have to give any thought to transmitting that power from the middle of nowhere to where the demand is. And though these companies have their assetsВ distributed across thousands of rooftops, when you aggregate them together what they are effectively operating is a big, complex solar installation. They're all different in one way or another, but what these companies have in common are that they own solar panels. Other companies that provide leasing and financing (and even in-house installation) of home solar systems include SunRun, SunPower, Vivint, Sungevity, and the big attention grabber SolarCity. Sunnova is far from the only one in this business. Sunnova is just extending that model on the other side of the electric meter, on and in the home.

And if there's a hitch at one of the power plants owned by my electricity provider Reliant Energy (a division of NRG Energy) I don't get a letter from them asking me to fork over a couple thousand dollars or else live in the dark. Do you really want that? After all, when my power went out over the weekend I didn't get a call from Centerpoint Energy asking me to chip in a few hundred bucks toward the repair of the lines on our side of the street. But then again, if something goes wrong with a system you own, then fixing it is your responsibility. Some homeowners might feel odd about having such a substantial piece of capital equipment bolted to their roof without actually 'owning' it. Sunnova will always own the panels on your roof, but if something malfunctions they are responsible for fixing it - or they don't get paid. So you save save money and have the added reliability of solar on those rare times when the power goes out. The electricity created on your roof displaces much of the electricity that you would otherwise buy from the utility (about 70%). Then you will enter into a long-term leasing agreement with Sunnova under which you agree to pay a certain amount for each kWh that the panels generate (usually the same or less than what you can get from other retail electricity providers).

#WELCOME TO THE POWER HOUR INSTALL#

With no money down, one of Sunnova's installation contractors will install panels on your roof. Especially given Sunnova's value proposition.В Here's how it works. The coming solar boom will be just as big and important as the shale gas boom.' 'The future will be baseload natural gas and residential solar. 'Residential solar has already become conventional energy,' he says. In fact, he will sell you solar power for about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour - less than what many pay their electric providers today. That skepticism eroded over lunch Monday withВ John Berger, CEO of Houston-based solar company Sunnova. That would be a very material annual addition equal to 1.5% of global energy demand. From just 31 gigawatts of new worldwide solar installations in 2012, Bernstein's analysts predict that will grow to 300 GW a year by 2020. I had solar on the mind anyway last week I was dazzled reading a giant new report from Bernstein Research asserting that the solar revolution is finally here and that solar power is now economic, even on an unsubsidized basis, in much of the developed world.

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