Solar non-hardware costs – the aggregation of all the time, effort, and fees expended while dealing with myriad people and processes – are now the greatest barrier to achieving national SunShot price and deployment targets. This “soft cost” challenge is nothing new; the sciences of innovation diffusion and market transformation have a rich tradition of seeding innovative programs that make energy technologies cheaper, faster, and easier to adopt. The advent of big data, predictive tools, and controlled field experiments has the potential to present a better solution set. This new science could be a game changer for how solar practitioners approach soft cost reduction. In this breakout session, the state of the art in soft cost science will be presented and open questions about the future of the science will be discussed.

Speaker Presentations:
  • "Learning-by-Doing in Solar Photovoltaic Installations," Prof. Bryan Bollinger, Assistant Professor of Marketing at New York University Stern School of Business
  • "The Soft Costs of Solar: How Social Science Can Inform Customer Acquisition," Dr. Dena Gromet, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
  • "Towards an Emergent Model of Technology Adoption for Accelerating the Diffusion of Residential Solar PV," Prof. Varun Rai, Assistant Professor, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
  • "Reducing Customer Acquisition Soft Costs through Randomized Controlled Experiments," Dr. Kim Wolske, Research Management Fellow, Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan

Download presentation files below.