Solar is Contagious: You Are 200% More Likely to Go Solar if Your Neighbor Installs
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Having a Neighbor with Solar Panels Increases Your Chances of Going Solar by Over 200 Percent.
It’s intuitive, but now there’s proof that having solar nearby makes it more likely that you’ll install panels yourself.
Our company began with this very notion, right after original founders Sylvia Ventura and Dan Barahona had solar panels installed on their own San Francisco home and discovered that their neighbors were hungry for advice on the process. Sylvia and Dan decided the solar industry itself needed a mechanism to produce this kind of neighborly advice, so they started One Block Off the Grid.
Fast forward a few years, and we were curious whether a more quantitative, analytical approach would back up our grassroots foundation, so we did a little in-house research to find out what effect, if any, the presence of solar systems have on neighborhoods. What we found is eye-opening: if you have a neighbor with solar panels on his or her house, you’re more than twice as likely to go solar yourself than if none of your neighbors have solar. We determined this by surveying an area block by block area and examining the distribution of home solar systems.
