With most of the country in economic lockdown, fewer people are spending their socially-distanced work-from-home moments thinking about going solar. OpenSolar and UtilityAPI are stepping up to help the solar industry survive and emerge stronger once the COVID19 lockdown eases.
OpenSolar offers free remote solar design and sales software. UtilityAPI lets users request and securely download their customer’s utility bill data.
OpenSolar just made its full cloud-based tool available to users in the United States. When users sign up with OpenSolar, UtilityAPI will give them three months of free utility data access through the app.
“With the COVID-19 crisis, the need to be able to sell and design systems remotely is more important than ever,” said Andrew ‘Birchy’ Birch, co-founder of both Sungevity and the new company, OpenSolar. “The OpenSolar software is an incredibly powerful toolkit that lets users design systems interactively with their customers, integrating the best data and mapping tools to create beautiful and powerful designs and manage their entire business.”
UtilityAPI has noticed that the era of ‘kitchen table sales’ — or face-to-face sales meetings with customers, sitting together at the proverbial kitchen table — has come to an abrupt halt. But solar installers are searching for the thing that will replace it.
“People who used to do door-to-door sales are finding us now,” said Lynne Wander, chief operating officer of UtilityAPI.
In order for solar providers to propose projects to their customers, they need to answer a series of common questions: How much will a proposed improvement cost? How much energy will I save? UtilityAPI gives them the data they need in order to answer those questions accurately and quickly, without having to meet with the client in-person.\
News item from UtilityAPI
Tell Us What You Think!