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Sungage’s integrated financing solution helps bridge the gap as solar sale value propositions change OpenSolar launched a partnership with Sungage Financial in the Fall of 2021 to bring an innovative integrated finance and design solution to residential solar installers across the United States. Since launch, hundreds of installers have activated the integration. The Sungage-OpenSolar integration helps installers streamline design, sales proposals, and financing applications all in one place – saving time, data re-entry, and the need to switch between multiple platforms to close a sale. A lot has changed since the launch. 2022 was a year of economic variability in the U.S., with interest rate changes, inflation, utility costs rising across the country, and a spike in mortgage rates. Meanwhile, it was also a landmark year for climate legislation with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Throughout these changes, the Sungage–OpenSolar integration remains a powerful sales tool for helping more homeowners realize their solar and energy autonomy. 2023 marks a new era of residential solar sales Economic angst and fears over a recession may give homeowners pause when considering if now is the right time to go solar or invest in energy storage. In reality, there’s never been a better time to make the switch! Why? Energy prices and utility rates continue to rise across the country. Solar and storage solutions provide energy autonomy to consumers, especially in inversely impacted markets like the Northeast, Hawaii, and Texas (and now, consumers in California impacted by NEM 3.0 changes). While the days of “0% loans” are something of the past, solar loans can still “lock in” an attractive alternative to monthly utility bills. With solar financing, customers can access consistent monthly payments, with a zero-down commitment. The solar industry continues to ride the wave of the IRA. The 30% Federal ITC is locked in for the next 10 years. Plus, there are new opportunities for solar + storage projects with the new storage investment tax credit, which now allows for standalone batteries. A powerful sales and proposal tool meets consumer-friendly and flexible financing With so much in flux on the “solar coaster,” Sungage and OpenSolar are here to help make solar installers’ lives easier. Sungage offers a wide range of flexible APRs and terms and is known for best-in-class customer service. Our team of dedicated Solar Finance Specialists (SFS) is experienced in getting projects to “notice to proceed” (NTP). Plus, they’re available to help homeowners throughout the entire financing process, from approval to energization. The Sungage–OpenSolar integration is free to all Sungage-approved installers, and getting started is easy. The integration automatically updates and manages solar loan APRs and pricing, so solar pros can be sure they’re always pulling from the most up-to-date Sungage solar loans. This helps pros focus on selling, knowing OpenSolar's back-end is doing all the compliance and entry work. With Sungage’s flexible credit application, homeowners can apply for financing in person or after a site visit with the shareable proposal feature. Once a customer is approved for financing within the OpenSolar platform, Sungage’s customer service becomes an extension of the installer partner’s team. Outlook for 2023 Despite bumps in the road, the year looks bright for residential solar and storage. Sungage and OpenSolar provide a unique combination of technological innovation and human touch – both of which are required to close a solar sale and provide a great customer experience. Providing streamlined, integrated solutions is a key priority for us at Sungage to help the solar pros we work with excel – while helping more homeowners go solar. The ongoing platform innovations we see from the OpenSolar team are impressive. Our integration provides a cost-effective option to help solar pros meet the ever-growing solar and energy storage demands of 2023 and beyond. Getting started with OpenSolar is quick, easy, and free. Sungage partners can activate financing within OpenSolar by contacting their account manager. Installers not yet partnered with Sungage can fill out this form to get started. Not using OpenSolar’s design and proposal software - offered completely free of charge? Create your account.

With the news of NEM 3.0 legislation in CA we have a seriously negative hit to the economics of solar in the largest US market - just when we should be ramping up under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Here’s an important solution for all US installers to be aware of: SolarAPP+. SolarAPP is the new national standard digital permitting process that automates permitting, saving you thousands of dollars per install in cities that have adopted, so you can maintain the economics to the customer and build margins. We need this across the US now to de-risk net metering. The legends at CALSSA just released this great 2 pager summarizing the new CA legislation - signed into law in 2022 - with what you can do as an installer to sign up. Register for an account and get started. Not a California resident? You can bring SolarAPP+ to your jurisdiction for free. If it’s not yet available in your community, you can contact your elected officials to ask for its implementation (it’s free!). California cities have until September this year to adopt SolarAPP (smaller <50,000 resident cities have an extra year), so this can help many CA businesses lower their cost base in 2023 just as NEM 3.0 rolls out. CALSSA estimate $1-5k savings per project, but I started SolarAPP+ 5 years ago because I’ve seen lower project costs in the $10,000s from automating permitting in multiple other countries! I think this will get the cost base to well under $2 per watt in the US. And I passionately believe we deserve this easy, low-cost, fast process to make growing your install business easier. Now’s the time to make it happen! You won't even need net metering anymore. IRA + SolarAPP + OpenSolar = Massive sustainable growth for US solar. Please join CALSSA and support them with your membership dollars to help them help your city migrate quickly to help you benefit: https://calssa.org/join-calssa. Curious to learn more about how to navigate NEM3 and win? Join our upcoming live webinars to see OpenSolar's leading NEM3 and battery modeling functionality up close with our partners.

In just five short years since launch, OpenSolar has become the world’s number one choice by solar professionals for system design and selling. As a mission-driven company, it’s incumbent upon us to share some of our success with underserved communities whose lives can also benefit from the transition to clean, reliable solar energy. That’s why OpenSolar is committing 1% of our annual revenues to projects that provide solar energy to vulnerable communities worldwide. We will be working with Empowered by Light, our non-profit partner, to carry out these projects. Each year, we will choose a collection of projects to install solar and storage technologies for vulnerable communities and people living on the front lines of climate change. For 2023, we have chosen the villages of Undi and Chutika in southern Zambia, where people walk between 200 and 600 feet per trip multiple times a day to collect water from the river for crop irrigation, sanitation, and drinking. This burden severely limits crop yield and quality of life, and continually exposes community members to dangerous encounters with crocodiles and hippos. With our 1% Commitment, we are installing solar-powered water pumps, irrigation and storage facilities in order to create a safer and more prosperous environment for the people of Undi and Chutika. This video lays out the problem we’re addressing, and the impact we expect it will have. Indeed, the impact that the solar industry can have on communities like this is profound, which is why we are inviting our partners and our solar installer community to participate in our 2023 project! To our esteemed partners, we invite you to contribute to the solar electrification of the two schools and health clinics at Undi and Chutika. Your donations in money and/or hardware will be deployed by Empowered by Light, and content will be produced from those deployments that you in turn can use to communicate with your stakeholders. To our solar installer community, we invite you to donate just US$10/month to Empowered by Light. In return, you will receive a compelling new exhibit in all of your solar proposals that shows your customers that you’re a company that cares, thus building your brand and improving your sales conversion. Here’s just some of the great content that your customers will see in your proposals: As the world accelerates its transition to solar energy, we believe that nobody should be left behind. That’s why you’ll see our 1% commitment grow and grow to support communities all over the world in the years to come. Please join us.

Solar is now the lowest cost electricity on earth - and we’re about to electrify everything, our cars, our heating, our lives. And so the world will once again be powered by sunshine, only this time with 8 billion humans living on it. It’s an insanely interesting time to be alive and in solar! But will it happen in time to avert runaway climate change? Manufacturers are scaling, the capital is there, demand for low cost energy has never been higher. And the arithmetic is simple: by scaling at 25% per annum we’ll hit 100% solar by the early 2040s. But how do we globally scale what is fundamentally millions of smaller-scale, local solutions? It is our belief at OpenSolar that you, the entrepreneurs selling and installing solar electrification locally, are the key to solving the global climate crisis. With this funding we’re going to double down on supporting your teams, your brands, your efficiencies, your growth - YOU are the heroes of the climate war, and we exist to make you successful. Adam & I started OpenSolar five years ago to have this exact impact. We’d built up decades of experience with solar and software around the world as early direct-to-consumer solar entrepreneurs ourselves, and we realized that we could build absolutely the best sales technology and services toolkit to help solar professionals to scale. But, rather than build regional sales and marketing teams to charge lots of money for the software and restrict its use, we decided to build the best technology and make it available to every solar professional everywhere in the world, at zero cost. We’ve set out to let solar professionals of all shapes and sizes configure the tool so it’s unique to your brand, with your content, your look and feel, digitally connected to whatever existing tools you currently use. The ‘Solar Pro’, as we call you, controls your own hardware, pricing, collateral, sales process, customer journey, team, your data, everything! It’s amazing to see how our white-label technology morphs into so many different looks out there now in over 130 countries, connected to thousands of Pros’ individual CRMs and systems, and in use on myriad devices! But common to every solar professional’s experience is the fastest, coolest and most accurate design and sales tool - and the best 24/7 support from our Pro Experience team. So that’s why we do what we do. And we’re becoming commercially successful too, to be a sustainable, long term partner to the world’s solar professionals. We now are proud to partner with 75 trusted hardware, finance and service providers, whose solutions are now integrated into your OpenSolar app. This brings a one-stop-shop efficiency to your business - everything in one place. These partners pay OpenSolar a revenue stream to connect their services to you - and that enables us to sustainably invest in new features and solutions for you, the solar professional, to keep it the best tech for free, forever. We truly think it’s a win-win. I’m really proud of how our team has come together to deliver this solution around the world! We’ve worked hard, and used our 250+ years of collective solar experience selling and installing - to get you what you need. We’ve grown to be the world’s leading solar design and sales platform. And today we’re announcing more resources applied to our mission, with US$15M of new capital invested into the business by an Aussie-US technology VC firm, Telstra Ventures, a European Sustainability fund, 2150, and a group of leading entrepreneur-investors. Because we don’t do fancy offices and branding campaigns or operate giant sales teams trying to lock installers into long-term contracts, we can continue to deliver the best tech with a lot less. In the months and years ahead, with this US$15M expect to see even more kick-ass features, more electrification, more configurability (more YOU), more post-sale solutions, and more awesome services from trusted partners in even more geographies - watch this space! Thanks to the team for getting us here, to the new investors for their commitment to our mission, and especially to you, our installer community for trusting us as your white-label growth machine, working away in the background to help you efficiently scale. Here’s to a restful and safe holidays, and then dialing it up for the next phase in the battle for a clean, safe and sustainable world! Birchy & the wonderful team of Openers P.s. if you’re interested in the formal press release announcing the funding, please take a look.

Because OpenSolar is growing so fast, we’re able to see changes in the solar industry sooner than most. We work closely with thousands of contractors, and in the USA we’ve seen a slowdown, after a very strong first half and summer. It’s not surprising. To combat inflation, we’ve just seen the fastest, steepest increase in interest rates in a generation, temporarily gumming up the works in the lending market and adding to the cost of monthly payments for solar. We also haven’t seen the full effect of rising energy prices in the US yet (Note: we see a very different picture in other parts of the world), so interest rates have had a bigger relative effect. This is the nature of the solarcoaster, as all of our brothers and sisters in the industry can attest. But this is a bump in the road - and the outlook for 2023 looks sunnier. The Fed is signaling a shift to lower interest rate increases, so we anticipate that the chaos in the lending market will settle down substantially. Add to that the increase in the price of electricity in the US that will start to hit home over the coming months, and with that - and supportive policy - you have the perfect recipe for an imminent and positive uptick in solar sales and installation activity again in 2023. Underpinning all of it of course are the tailwinds from the Inflation Reduction Act. The Solar Investment Tax Credit has been increased from 26% to 30%. The 30% applies to both business and residential projects, including projects installed in 2022, and will last until the end of 2032. Energy storage projects were previously ineligible for tax credits unless they were connected directly to solar power projects. The Inflation Reduction Act removes these requirements, and allows energy storage projects to receive the same 30% tax credit, even if they are stand-alone facilities. Batteries connected to a solar power project will continue to qualify for the credit. And even supply chain woes are showing signs of easing, with significantly more optionality for US installers in the medium term, at least $25.7 billion in new US clean-energy factories in the works, and 500GW of global solar supply en route by the end of 2023. The crew at OpenSolar has seen these cycles countless times before. With more than 222 years of combined experience in the solar industry, we’re quietly plugging away without getting too stressed about it. And because we charge Solar Installers $0 for our end-to-end software, our biggest focus is on helping them transfer to our platform. As the industry goes through its ups and downs, they’re realizing that they can insulate themselves by removing $1000’s to $100,000s from their annual costs, but still enjoy the very best class-leading software.

I’m delighted to be a guest author on OpenSolar’s blog today. I love their vision of a world powered by sunshine by 2050. Free software can enable more of the world’s contractors to sell and install more solar electrification to more homeowners and businesses, more of the time. OpenSolar is an excellent example of the kind of “scale tech” innovation that the climate needs. We need a wake up call for climate technology. Relying on so many so-called breakthroughs to solve climate change is distracting us from the biggest opportunity. The technologies required to solve climate change are already among us. What they lack is scale. And they need more than just infrastructure money to scale. We need “Scale Tech”-- rapid iterations on existing technologies, financial innovation, and the magic of software – to solve the climate crisis. The core technologies are available to have a major climate impact within 15 years. The combination of solar, wind, and various storage technologies (batteries and perhaps hydrogen) need to be scaled up to get us to a clean grid, supporting the existing hydro and nuclear power. Electrification of transportation can have outsized climate impact by focusing on high-mileage vehicles. Improvements in land management and agricultural technologies can sequester carbon in soils and plant material. One proof point is the history of technology and the success of climate tech in the last 15 years. The big accomplishments of greenhouse gas reduction and wealth creation were due to scale tech not breakthroughs. The same is true of virtually all other technology fields. Why should the future of climate tech be any different? Almost 15 years ago I led a study, “The Gigaton Throwdown” to understand the obstacles to solve climate change through various pathways. Many of the approaches, such as biofuels, required breakthroughs. They didn’t happen. What worked instead was scale tech. Cars were electrified by cribbing the technology of cell phone batteries. Solar and wind got cheap through a gazillion incremental improvements plus clever software and financial innovations. And government support was critical to it all. Tesla is a scale tech business. Tesla didn’t get to its current position with a technology breakthrough of the sort expected from companies pursuing “deep tech” like fusion or biofuels. A crucial advance was to create technology that can use lithium ion batteries, which at the time were used for laptops and cell phones. At the time, traditional automakers were stuck searching for “deep tech” breakthroughs in batteries and fuel cells. Tesla used software to scale the lithium ion battery cells used in laptops for use in automobiles. Solar installations have grown at exponential rates because of scale tech innovation. Sunrun, one of the solar industry’s most successful companies, created new software to enable solar installations to happen faster and cheaper than anyone thought possible 15 years ago. Enphase, a pioneer of solar microinverters, leveraged the advances in microelectronics to create better, safer solar panels. Both of these companies exploited advances in other fields and developed their own technology to integrate and adapt those advancements. Scale tech is not the absence of technology. It is innovation to speed the scaling of existing proven technologies and techniques. It requires recognizing that certain technologies are getting better with scale and finding ways to pushing them forward. It requires brilliance and creativity including using existing technology in new ways. In aggregate, scale tech creates breakthroughs including the staggering gains in price and efficiency of solar, wind, and batteries in the last several decades. We do not get another 15 years without major reductions in global emissions. We need to focus the energies of engineers, company builders, and investors on scale tech. If we do, 15 years from now, people will be slack jawed at how fast things improve. Like how quickly electricity decarbonizes, and that we make major cuts of carbon emissions from transportation and industry. And that agriculture and forestry become a massive sequestration method for carbon. A major improvement in climate is within our collective grasp. We need the proper focus to grab it. The original version of this post was on Sunil Paul’s Linkedin and can be found here. Follow him for more on scale tech.

We sat down with Guy Olian, CEO of Smart Ease, to find out more about how offering payment solutions can support solar pros in selling commercial jobs. Could you tell us a bit about Smart Ease? One of the biggest obstacles stopping businesses from installing solar has always been the upfront cost. We started Smart Ease so that we could tackle that obstacle, head on, by offering payment plans. Our application and approval process is super fast – around 4 minutes – which means that busy business owners can get their solar installed quickly and start saving straight away. Why is having Smart Ease available in OpenSolar great for solar installers? It changes the conversation that installers are having with their commercial customers. It turns the obstacle of cost into an opportunity for smart money-management. With rapidly rising power bills around the world, solar can often pay for itself via electricity bill savings. This makes it a much easier decision – $0 upfront and often cash-flow positive from day 1 (as shown below). When installers introduce payment plans early in the sales process, business owners know that they have options (which can often be tax-beneficial) for paying for their solar. Even if they have the cash to invest upfront, they generally prefer to hang onto it. The process is seamless. In a few simple clicks, a Smart Ease payment plan is integrated as part of the proposal. Installers can move from proposal to payment plan approval within the one platform. The customer can even click through to sign the payment plan agreements – all within OpenSolar . What are some of the interesting installations Smart Ease has been involved in? The range of businesses that we’ve been able to help with solar installations is vast. We’ve provided payment plans across all industries and business types, from outback cattle stations to bayside wineries, food manufacturing businesses to supermarkets and local grocers. We help schools and charities, bowls clubs and breweries – even New Zealand’s most-loved peanut butter brand! What’s your advice for selling solar in trickier times? Get comfortable with offering your commercial customers payment options. Help your customers understand that on a payment plan, they can hold onto their cash and still get energy-saving equipment. With rising energy costs, reducing electricity overheads will be one of the many ways business owners can manage their cash flow. Learn more about the Smart Ease and OpenSolar integration. Not yet using OpenSolar to grow your business? Register for your free account.

We’ve heard your feedback and are excited to share what we’ve recently built with your help. This release includes some serious design and proposal tool polish like enhanced heatmaps, 3D designs for custom or uploaded imagery, easily shareable proposal links and more to make that next deal just a bit easier to get out the door and close. We hope you enjoy these updates and are able to make use of them as best fits your business! Save time and simplify your design considerations with our enhanced heatmaps feature. Enjoy our enhanced colour scheme which now shows the actual shading impact of nearby objects in the 3D imagery, like trees, and lets you see how much sun every square inch of the property gets with just the click of a button. Both the loading time and quality of the sun access assessment are significantly improved so you can create even more efficient solar designs and layouts in less time. Please check our help center for a tour of this new and improved feature. Get proposals in front of your customers quicker with shareable proposal links. You can now easily copy the proposal link and paste it into an email or text so you can share proposals faster, simplify the solar shopping experience, and increase the odds that your proposal is viewed almost immediately after being sent. Please check our help center for a tour of this new feature. You can now overcome inadequate imagery due to new construction, spotty coverage, or anything else and get all the benefits of OpenSolar’s 3D modeling engine on custom or uploaded imagery. Just pull the new imagery straight into your design and create an accurate, realistic 3D proposal for the projects that need that extra bit of effort. Please check our help center for a tour of this new feature. Our horizon shading feature makes it easy to upload your horizon files (.hor file type) and model the shading impacts of far away objects (e.g. mountains) on your solar array. Create accurate and thorough designs for your customers so that you can be confident in the production values and savings estimates. Please check our help center for a tour of this feature. You asked, we listened. OpenSolar now supports accurately modeling microinverters that connect to multiple panels (e.g. 2:1 or 4:1). Forget the workarounds and create more accurate designs and proposals for your customers in less time. Please see this article to see how the Number of MPPTs field is now used for multi-panel micro inverters. Other Enhancements There are a wide range of other improvements for your use, available now. See the full release notes for more information. Our team continues to work hard to ensure that you have the tools you need to sell solar as efficiently as possible, and we are continually listening to your insights for ways we can improve the app even further. We always appreciate the constructive feedback that you provide. If you ever have any questions, please contact us at support@opensolar.com. Have a sunny day, Dion Product Designer, OpenSolar

I am excited to share a major milestone in America’s journey to reduce solar costs. It has been nearly 5 years since I started SolarAPP+ - the campaign to automate permitting in the US. Thanks to a lot of late nights from tons of amazing solar people and a huge effort across a consortium of solar friendly organisations, we’ve won our first legislative victory! Governor Newsom just signed automated permitting into CA law! This sets CA on a path to halve the cost of home solar to the levels we have in most other countries around the world today. SolarAPP+ is an online, automated process to grant instant solar permits to contractors, live today in 22 cities that have adopted the technology. This law requires CA cities to migrate to SolarAPP+ (or equivalent) over the next couple of years. Please join CalSSA with your membership dollars and in supporting your city to migrate quickly so you can install the next day and save thousands of dollars in Opex - all while maintaining the quality, safety, and code standards through the approved SolarAPP+ process. In combination with IRA, we have a real opportunity to scale affordable, clean energy to every home in CA - and hopefully soon the entire US - as we look to migrate SolarAPP+ across the country with supporters like Secretary Granholm and the amazing solar state associations. Thank you to everyone involved, especially CalSSA & NREL. Plenty of times it looked like we wouldn’t get there but, as always, perseverance wins out (and it helps being on the right side of history). You can read more about the legislation here. Cheers, Birchy

Another rate hike from the Fed at the end of July and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act near the start of August, proved, once again, that there's never a dull moment in solar - or solar finance! Although inflation appears to have leveled off (we hope), analysts expect further rate increases from the Fed in the coming months; we expect further rate increases and product changes from solar lenders as they keep up with the Fed and the broader economy, as well. With that in mind, the best strategy is to sell while the sellin's good! With future rate increases on the horizon, the loan offerings (i.e. term, APR, dealer fees) you have today may be the best you have for some time. We'd definitely encourage you to lock those in where you can by getting your customers approved for finance! Getting approved faster Thanks to integrated financing on OpenSolar, you can take your customers from credit application to a decision in about five minutes. In August, solar pros using integrated finance spent an average of 4:45 minutes filling out the credit application and took just 44 more seconds to receive a credit decision right there in the OpenSolar app! The reason is simple - the entire process of applying for credit, getting approval and signing the contract is all done on the OpenSolar proposal. No multiple apps, no double data entry. Just a simple, easy checkout process for your customer. Every minute counts when it comes to closing a deal with a solar customer. The difference between getting your customer approved through OpenSolar integrated financing and going through typical financing channels could be the difference of a sale being won or lost. Summary Of course, I’m biased, but it’s not without proof. If you want to make the most of your sales pipeline by month’s end, you need to be offering solar financing through OpenSolar. The Integrated Financing feature is an easy and quick way to offer your customers competitive financing options. Get more of your clients to say “yes” to solar while the getting’s good.

Ever feel like it’s impossible these days to just get in and get out when you need something without burning a hole in the wallet? Operating a successful solar business has never been remotely easy, and today there are even more monthly or annual subscriptions, lengthy contracts, expiring free trials, disclaimers and limitations than ever before. We get it, it ain’t easy, and it’s bad for business. At OpenSolar, we take the ‘Open’ in our name seriously. For us, ‘Open’ means honesty, visibility, choice, flexibility. Solar professionals today are constantly battling with large overhead costs and a lack of control in a competitive and uncertain market. Today, as a member of the OpenSolar product team, I’m very happy to say that we’ve taken a big step towards empowering solar professionals to win deals, save time and enjoy total flexibility when choosing high resolution premium Nearmap imagery and 3D data sets for their proposals. OpenSolar has extended our offering to support pay-per-project functionality for purchasing high-quality Nearmap imagery and 3D data sets. This allows for quick-and-easy access to premium imagery through OpenSolar’s wallet functionality. We are introducing the pay-per-project feature which will allow you to purchase premium images on a per project basis while allowing OpenSolar Pros to benefit directly from OpenSolar’s high volume purchasing power and enjoy very competitive pricing. One of the key tenets that draws value in this feature is convenience since the solar pro is charged for what they use rather than having to pay a monthly subscription fee. Pay-per-project Premium Imagery As mentioned above, you can now purchase premium high-quality images on a per project basis. OpenSolar Pros will have an OpenSolar Wallet in which they will be able to add funds and these funds will be directly spent on premium imagery. The Admin has the capability to provide access to other Pros in the organization where they can give access to Pros depending on their role. Additionally, a new control field is added to roles and permissions where the admin can give access to the Pros in the org by using the option of view, create, edit, delete. Wallet Wallet is a new functionality that allows organizations to add funds on their org account that can be used in real time to purchase premium imagery on per project basis. Admins have the capability to either top-up funds manually each time or use the auto top-up feature. Additionally, Wallet Activity functionality will allow Pros to check the transaction details which includes the purchase details and top-up amount information. With this Pros have the ability to filter the transactions and can download a CSV file for it. If you’d like to learn more about accessing high-quality Nearmap aerial imagery on a pay-per-project basis on OpenSolar check out www.opensolar.com/premium-imagery. If you have any questions at all feel free to get in touch with us support@opensolar.com. If you would like to get started with your free OpenSolar account, click here. Have a sunny day! Ishan Technical Product Specialist

As we all know, getting solar can be hard. Comparing products can be complex. Installations can be complicated. And cost continues to be a major barrier. Our research shows that one in three Aussies without solar have not yet installed it because they believe it’s too expensive. To help homeowners make the switch to solar we need to make it as simple and easy as possible. We can do this by removing two key barriers, the large upfront cost and the complexity of installing solar. This is why I started Brighte. In 2009, our family installed solar and soon after started seeing energy bill savings of up to 50%. I wanted these benefits available to everyone. But back then, solar was expensive and finance options were limited, putting solar out of reach for many households. By speaking with solar retailers, I heard what their problems were and saw a gap in the market for fast and affordable point of sale finance. I was determined to solve the accessibility issue so the benefits of solar could be experienced by more households. I was so committed to this goal, I eventually left my day job, remortgaged our home and went all in on building Brighte. Fast forward to today and we are at a unique tipping point. The energy market is transitioning and it is companies like Brighte and OpenSolar that are at the forefront of this big change. We’re on the brink of a solar surge, with more Aussies looking for ways to lower their bills and their impact on the planet. Finance is even more important today with family budgets under pressure on many fronts. Brighte’s no interest payment plan solves the affordability issue by allowing customers to split the large upfront cost into more manageable payments to be paid over time. When it comes to addressing complexity, companies like Brighte and OpenSolar are there to support customers to ensure that they are equipped with adequate information to make informed decisions. We do this by sharing knowledge with our vendors. Having been a part of the solar sector for almost a decade now, our talented team has accumulated a deep knowledge of the industry and we have shared our expertise and insights to ensure that our vendors’ business thrives. We have recently created a number of comprehensive guides featuring content on rebates and finance tips, to help our vendors meet the growing solar demand and to weather the economic storm ahead. And as more households consider installing solar, Brighte and OpenSolar will continue to support both customers and vendors. Together Brighte and OpenSolar are streamlining and simplifying the entire solar process for homeowners and installers. The result is more deals, more jobs, more solar - and a better planet. *Fees, terms, conditions and lending criteria apply