I have a startup in solar software, and the big thing that I don't think people here realize is that 64% of the installed cost of solar in the U.S. is soft costs (i.e. not hardware)[1]. The industry is incredibly inefficient when it comes to customer acquisition, marketing, distribution, project development, permitting, monitoring, analytics. etc. There's a huge effort by the DOE[2] and the industry itself[3] to attack soft costs with software and process improvements. The vast majority of innovation in solar over the next decade will be in software.

However, strangely, much of the startup community remains uninvolved. Why? The solar industry is expected to grow by 100-200x over the next 30-40 years[4], even when it's already a $14 billion dollar industry[5]. And yet, this week in SF, there's a huge solar conference[6], and I personally know most of the software companies there (there's only a few dozen of us). Why isn't more of the startup community coming in an "disrupting" solar software along side us? We just got $100k in free money from the DOE. We closed a seed round in less than 6 weeks. Pretty much every solar software company we know (including us) is hiring. Yet when I go to normal bay area startup events, no one there has any any clue that solar is taking off like a rocket ship and their biggest pain points right now are completely solvable with software.

Come join us. In the last few years, the solar industry reached "grid parity", which means that the unsubsidized installed cost is now cheaper than buying power from the grid. That's why this industry is the fastest growing industry in the country. This isn't some subsidy-dependent industry anymore. We work hard and we make real money (while conveniently also saving the planet).

[1]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware-costs

[2]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/soft-costs

[3]: http://www.solarindustrymag.com/e107_plugins/content/content...

[4]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/

[5]: http://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-industry-data

[6]: https://www.intersolar.us/en/home.html