Our Mission.
Our mission is residential decarbonization.
It’s not immediately obvious why re-igniting rooftop solar is so critical to residential decarbonization, so we’ve tried to connect these dots below.
Decarbonization requires electrification. The lion’s share of our residential carbon footprints arise from 3 uses: cars, space heating and water heating. Powering these 3 energy loads with electricity generated from renewables is well understood to be the path to decarbonized homes. Decarbonizing the residential sector is absolutely crucial to meeting city, state, national, and global climate targets. Unfortunately, it is hard for many of us to justify electrifying these energy loads when the electricity rates we pay are some of the highest in the world, and rising faster and faster.
Electrification requires affordable electricity. PG&E raised our rates 13% already in 2024 and have requested state approval for another large rate hike in November (2024). Nearly all expert forecasts predict utility rates in the US to continue to rise in the coming decade, with California’s major utilities expected to retain the title of most expensive electricity providers in the country. With such high electricity rates, its hard for homeowners to recover the investment in EVs, heat pumps, or electric (heat pump) water heaters. We need to increase access to lower electricity costs to create the financial incentives for homeowners to electrify.
Affordable electricity requires rooftop solar. With the sunshine we have in the SF bay area, solar is by far the lowest cost means of generating clean electricity here. Given we have great sunshine and suffer unusually high PG&E electricity rates, it is surprising that Potrero Hill (and many surrounding neighborhoods) have < 10% residential rooftop solar adoption as of 2024. Compare this to rooftop solar leaders like Australia and Germany, where nationwide average adoption rates have already reached ~40% and continue to rise. Not only are we behind, but falling further behind every day. Residential solar policy / billing changes passed in California in 2022 have led to a sharp slowdown in solar adoption (see FAQ for more on this). The broader California solar industry is responding to these policy changes by laying off half their workforce, lobbying for policy change, and suing the parties responsible. In truth, the policy changes are good for decarbonization in the long run, we just need the rooftop solar industry to step up, get creative, learn from other countries, and make it work.
Rooftop solar requires innovative, new business models. We desperately need new business models in California’s rooftop solar industry in order to reverse the adoption trend from sharp slowdown to sharp acceleration. Potrero Solar was founded to address this need, and spur the California rooftop solar industry to step up.
Read the FAQ to learn more about the problems in the US residential solar industry, and how our solar program attempts to fix them.