Dazed and Confused by Solar Power?

Image by 1BOGPHOENIX

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Solar power lovers of the world, unite!

That could be the motto for the solar power collective, 1BOG—if co-founder Dave Llorens cared about things like mottos. 1BOG is an acronym for “One Block Off the Grid,” a concept Llorens explained over lunch recently in Phoenix where he was finalizing a decision on which of the many solar installation companies in the Valley of the Sun would be 1BOG’s “preferred installer.”

(They announced their decision yesterday: REC Solar, Inc.)

 

The part of the concept that’s most easily grasped is the CostCo Principle: You get a better price when you buy in volume.

“Obviously, price is very important,” said Llorens. “We want to make sure our customers get a good deal for their money.”

1BOG Man Llorens1BOG Man Llorens

It’s hard for a typical homeowner to buy enough solar panels to get a hefty price break. Few of us have roofs capable of supporting 5,000 panels, even if we could use a thousand kW of electricity. (What? You’re not running a super-computer yet?)

1BOG solves that problem by pooling homeowners’ need for PV. The 15% price break they eventually negotiated in Phoenix allows them to take “one block off the grid” at a time, at least conceptually. (Buyers don’t actually have to live on the same block — although the idea has a certain appeal of its own.)

There’s something more important than price, though.

“What we really offer,” says Llorens, “is a more comfortable way to go solar.” Roof-mounted PV systems are not new, but the growth of the industry has skyrocketed, and that’s had the unfortunate consequence of presenting would-be solar buyers with a bewildering number of choices: of panel types, system sizes, incentives to apply for and firms to install the array. 1BOG streamlines and untangles the process. In essence, you’re only making one major decision: to use 1BOG or not.

At a little over one year old, 1BOG understands that for their company to survive, they have to build a solid foundation of credibility themselves.

“Right now there are close to 15,000 1BOG members looking to put solar panels on their homes,” says Llorens. “We think that’s a pretty strong endorsement of our program, just a year out of the gate.”

You can visit the 1BOG site, here.

(I’ve posted a longer piece about 1BOG and REC Solar at The Phoenix Sun.)

—————–

Osha Gray Davidson is a contributing blogger at Mother Jones and publisher of The Phoenix Sun, an online news service reporting on solar energy. He tweets @thephoenixsun.

 

 

 

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate