Solar Stress Management [Transcript]

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Adam ([00:00]):

Hello Jamie. Halo Adam. Woo. Time for another edition of straight cop fill a cast. Are you all ready? Yes, I’m calling from our new expanded well in the process of being expanded to our solar headquarters. All right. It sounds like building a wall. I don’t know. What do you do? There’s some finished stuff going on, but yeah, that was some power tools and some, you know, some, some work happening around here. We’re not just sitting around building the infrastructure. GTD. That’s right. Good job. I know. It’s exciting. While I guess, while others are contracting, solar harmonics is expanding, always expanding. Always something fun going on, that’s for sure. And a man. Oh man, we have you know, it’s just this coven thing is all over the place. And so we’re, we’re feeling it actually just with clients who really want their solar in immediately.

Jamie ([00:55]):

So you know, where they’re not upset, they just wanna know what’s going on. And what we’re actually running into is with the city County governments there, we thought they were slow before. Well, now they’re much slower if they can’t go into the office. So they’re like, okay, now I guess, yeah, they, they’re taking the days off. Right. some of them were working from home, which is nice. And actually they’d been a little bit more responsive when we contact them. But yeah, it’s, it’s another, you know, thumb, something we have to contend with is that a lot of, you know, they might be distracted with other things right now. So it’s a, it’s an interesting, it’s always something always interesting. But yeah, I guess that must have affected PG&E’s approval process too. We’re still getting projects approved. There’s some, you know, some things that are being held up, but not so much.

Jamie ([01:44]):

I think there’s a, well, it’s really on the, on the city side because we’re dealing with building permits, fire department, and a lot of them are, you know, skeleton crews or to just telling people not to come in at all. Like nothing is, is important. So but on the positive side solar is really been fantastic. People are, are still really excited about going Southern or not. It’s just canceling. There may be canceling appointments, but they’re not canceling their solar projects. Ah, that’s good. Cause they know, right? They’ve already, they know it’s going to save them money, save them money, and they think, you know, well if we can’t go on vacation, we’re going to be home a lot more. So that means we’re gonna be using a lot more power and we might as well get it from the sun. You know, PG&E everyone agrees that PG&E will not do anything but go up.

Jamie ([02:34]):

So, and the tax credit has already declined from 30% to 26% so, and next year it goes to 21% so it’s kind of, you know, it’s a good time to go solar as always. But it’s always right before the summer. So this is, I know you’re in Northern California. This is sunny. Yeah. We were seeing excellent solar production because everyone’s panels. It hasn’t rained here in a while and then it rained over the weekend, so everyone’s solar panels kind of cleaned off. And so now we’re seeing now fantastic. A solar production. Oh great. All right. So did you want to go into about more about the virus? What did you want to go into today? Well, just, you know, what we have, you know, I’ve always contended that solar is the safest, most reliable investment someone can make. Because we’ve already talked about, you know, PG&E rates can only go up and they’re certainly, they’re certainly going up this year.

Jamie ([03:30]):

I’ve heard a 17% on the highest electricity tiers plus the tax credit that we talked about. But then really super cool thing about solar as opposed to other investments, is that once it’s installed and it’s turned on, you can actually see your returns real time. And so with PG&E meters thereby direction and it allows the customer to actually see power flowing back to PG&E. And when that happens, they’re actually getting a credit on their electricity bill. So whether, you know, if you’re investing in stocks or mutual funds, you know, you’re kind of throwing your money out there and your fingers across that we’re not going to have a coven outbreak and, you know, lose half your value of your 401k in two days. So you know, solar, there’s so many things that, that are beneficial. It’s kind of, again, one of the safest investments people can make into their homes and it’s in their homes.

Jamie ([04:28]):

It’s you know, and the side benefits not really side benefits anymore, but you know, 100% clean power that is producing, you’re responsible for your own power. So you’re not, you’re not really subject to all the games that the electricity companies play. And, and so once you’re in that, you’re, you’re, it kind of gives you a sense of independence and self sufficiency, like few other things can. So now there you’re not really in control of the solar production, but you are in control of the number of panels you put up. And the solar production is guaranteed by the solar panel manufacturers. And so you know, not to mention a tax credits. And according to Institute of real estate appraisers, it does increase the value of the home by three to 4% when it’s an owned system and not a leased or power purchase agreement system.

Jamie ([05:20]):

So we just think, you know, in the face of the COVID-19, who knows what’s going to happen with it if we’re going to get it under control in the near future. But we do know the sun will come out and we do know people will be using electricity and you know, when we’re installing customers can stay inside of the house and we’re up on the roof installing. And you know, we very few instances when we have to go inside, but we give them plenty of notice when we do. We did have an instance this last week where our installer knocked on the door. No one answered and knocked on the door again. No one answered called no one answered. And then the inspector came we turn off the power and then heard lots of screaming upstairs because apparently they have a, a, a tankless water heater that runs on electricity.

Jamie ([06:09]):

The one was in the shower and did not appreciate the power going out. But yeah, that’s, it happens. That’s just one of those things. But anyway, ah, well, you know we apologize for the inconvenience and but overall, you know, in the long term customers extremely happy with this system, extremely happy to be producing power and you know, we, we love that that feeling that we can help these customers realize which is self sufficiency and independence. So in the world where you have no control over this COVID and no control over PG news plan, power shutdown outages and, and everything else that goes on, you can certainly count on the solar panels to produce that is like for investing in anything that’s like the only guaranteed investment that you know, I can think of. Well, and super cool thing about that too from a financial perspective is that the savings.

Jamie ([07:07]):

So, you know, it’s in, in life, it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. And the government’s gotten very good at taxing what you make. So if you get paid $100,000 a year salary, you can say kiss goodbye to, you know, 30, 40, 50% of it when you add up all of the taxes. And don’t get me started on insurance too. So, but when you add all those in, what the government’s terrible at is taxing the savings. So when you’re reducing your expenses, then you’re actually adding to your income. Essentially you’re adding to your cashflow. So that’s untaxed and which is great and that’s what solar offers. It’s a, it’s a savings on what you would have been paying anyway. So that’s why it’s another. So in essence, any of the savings you get our after tax, which makes it even better investment.

Adam ([07:59]):

Yeah. It just, it seems like it, I know it just always goes up the cost of electricity, so, yeah. Yeah. And, and more, you know, more and more electric car adoption, almost every customer we’re talking to if they don’t already have an electric car, they are planning on getting one. So that’s further independence from, you know, oil increases and things like that. So, you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s the way everyone will be going. It’s just how expensive does PG&E need to get for someone to say, Oh my God, this is ridiculous. I can’t take it anymore. We need to go solar. So that’s where we’re at. But yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, everyone covert virus, it’s a, eventually we’ll get under control and then but solar power will still be there, so. Excellent. Yep. I agree. Any last words?

Jamie ([08:50]):

Those were my last words. Yeah, that’s for today’s episode. No we just really appreciate it. We just want to thank all our clients, all our partners, all our installers, all our sales people, everyone that’s in our chain. They are all working really, really hard and you know, it’s, it’s great when we get the feedback from the client that they loved everything. So that makes it all worthwhile. Everyone loves acknowledgement and so we definitely appreciate when the client’s right. It’s five-star Yelp reviews and are really happy with the system, you know, five, 10 years

Adam ([09:23]):

On the road. Okay, great. We’re going to wrap it up there. Thanks everybody. If you have a question for us for a future episode, please go to our Facebook page, straight talk, solar cast, and make sure to write us a review on Apple podcast or wherever you are listening to this podcast. That’d be great for a five star review would be wonderful. Review, refer, wait, what’d you say, Jamie? Great review and refer. All right. Awesome. All right, great. Thanks everybody. Have a great week. All right. Thanks.