The Gateway to Building Performance | How Solar Companies Can Diversify into New Revenue Streams

For residential solar companies squeezed by declining margins and saturated markets, the path forward is clear: diversify. The fuzzy part for many is where to begin. In this clip from HeatSpring PRO Circles, building performance expert Spencer Rosen breaks down why he believes energy audits are the ideal gateway product for solar installers ready to offer more comprehensive solutions to their customers.

Spencer, who sits on the board of the Building Performance Institute (BPI) and teaches the new course Avoiding Main Panel Upgrades on HeatSpring, explains how energy audits create a natural bridge between solar installation and whole-home energy services. Rather than just putting panels on roofs, solar companies can position themselves as trusted advisors who understand the complete energy picture and help their customers see it too.

Want more insights like this? HeatSpring PRO Circles features monthly conversations with industry experts on growing sectors in and around the solar industry. PRO subscribers get access to these monthly discussions, plus 16 premium courses across four learning paths including Building Systems PRO – all for $89/month or $890/year. Learn more about HeatSpring PRO here.

Transcript below.

Brian: A lot of HeatSpring customers are residential solar companies that are looking to diversify their business lines. So if they want to get into building performance, what are the specific products or services – the gateway products – that they can start offering their customers to really start to sell this stuff and prove there’s demand for this type of work?

Spencer: I think it’s a really big market opportunity for solar companies, especially in a saturated market where companies are really looking to diversify and stand out from the sales organizations that just sell, sell, sell solar, and maybe don’t have as much of a customer outcome at stake.

So to get really specific, there’s an interaction between what solar basically solves, right? Solar’s providing energy. What’s using energy – what the solar needs to provide energy for – are the loads inside the home. Things like the heating and cooling system. And when you impact the heating and cooling load, how much energy it uses, and you do that through energy efficiency and building performance upgrades, you’re able to have this holistic ability to ramp up and down the solar system size, manage the battery size. It’s just a holistic approach.

So if I was a solar company and I was like, “I really want to become more of a whole home energy company,” I might start with something as simple as an energy audit. An energy audit is the process of going into a home and looking at what’s really happening in the home. What are the systems inside of the home? What does the building envelope look like? Where are the deficiencies in the building envelope? Where are opportunities for air sealing the home – whether or not you deliver those services? It can be an initial assessment of where that home is at and where the biggest opportunities are.

And so it would be a major add-on, a high-value service. If somebody gets an energy audit and a report from an energy audit and then they’re given a solar proposal, and another company just gives a solar proposal, it’s going to feel much more comprehensive from the company that did the energy audit.

So I would say one of the best places to start for a solar company would be to integrate some kind of energy audit or energy assessment step in the sales process, so that they’re not just going in and trying to sell something. They’re actually really taking the time to understand what’s happening in that home so that when they make recommendations, their solution can be more holistic and not just – you know, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a solar company, everything looks like a roof to put solar on.

Sure, those are still really valuable solutions and make an enormous difference for a lot of families. But their energy use is more than just providing cleaner energy. It’s about how comfortable their home is in the winter and summer. It’s about what appliances they can get off natural gas or propane and change to electric so they have less of a cost stack once they go solar. So there’s a lot of approaches, but I would say the first best place to start would be an energy audit, in my opinion.