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Realtors often think of solar as a four-letter word. So how do we change that?

Today’s episode was recorded live in front of an audience and features two guests:

John Nichols is a realtor with Lokation Real Estate who has had some frustrating experiences with solar energy systems during home transactions.

Kate Collardson has two decades in the solar industry under her belt, and now runs a solar inspection and service business that helps give home-buyers peace of mind.

If you own solar, want to own solar, or might someday buy or sell a house that has solar on the roof, this is for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Connect with John on LinkedIn here.

Connect with Kate on LinkedIn here.

Watch Kate’s first appearance on the show here: We Can Fix Solar’s Recycling Problem.

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Why a paid-off solar system can add $10,000 to $30,000 to a home’s appraised value.
The single most important thing to demand before you buy a house with solar panels.
How you can find service and production records for solar panels on homes (even if the company that installed them is out of business).

“What I’ve learned is that realtors generally think of solar as a four-letter word. They think it mucks up the transaction, throws off the debt-to-income ratio, it’s a mess, it’s a nightmare. And so hoping to ease that, as an industry.”

— Kate Collardson

“I don’t know if I’d say it’s a four-letter word. I do think solar is great. But I just think if it was teed up the right way, it would make all the difference in the world.”

— John Nichols

Aaron Nichols: Hello everyone, and welcome to Buying and Selling Homes With Solar. For anyone who’s listening on Substack or any podcast platform, welcome to This Week In Solar, what is now widely considered the world’s most important podcast. Wait, wait, pass him the mic.

John Nichols: Aaron is my son, and there was a finder’s fee, I had to bribe him to get on such a popular show. So I’m really honored.

Aaron Nichols: I believe what you said was that this is the pinnacle of your life.

John Nichols: By far the pinnacle, yes. A definite high point.

Aaron Nichols: All right. So I have invited John and Kate. Kate’s been on the show before. Kate now has a business servicing solar energy systems, and my father, John Nichols, is a realtor who has had a couple of headaches he’s told me about with solar energy systems during home transactions. So I want to invite both of them, record a conversation with some questions that I got from people, and then do some Q&A with you guys. How does that sound?

Kate Collardson: Woo. Amazing.

Aaron Nichols: So, first question, either of you can take it, but please pass the microphone to whoever will take it, because it’s a low-budget show. What are some common misconceptions homeowners have about solar panels when it’s time to buy or sell a house?

Kate Collardson: I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that because it passed inspection, it was necessarily installed correctly. Sometimes there are things that do in fact break.

A lot of people assume that it’s working because it’s up there. They don’t necessarily check their monitoring as much as they should. They don’t pass on the monitoring information to the new homeowner. And home buyers don’t think to ask for it.

So that’s one, monitoring, and then just kind of assuming that all installations are quality installations. That’s not necessarily true, sadly. For the most part the equipment is usually fine. Every once in a while things will fail. But we do run into some poorly installed systems every once in a while.

John Nichols: I’ll piggyback on what Kate said, because I really believe that’s true. A lot of people make quite a few assumptions, and it can run the gamut. It can be, “Wow, they have solar, that’s great, I’m going to be saving a lot of money”, just kind of trusting the system, thinking of it as a black box. It just works. Or in some cases you get this feeling of dread: what is this going to mean? That panel is broken. I’ve heard bad things about solar. How much extra am I going to pay for it?

So it really comes down to, number one, as a realtor, when we visit a home, we hope the listing agent has done a good job of educating the public and the other realtors ahead of time. Saying this is owned, this is leased, here’s what the payment is, providing some utility bills, that type of thing. But in many instances there’s just not a lot of information going in. So like everything else, a regular inspection, a solar inspection, a sewer inspection, you really need to dig in and find out what we have.

I think one of the biggest frustrations I run into as a realtor, and I think that’s echoed by my buyers, is that we just don’t know if the system is actually worth the payments, or worth the payoff. And we don’t know if it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do. There have been times where we get some utility bills and we get kind of a before and after, and when I’m speaking to the buyers about the whole thing, we’re all confused. It’s as though the solar is not really doing what it’s supposed to do.

I’m sure Kate has run into a lot of situations where the solar is just not working, and yet the home has been advertised as having solar. So again, you run into either excitement because it exists, assuming that it is producing energy and will save them money, or they’re just not sure what to think. In many cases it’s kind of a negative reaction.

Aaron Nichols: To jump off what you said a little bit and ask you a question, Kate: when someone’s in a situation where the solar might not actually be working, not everyone has access to someone like you who specifically fixes broken solar energy systems. And for us as an installer, though we do service them, for something like a real estate transaction, for us to come out and check if it was working or not would be quite expensive and probably wouldn’t be worth our time.

So how does the average homeowner usually find out if a system is working?

Kate Collardson: Right. There are folks out there who do inspections. And there are home inspectors, obviously, who inspect the whole home. But when they go to a system, they don’t necessarily know more than “that panel is cracked,” or “I see a red light, maybe it should be green.” Or maybe it should be red, and they don’t necessarily know.

You have to have the credentials, to have done the trainings, to be able to go into the monitoring. So there’s a specialized group of folks — like your company, that can do that, that have access to that.

And so it is important, I would say, to get these checked out when you’re buying. Even if you’re selling your home, it’s worth getting the inspection done and being able to say everything’s good. You add that to your listing, right? I think it’s definitely worth doing that. There are folks around who will hop up on your roof and check out your system.

John Nichols: First of all, I’m very excited that I’ve connected with Kate, because since being a realtor in 2019, since 2019, I really haven’t found someone who can focus on inspecting the solar. And I think that’s really important.

So for the most part, what I’ve been doing is: we only have the utility bills, we have the disclosures, the seller’s property disclosure, any information from the agent, and then our own regular inspection. The inspector can go on the roof and say the solar panel is loose, or the solar panel is cracked. But there really has not been anyone so far that I’ve been able to rely on to really inspect the solar.

So I think she’s onto something, and I hope to use her services. I think this is a really important service that needs to be provided, so that buyers can feel good about the system, or be able to object and ask the seller to do something before they purchase the home.

Aaron Nichols: So, John Nichols of Location Real Estate, Dad, a follow-up question for you. Is this something you think can be rolled into the closing costs?

Because the company I work for, Exact Solar, is one of the only companies in our region that will service systems we did not install. But just coming out to check if a system is working is probably something we either wouldn’t be interested in, or if we were interested, would be quite expensive, to send a van and a technician.

So is this something you think could be rolled into closing costs, so that someone isn’t having to pay for it upfront? Or is this, do you think, a cost that’s going to come out of someone’s pocket right away?

John Nichols: I think for right now it would have to come out of somebody’s pocket. It would just be part of the due diligence that a buyer needs to take care of.

When I’m working with buyers, we talk about: let’s do a radon test, let’s do a sewer scope, let’s do a top-to-bottom inspection of the house. But as of right now, I don’t have anyone to do that extra layer and say, let’s inspect the solar. Let’s find out what kind of energy it’s actually producing. Let’s find out the age of these panels. Let’s find out the payment arrangement.

In many cases, when I talk to sellers about listing their home, they may not really know. They might have bought the home after it was installed, and they don’t have a lot of information about what company installed it. Because, and I think I’ve learned this from you, Aaron, in a lot of cases you have these companies that’ll install and then they leave, and then we don’t know who’s doing what.

Having talked to Kate a little bit, that’s part of her business model: to help the seller dig in and get all that information. So the more information the sellers can provide the buyers, and as long as the price is reasonable,I think it can’t really be a closing cost. It just needs to be another financial commitment for the buyer, to make sure they’re purchasing the home they want and it’s worth the investment.

Aaron Nichols: Another thing that’s commonly understood about solar, it’s gone so far that in New Jersey they have a property tax exemption. Specifically, an exemption on the increase in property tax when you put on solar. If you can prove solar has increased your home’s value by X amount, you don’t have to pay property tax on that amount.

So one of the most common things we’re told about solar is that it increases home value. Does solar actually increase a home’s appraisal value, and how do buyers look at that extra cost?

John Nichols: So I did consult with an appraiser ahead of time, and the answer I got is: it really depends.

If the system is completely owned and the seller has already paid it off, that can increase the appraised value of the home anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000, depending on the extent of the system and depending on the house itself.

If it’s leased, most appraisers are not really adding a lot of value to the home, because it’s a leased system and it’s not really owned by anyone.

And then if it’s being purchased and there are payments, it can go either direction. It can be very valuable, but only if the seller is willing to pay that off before closing, and that usually needs to be structured ahead of time so the appraiser knows. At that point it pretty much goes back to option one. If the buyer is taking over the payments for the purchase of the solar, then there will be a little bit of a value add, but not as much as if the panels are already paid off.

So it really does depend quite a bit as far as how much value it adds. But potentially it could add quite a bit.

Kate Collardson: And it’s more than just the material value. It’s of course the energy that will be produced. That’s why an inspection is important, to make sure that it is going to produce the monetary value you’re adding for that equipment.

Aaron Nichols: Now, you touched on it a little bit, but what’s the difference in the selling process if the panels are owned outright versus if it’s leased or paid for with a loan?

John Nichols: If it’s leased or paid for with a loan, then it could potentially knock the buyer out from having the ability to purchase the home. If their debt-to-income ratio is already stretched, which in Colorado and many states right now, between the price of the home, property taxes, insurance, et cetera, they’re barely qualifying for a loan, and then if you’re asking them to also take over payments, that can significantly change the game. To the point where either they don’t qualify for the loan, or the seller is forced to say, in the case of making payments, we’re just going to pay off the whole situation.

It really depends, but that’s kind of, in a nutshell, where this process stops.

Aaron Nichols: Which is an important thing to note, and something that’s not widely understood. You’re often told that someone’s just going to have to go through a credit check in order to take it over, but the debt-to-income ratio piece is really important. They might be trying to be approved for an extra $30,000 or $60,000 loan on top of the loan for the home, and that might just kick them out of being eligible to buy it. Whereas if it’s owned outright, it’s like buying a dryer with the house.

John Nichols: Yeah. And I have buyers right now that are in the final stages of purchasing a home in Milliken. That home had been on the market quite a while, and one of the reasons is that the seller was not willing to pay off the solar panels.

But sellers get very motivated when their home doesn’t sell. So by the time I went to see that home with the buyers, the agent had already made an agreement with the seller and already put it in the broker notes that that system would be paid off at closing. And that changed the game completely, because we weren’t trying to qualify for that loan as well. There was just that peace of mind knowing, okay, we don’t know exactly how well the system is working, but what we do know is that we’re going to be able to buy this home. It does have solar, and it’s not going to be an extra expense for us on a monthly basis.

Kate Collardson: I think a lot of realtors have picked up on this. When they see that they’re going to be listing a home with solar and that there’s a loan on it, or a lease, or third-party ownership, they’re going to make them pay that off. I think with loans, generally you have to pay them off. But with leases, a lot of the realtors I’ve spoken with have said, yeah, we do that too.

What I’ve learned is that realtors generally think of solar as a four-letter word. They think it mucks up the transaction, throws off the debt-to-income ratio, it’s a mess, it’s a nightmare. And so — hoping to ease that, as an industry. To make that better for that home sale transaction.

Aaron Nichols: So the next question is definitely for you first, Kate. If a buyer is looking for a home that already has solar installed, what are two or three things they should inspect or ask for before making the purchase?

Kate Collardson: They need the monitoring. That must happen, 100% of the time.

And they should be inspected. You should find out, is the system working like it should? Sometimes you’re getting electricity, and it’s not producing as well as it could be because X, Y, or Z is happening.

And if there’s no critter guard, everyone should have critter guard installed every time they install solar. But if there’s not critter guard, of course you’re going to want to check for critters and any damage that might have been done there.

But number one: get the monitoring. Get that information, and then watch your system, or connect with somebody who will.

Aaron Nichols: Well, two things there. As someone who works for an installer: there are a lot of people we talk to who see critter guard as an extra couple hundred dollars, and they’ll say, I don’t want it. We usually just include it and don’t have it as an add-on, because it’s just not worth it. Squirrels. Solar industry, take note.

John Nichols: Are we referring to the thing that covers your gutters so you don’t get leaves in there? What is critter guard?

Aaron Nichols: It’s metal mesh that goes around the solar panels so that squirrels can’t chew your wires. Because squirrels will chew the wires.

Kate Collardson: And pigeons will nest. They will have big old families.

Aaron Nichols: Then the important note I want to make for anyone listening is that monitoring is not through whoever installed your system. Even if your installer goes out of business, monitoring is run at the inverter level, I believe.

Kate Collardson: That’s correct, yeah.

Aaron Nichols: So most people probably don’t know who made their inverter. But you can go okay, all the wires from the solar system go into this box in my house. What’s the brand name on the box? And you call that company and say, can you help me monitor my system? And they will say, you need to pay us $200 and we will gladly help you monitor your system.

Kate Collardson: Yeah. Yeah.

John Nichols: I earlier mentioned this whole concept of wanting to know: is the system actually working? Before and after. Like when you’re on a diet, it’s nice, you’ve got the before and after photos, you see those on the commercials all the time, and you can say, okay, whatever they’re doing seems to be working.

In many cases we don’t have that before-and-after data. We really don’t know what to compare it to, and that’s extremely frustrating. If more of that information was available, and we knew how much energy they were actually producing, or how much money they were saving on energy from the sun, that would be really, really valuable.

And I can see how, even if the appraiser didn’t value the home higher, if I’m a listing agent and I can prove that to people, that’s just another selling point. But right now there’s very little data out there to prove that this is working really well.

It’s like if you’re selling an investment property and you can prove it has great rental history and a great cap rate, you’re obviously promoting that, and buyers are saying, I want to buy this thing because it’s going to do something for me.

I would love to see a system or a program out there that allows the home solar to be inspected and to have some sort of number to prove this is really valuable, from an energy production and a cost savings standpoint, especially with utility rates going through the roof. That would be such a great marketing point.

So it sounds like we’re moving in that direction, and I’m looking forward to seeing people like Kate in the community, and wanting to bring them on board to be part of the whole inspection team.

Aaron Nichols: Last question. A decade from now, do you guys think solar will still be a premium feature on homes, or do you think it’ll just kind of be standard? I know a lot of companies include it when they build homes now, but some don’t. What do you guys think?

John Nichols: Do you have a crystal ball? I wouldn’t say it’s now, you said, will it still be a premium feature? Is that what you were saying?

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Right now it’s kind of like a premium feature.

John Nichols: I think it’s going to become more and more standard. You’re seeing some subdivisions that automatically include it, and others that are not. It’s hard to say. But even if a brand-new subdivision has solar, I still think you can run into the same issues.

Let’s say it’s a big home builder, I better not mention any names, for liability’s sake, but let’s just say one of those massive publicly traded home builders that’s throwing these homes together and they all have solar on them. Well, the solar’s being subcontracted. In many cases I’ve helped people buy brand-new homes with solar and they’re really unclear as to: is that part of the home warranty? Is that something completely separate? In many cases it’s a company no one’s ever heard of. And in a lot of cases the company goes out of business, and then these people really don’t know what they have.

So if we’re having more and more homes that automatically include solar, and if those homeowners and those communities are going through the same type of situation I just explained, then I don’t know for sure what the future looks like, whether it’ll just be commonplace, or whether it’s always going to be a little bit of a novelty. In some cases it works really well and it’s worth having, in some cases it’s not. So yeah, it’s hard to have that crystal ball and see what’s going to happen in the future.

Kate Collardson: We are a young industry. Solar is young, and we have seen a lot of churn. Really, the industry started taking off about 20 years ago, and we’ve seen a lot of churn in those 20 years. We’ve learned a lot of lessons.

I’m thinking about the very big players who have gone out of business and left systems on homes that weren’t even turned on, unfinished, for sure. But then there are some that look completely done, and the homeowner thinks it must be working, because it must be working, because it’s on my roof. And the system isn’t even commissioned. Monitoring isn’t available. And it’s a really frustrating experience for a lot of people.

I do think that as an industry we are going to get through this and continue to provide value in clean energy. Maybe 10 years out we’re still very premium, and maybe 15 years out it’s less so. In my 20 years in the industry, solar has gone from nothing to, now it makes more financial sense to build a new utility-scale solar plant than it does to build a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired power plant.

And to think what we were doing on roofs 20 years ago, that was a pipe dream. It was ridiculous to think that a utility company would ever, ever use that technology, because it was so expensive. We’ve come down in cost over the last 20 years, we’ve gotten better, and we’re still learning. And I think there’s still value in rooftop solar on a lot of levels, especially when storage is there. I think we’ll get to that point where it’s just standard, but I don’t know that 10 years is a long enough time for that.

Aaron Nichols: Too optimistic.

All right, well, I’d like to open it up to the audience. If anyone has any questions, I’ll pass you this little mic you can speak into.

Audience member: What’s the lifetime of a solar system? Are you seeing them age out, and is it getting better over time?

Kate Collardson: Ooh, that’s a meaty question.

The lifespan of a solar module, a solar panel, they’re generally warranted to produce up to 80% of their original rated output for 25-ish years. Twenty, thirty years. And I’m seeing a lot of older systems, and a lot of them are cranking, really still producing. I’ve seen a couple of systems that are not as healthy as they used to be.

I think it really depends on the technology. One thing I will say: I talked about the cost coming down, and one reason for that is called dematerialization. We’ve taken a lot of materials out of the panels themselves to reduce the cost. It’s made thinner frames and thinner glass and thinner cells, fewer wires, less copper and silver. I’m not sure that that has increased the longevity.

And the ones I’m seeing right now are cranking. And there are great manufacturers who build really good quality product that really will last. But time will tell.

Audience member: So for someone who’s considering putting solar on their house, what I’m hearing is there are things you should do to think about, okay, what do I need to do in case I want to sell? Choose quality, set up the monitoring. And then, as you prepare to sell, you have to assume you’re going to pay it off before or during the sale.

And, as a realtor: if a seller gave you a report that showed, just like someone selling a business, here’s the income generation, would that be compelling? Or would you tell your buyer to pay another thousand dollars for another inspection on the solar?

John Nichols: I think it would be very compelling. As a realtor working with buyers, I think it would be great to have that information. I think the buyers would really want to know that, and if they do need to pay a little bit more, I think they would do it.

There are a lot of reasons why people pay a price for a home. It could be time on the market, it could be all the other features. But assuming all the other features are very marketable and it’s a sought-after home, if a system was well put together and producing energy, and we definitely have a great before and after and we can prove that, and let’s say you’re working with a listing agent that’s helping you sell it, and that listing agent is putting all that information out for people like me and my buyers to see, and it’s showing this is a great system, it’s a high-quality company, here are some of the utility bills before, here are some after, it comes with a warranty that when you buy that home it’s transferable and they’ll come and fix it, if that information was available, I think it would be like gold. And I think buyers would be willing to pay more for the home if they had that information and it could all be verified.

Aaron Nichols: And this is why it’s important to go with a really good installer as well. Most of the stuff you mentioned upfront is something Exact Solar will give you in a packet after you’ve gone solar with us. It’ll talk about the warranty, it’ll talk about the components that are used, and we do the monitoring, but if you call us, we will give you access to your monitoring portal and we will walk you through everything and exactly how it works.

John Nichols: And you’ve been with companies before, or you’ve heard of other companies that are not doing that, right? Obviously I’m seeing the end result of that as a realtor. That’s a good reason why people should be working with Exact Solar, or a company of that quality. But you’ve seen plenty of examples, or heard of plenty of examples, of the opposite of that, right? Where they’re kind of slapping it on, I think, Kate, you’ve already mentioned this, slapping it on, and then good luck.

That’s the part where I think, as realtors, we get very frustrated. So I don’t know if I’d say it’s a four-letter word. I do think solar is great. But I just think if it was teed up the right way, it would make all the difference in the world.

Aaron Nichols: To hammer on that, it’s like doing anything else to your home. You want to do it with the best company. When you’re thinking about something like this, if you save a couple dollars up front, you might end up with an expensive nightmare in five to 10 years. So it’s really important, when you’re doing something that’s going to be on your home for decades, that you’re working with someone who’s well-reviewed and experienced and knows what they’re doing.

Anybody else?

Audience member: One of my barriers to having a solar system on my roof is that it’s ugly. And I was really psyched quite a few years ago when Elon Musk’s company talked about having roof tiles that were the collectors. That sounded really cool. And that’s all just kind of dropped away, and I haven’t heard anything about it. Do those still exist? Are there competitors? Are there better-looking systems?

Aaron Nichols: There are companies that do that, but we discourage people from installing them at Exact Solar, for a couple of reasons.

It can be five to 10 times as expensive for the same energy output. And when you’re building a solar energy system, you are building an electrical system that has points of failure. That’s just true of anything that has electricity in it. When we’re talking about shingles, we’re talking about more than a hundred panels on your roof instead of 10 to 20. So we’re talking about many, many more points of failure.

And also, because those are only built as what are called strings, they’re not big enough that you can put microinverters under each panel, which means monitoring is only going to happen at one central inverter. So if one of those breaks, you don’t know which one it is, and you take them off until you find it. It’s like a string of Christmas lights.

To your other point: a lot of people do think solar is ugly, which is fine. But I think the truth of the matter is that people tend to dramatically overestimate what the impact of a decision is going to be on their lives, and then hedonic adaptation happens and we forget about it in a couple of weeks. You put solar on your roof, you think it’s ugly for a couple of weeks, and then you forget about it, and it’s there, and your life moves on.

Audience member: But I’m a design wonk. How beautiful is that pipe, or the fire access, the hose access on that wall right over there? How beautiful is the transformer that’s sitting on the corner? How beautiful are the telephone poles? When they first went in, they were ugly. And then everybody got used to them, and we don’t even see them anymore.

Kate Collardson: I can’t not jump in on the question of solar shingles, because I worked in solar shingles for 10 years. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic.

Aaron, everything Aaron said is exactly right. Yes, there are so many things that can go wrong and do go wrong. Electricity on a roof, sparks can happen. And I’ve heard that as of today you cannot find the Tesla Solar Roof online. You’re confirming that.

I just want to say: the market for BIPV, building-integrated photovoltaics, solar shingles, is always going to be there. The homeowner is always going to want a beautiful system.

I also think there is a code out there to crack, and we can get it right. There are things that can be figured out, and we can make a system. I think we need to think outside the design box we’ve put ourselves in. But I do think that we humans can engineer a system that will sit on the roof and be your roof, and it will produce electricity. We have not cracked that code yet. The code is there to be cracked. It has not been cracked.

Aaron Nichols: Another thing I just remembered is that they’re far less efficient, because heat decreases voltage, and there’s no airflow underneath.

Okay, she knows more.

Kate Collardson: We could live with that as a manufacturer. There is a drop. He’s not wrong, but it’s not huge. That didn’t kill it. But it does take a lot more space.

John Nichols: I’ve noticed in some of the newer subdivisions that you can hardly even see the panels now. They’re so blended in with the roof. So I think the design is definitely improving.

And then you mentioned hedonic adaptation. I learned something new. Just wanted to say that.

Kate Collardson: Yeah, no, that’s a good point. Some of the racking has come a long way. We have these better lines, and we’re not looking straight under the panels and seeing the wires. I think the design has gotten better over the years. It’s not blue and silver rectangles against the shingles like it used to be.

John Nichols: I do wonder, though, because a lot of those are on the newer subdivisions. The first question that comes to my mind is, again, how efficient are they? They’re very sleek, they’re very well designed. But as an agent, and for a buyer that I represent, we’re kind of coming in and it’s literally kind of like the black box. Okay, well, it looks good, and it’s not an eyesore. We assume it works pretty well. But that’s the big question.

I know we’ve been discussing this quite a bit tonight, if there’s anything that can happen to educate the public about the value and the efficiency of the system, that’s going to make a huge difference.

Aaron Nichols: All right, we have another question.

Audience member: It’s not a question. I just wanted to say I think solar panels look totally cool. If we want to argue about how something looks, can we work on the headlights with LED lights that you can’t see when you’re driving in front of? There’s so much that just changes that we have to adapt to. It’s neat that we can’t control how they look on our roof.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, that’s a good thing. I think that’s propaganda we should spread. Solar is sexy now.

Kate Collardson: It’s always been sexy.

John Nichols: I don’t know if I’d call it sexy, but it’s another thing I’ve learned tonight. We’re quite the vocabulary education.

What you mentioned reminds me a little bit of some of your LinkedIn posts, where you’ll have a before and after. There’ll be solar, and people will say, I don’t think solar looks very good. And then you’ll compare it to pollution all over the world. So a little bit of a trade-off, maybe the roof doesn’t look perfect, but knowing how much energy is being saved if it’s working properly, maybe not using as much oil. For somebody who cares about the environment, that means a lot to me.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I’ve done this meme quite a few times and it always gets a laugh and a good amount of attention. I like to compare solar to other ways we generate energy, aesthetically, simply because we’re very privileged to live in a country where we don’t have to look at things. We put our trash in a box and someone comes and takes it somewhere, and we don’t have to look at it.

If you look at solar next to a natural gas plant, those things are heinous. They look disgusting. They’re spouting smoke everywhere, they’re just pipes, and they’re covered in grime. Solar is much sexier than that.

All right, anybody got another one?

Well, thank you everyone for coming tonight. For everyone who’s listening, that’s been This Week In Solar, and I will talk to you next week.

John Nichols: Thanks, guys.

Everything You Need to Know to Buy or Sell a Home With Solar: John Nichols and Kate Collardson

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