San Francisco-based Clean Power Finance (CPF) has expanded its platform to offer an online marketplace for operations and maintenance (O&M) services on installed residential solar systems.
To date, the seven-year-old firm—which was founded Gary Kremen, the creator of Match.com—has done for residential financing what the dating site did for the lovelorn: The CPF Market site connects providers of capital with solar professionals who need residential solar finance products (such as solar leases and power purchase agreements) to grow their businesses.
CPF’s new O&M Marketplace addresses the lack of large-scale O&M services for distributed generation (DG) solar, which Standard & Poor cites as one of three obstacles to securitization of solar assets.
“Lack of ongoing O&M services is a major perceived risk that currently hinders DG solar investment,” commented Nat Kreamer, CEO, Clean Power Finance. Adding, “The O&M Marketplace provides investors with a solution that will lead to increased investment, drive down the cost of financing and pave the way for securitization.”
Photo courtesy of Clean Power Finance.
The O&M Marketplace allows solar system managers and owners— particularly third-party financiers —to connect and contract with repair, maintenance and inspection professionals. The marketplace promises to ensure that the price, quality and speed of O&M servicing remains competitive by allowing those requiring service to choose the best vendor bid and rate job performance. Service providers, which currently include Burnham Energy of San Jose and Next Phase Solar of Berkeley, will have access to new sources of revenue and can improve utilization of their installation crew resources.CPF currently uses the marketplace to manage its O&M and quality assurance (QA) services.
"Clean Power Finance's O&M Marketplace has been a valuable tool for strengthening communication between Next Phase and CPF,” said Adam Burstein, CEO of Next Phase Solar, Inc., a provider of O&M services for the solar PV industry. “As a result, we have been able to grow our nationwide service partnership quickly and effectively. Working with the O&M Marketplace has enabled us to deliver a higher level of service to our customers."
Owners of DG solar systems require a broad network of qualified service providers to maintain their assets. Clean Power Finance claims to work with 80 percent of the top solar companies in major U.S. markets. Investors using the CPF Market can tap into the power of the CPF network to connect with solar service professionals nationwide.
The O&M Marketplace was funded in part by a 2012 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative, a national collaborative effort to make solar energy cost-competitive with other forms of electricity by the end of the decade. The SunShot Initiative supports a wide variety of efforts to reduce the non-hardware, balance of systems costs associated with solar PV systems. These “soft costs” today account for “well over 50 percent of the installed price of residential PV systems in the United States,” according to a 2013 study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). CPF has received grants from the DOE to address permitting, O&M and customer acquisition costs so that solar professionals can operate more efficiently and investors can deploy more capital.
Edited by Alisen Downey