Renewable Energy Installer February 2014 | Página 8

News: Analysis
Through
the looking
glass
Cathy Debenham, YouGen founder
and director, offers a glimpse of
changing customer behaviour in the
renewables marketplace as detected by
the consumer information website
W
hile solar PV is still the most installed technology at a
domestic level by a long way, it is no longer as dominant as
it has been. This is showing in what people are searching
for online, and in the pages our visitors go to on YouGen.
Back in 2011 the vast majority of traffic was going to the solar PV
page (just under 40,000 visits between January and September 2011).
Other technology pages were getting around 7,000 – 8,500 visits in the
same time period.
Fast forward two years and the picture has changed completely.
After the home page and the blog page, the heat pump page is the
most visited, followed by biomass boilers, with solar PV down in third
place with just 11,190 visits in the first nine months of last year.
So what’s changed?
When Feed-in Tariffs were high, solar PV was a no brainer as a financial
product. Now it still makes sense, but is being bought for a much wider
range of reasons than just financial return.
Heating is the biggest chunk of most people’s energy bills and the
recent announcements of price rises from the Big Six are going to focus
their minds even more. With most of the detail of the domestic RHI now
clear people who had put decisions on hold can move forwards.
The Green Deal is launched and up and running. Whatever
you think about the delivery of the scheme, the basic idea behind it
is sound. Having an independent energy audit of your property to
establish the options for making it more energy efficient makes sense.
And for those of you who say that the Green Deal is never going to
take off, have a look at these figures:
• Domestic solar PV installations (0-4kW, Jan-Aug 2013, maturing
market) = 60,328
• Green Deal assessments done (Jan – Aug 2013, totally new
market) = 71,000
8 | www.renewableenergyinstaller.co.uk
Yes, they didn’t turn into Green Deal plans, but DECC customer
surveys indicate that people did go on to install measures, finding other
ways to pay for them.
Customer perspective
So just for a minute, forget that you have renewable energy products
and services to sell, and put yourselves into the shoes of your potential
customers.
You’ve received lots of really annoying cold calls from people
trying to sell you solar panels, insulation, offer you free a boiler
replacement, and have read some articles about cowboys in the
industry, and don’t quite know who to trust or believe.
The answer, from a business point of view, is to look at the whole
house, ask the homeowner what their goals are and what their budget
is, and put together proposals for how you could meet that, possibly
phasing it over time so it fits with other upgrades they want to make to
their property.
If you’re a small and specialist installer, and don’t want to diversify,
you could seek out complementary companies installing other
technologies, and form a strategic alliance.
If you find partners who install to the same standard and your
company values match, this could be a great way of getting more leads
– as instead of each of you just looking for work for yourself; you could
pass on leads to each other where appropriate.
When I talk to people who have multiple renewable technologies
installed, they often have
stories to tell about how
getting them to work
together was a bit of a
nightmare. Diversifying to
cover more technologies, or
building strategic alliances
and working closer with
complementary companies
is a great way to minimise
those problems.
Branching out: Cathy
Debenham, YouGen, urges
installers specialising in a
single technology to diversify
or form strategic partnerships
to meet the needs of the
modern customer