With “hundreds” of installations in the last year, solar roofer GAF Energy and its parent company, global roofing manufacturer Standard Industries, claim they’re getting their product to market faster than Tesla Energy, just months after they announced their entry into the U.S. market.
“We believe that roofing and solar products are on a trajectory to merge,” GAF Vice President of Sales Robert Lahey told Greentech Media last week.
“There are a lot of folks trying to make that killer product. I don’t think anyone has solved it yet,” he added. “But I believe we have…the best roofing-integrated product out there on the market today.”
Standard Industries introduced its “roof-integrated” DecoTech solar energy system in 2017, then formed GAF earlier this year to carry the product. Since then, “while much of the attention around solar roofs has focused on Tesla, GAF Energy has been quietly deploying its solar roofing systems,” Greentech reports. “Tesla had installed only 21 solar roofs as of February 2019 in the service territories of California’s three largest investor-owned utilities, the nation’s largest residential solar market, records show.”
Neither company was prepared to release specific deployment numbers, but a Tesla spokesperson said the public numbers for its installations were low and unrepresentative.
The GAF Energy product is recognizable as solar paneling but sits flush against a roof, “in contrast to Tesla’s sleek tile-like solar roof,” Greentech says. GAF’s strategy is to “massively increase the penetration of residential solar by cutting down on customer acquisition and installation costs,” the trade publication adds, and it’s an area where the company “has a unique advantage” over most solar firms: “Rather than signing up customers through traditional channels like door-to-door sales or in-store marketing, it finds them when they’re shopping for a new roof, using leads from its broader roofing business.”
Lahey said the approach cuts the customer acquisition costs that Wood Mackenzie Power and Renewables has identified as the most expensive part of a home solar system, at about US$0.65 per watt.
“Most people get solar today by proactively getting sold solar by a solar company,” but “it’s flipped with our equation,” Lahey said. “We’re essentially merging the product itself—both solar and roof—and we’re merging the customer experience,” producing “a lot of optimization for all parties.”
