Software can drastically improve the economics of commercial solar

Commercial solar has always been the weak sister in the U.S. solar market — but Extensible Energy, a Berkeley startup, believes its software can drastically improve the economics of commercial installations. Residential solar had a record 712 MW third quarter in the U.S and the contracted utility-scale solar pipeline is about 45 GW, the highest U.S. total ever, according to Wood Mackenzie. Languishing in the middle is the commercial sector, which actually contracted in 2018 and 2019, due to unfavorable rate structures and incentives in states like California, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York. Historic remedies to improve the lot of commercial solar attempted to reduce transaction costs and speed up development timelines — but that’s proven less than effective. Commercial PV will never be a standardized install.