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For more than a decade, it’s been clear that Americans pay much more for rooftop solar power than Europeans, Australians, and others. We have much higher “soft costs,” including much higher “customer acquisition” costs. Part of it, as well, is the sales process and sales tactics leading to … not the best deals at times. Someone who has been in the solar industry but far away from the consumers sales side of things for a long time has decided to change this. And, look, people here know I am not the most gung-ho about AI (for a lot of reasons). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some brilliant, useful applications of AI. This certainly is one. Let’s get into it.
First of all, the company is AgentSolar AI, and the founder, Tursun Ablekim, has a history working at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and First Solar. Ablekim cuts to the heart of the matter and makes the point clear in an interview with pv magazine: “What is the point of a scientist spending years making a solar panel 1% more efficient if those gains are immediately wiped out by a sales process that adds 30% or 40% in ‘soft costs’ to the final price? We don’t have a hardware problem; we have an information and efficiency problem.” Word.
