Market data, policy, and dealer economics — written for the reps and owners doing the selling. By the team building GRID.
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A module cost $128 a watt in 1975 and about 26 cents in 2024. SunPower, Titan, Mosaic, Sunnova and Freedom Forever all went under in twenty-four months while the country installed near-record volume. Four policy shocks in eight years produced four dips and four recoveries. That is not what a fad looks like.
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Berkeley Lab found median prices among the top 100 residential installers running from $2.60 to $5.90 a watt for comparable systems. Battery cells hit $70/kWh while installed batteries sit near $1,000. Almost none of that spread is hardware — here is what it is actually made of, and why GRID was built to shrink it.
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Wood Mackenzie has residential customer acquisition cost jumping 40% this year, from $0.60 to $0.84 a watt. Meanwhile four lead vendors can't agree what the same shared lead is worth within a factor of six. Here is what a lead actually costs you, what you inherit when you buy one, and the exact terms of GRID's 5/5/15 free-lead ladder.
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Every deal you close carries a stack of overrides above you — money for work you did. The barriers that used to justify that arrangement have mostly collapsed. Here's what owning a dealer org actually takes in 2026, who should do it, and who absolutely shouldn't.
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The safe-harbor scramble is over. Projects that began construction by July 4, 2026 carry the investment credit as far as 2030; everything that missed the line must be operating by the end of 2027. Your TPO partner's safe-harbor position is now your pricing forecast.
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Both numbers are on the same LADWP web page. The base energy charge hasn't moved since 2019 — every increase since then has been loaded into adjustment factors that most reps never read. If you're doing bill-versus-payment math off the published base rate, you're understating the utility by nearly 4x on the tier that matters.
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In California, the Home Improvement Salesperson registration is the difference between a rep a homeowner can verify with the state and a stranger with a pitch. Most reps treat it as paperwork. The smart ones treat it as leverage — at the door and at the negotiating table.
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Residential electricity averaged 18.56¢/kWh in March — up 8.6% in a year, with Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania jumping 20%+. The utility is writing your pitch for you. Here's the map, the sources, and how to use the numbers without stretching them.
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Ask a dealer owner what their software costs and they'll name two tools. The real number hides across six invoices and eight hours a week of admin glue. Here's how to find yours — and why the stack got this expensive without anyone deciding it should.
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The homeowner tax credit is gone — but the tax credit isn't. It moved to the other side of the contract. Leases and PPAs are now the volume play in residential solar, and the reps who understand the mechanics are closing deals their competitors are walking away from.
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The tax credit died, companies folded, and everyone wrote the obituary. Then SEIA's Q2 2026 report landed — residential installs UP 6% year-over-year, and solar was 91% of everything new on the grid. Here's what's actually happening, and what it means if you sell.
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