This is your SolarWakeup for March 27th, 2020

Sales Continue To Slow. As expected, this week’s SolarWakeup tracking survey shows that sales have dropped compared to pre-corona levels. Installers say that sales are down 33.5%, a deterioration from the 25% reduction our survey showed last week. Anecdotally, a few installers are seeing an opportunity in the market due to their online or telephone based sales process. Installers that relied less on the face to face sales tactics are seeing minor increases in sales volumes.

Installers Prep To Tough It Out. Door to door sales have stopped across the board, with no installer reporting business as usual. With the backlog of projects keeping some installation crews operational, 62% of the installers have already or plan to terminate employees. Next week, we will test this given the loan forgiveness passed by the Senate this if employees are retained.

Another Barrier Arises. While most companies across the country (and many of the respondents) have transitioned to the Zoom economy (including my children and their teachers) building departments were not prepared for not being able to process digital permit sets or inspections. 24.1% of the installers are seeing delayed inspections and 44.8% report that some or all of their building departments are closed. Even if installers are able to sell projects right now, unless building departments move online (touches permitting) projects will wait for things to normalize.

Trade Group Support. Thanks to memos by groups like CALSSA, joining today would mean a lot, installers are considering themselves essential or critical in order to continue installations. 68.9% of them are doing so with over 50% officially labeling themselves as essential.

Survey Results. This week’s survey included responses from 74 companies whose primary markets spanned 20 states. Included in these companies were 29 residential solar installers. Responses spanned from March 23rd to March 26th.

Market Chatter. In discussions this week, companies are saying that they have had record attendance on webinars and software companies are able to guide installers, developers and companies through the digitization of their processes. There are bright spots in the market as the underlying reasons for solar’s success continue to exist.

Next Week. Look out for next week’s survey which opens on Sunday afternoon, as you can see the data is helpful to your business and respondents got many more data points than this short summary. 

Opinion

Best, Yann