Tioga has gotten pretty good at a business model that I’ve actually heard about in a few different places: effectively, they lease people’s roof space and put solar panels up on homes and businesses. Then, they sell the energy to the people in the home at a fixed rate (below market value for the customer) that goes up slowly over a 20 year period.

There are options for the owner of the property to purchase the solar panels if they would like to down the line, but until they do Tioga maintains everything for them. This means that the company soaks the initial start-up costs for people: often that prohibitive thing reinventing a small business or a home-owner from taking a plunge.

Plus, they have a super sweet panel you can use to check how much energy your roof is or is not producing. They called it the “Prius panel” today, which gets at how well it does at being another way of turning your energy consumption into something that you track and are viscerally aware of.

Check out their Solar Panel display, a case study of their model being put into effect for the Athenian School, a college prep out in Danville, CA. The presenter talked about this model, and he’s right: it really is photogenic!

That’s a whole field of panels for a school that could never have afforded the cost of such a large installation. Hard to find a downside, as far as I can tell — and it seems to be a sustainable model for the company to make real money at it.

Paul Detering

Paul Detering is CEO of Tioga Energy. Tioga Energy enables commercial, government and non-profit organizations to reduce their energy costs while lowering carbon emissions. Through the SurePath™ solar power purchase agreement (PPA), Tioga Energy owns and operates renewable energy systems that provide organizations a hedge against energy price volatility and accelerate their access to clean energy without any capital outlay. For more information, visit www.tiogaenergy.com.

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