InterSolar US’09: Where is the Customer?

On July 13th, I attended one of the conferences at InterSolarUS: GreenTech Media’s “Growth Opportunities in the New PV Market”. As I witnessed the various presentations go by, one after the other, I went from being surprised to a mild state of shock: Between 9am and 4pm, there was only one – 1 – mention of the word “customer” from any of the presenters – and that came from SunPower’s Julie Blunden, VP Public Policy and Corporate Communications during a panel discussion. It wasn’t that I came there to count, but as a marketer I was pretty sure that a conference with the word “growth” in the title would involve the buying audience at least 50% of the time, but that wasn’t to be.

Thankfully, late in the day there were two panels that both had participants that seemed more concerned with the demand side of the solar market and could offer the audience insightful comments with regards to market development. Among them were Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena, Jeff Wolfe, CEO of groSolar and Chad Sachs, SVP at Renewable Ventures who gave the audience great value for their time.

The thing about solar customers – apart from the fact that they buy solar systems – is that they are also voters (in the case of farmers and residential customers), taxpayers and investors. So not only do they pay our salaries either through direct investment in our companies or by buying our products – but they also elect the politicians that regulate our market, which suggests to me that we cannot continue to ignore them without risking both our own livelihood and the future of our industry.

Illustration photo by David Blaikie