Haleakala Solar Celebrates Its 40th Year In The Solar Business

Haleakala Solar is celebrating its 40th Year in the Solar Business this year with over 14,000 customers statewide. We continue to spearhead the growth of our market by testing and installing new and proven technologies for residential, commercial and government entities. These technologies include batteries (Tesla, Sunverge, Aquion, Sonnen), Solar Hot Water, Solar Air Conditioning, EV Charging Stations, Thermal Pool systems, etc. With that homeowners enjoy the ability to go green, save money and enhance our grid infrastructure while maintaining compliance with Hawaiian Electric’s requirements.

This is important because a lot has changed in the Solar Industry over the past year. The biggest change has been the termination of the popular Net Metering Program with the HECO companies which brought with it many unanswered questions regarding the vitality of the solar market. For those solar companies with narrow product offerings and limited resources, the end is near if not already here.

In 2014 there were nearly 400 solar contractors registered with the State of Hawaii. Over the past 3 years that number has declined to less than 50 of which 80% of those companies are no longer active. That means that over 90% of the companies that sold solar systems to customers in Hawaii do not exist any longer. Either they have gone bankrupt or closed the solar division that they had opened to take financial advantage of the huge business growth of PV. Now they no longer offer solar sales, installation, or service and deleted their phone numbers and websites. When solar customers call, there is nobody there. Haleakala Solar is here to help these homeowners with their orphaned systems. Our full service department is on call seven days a week and is trained to troubleshoot just about any type of solar system out there.

Recently HECO sent out thousands of letters to solar customers who applied for Net Metering. These letters were meant to inform the customer of their option to join the Net Metering program. This option came with a financial burden to “upgrade their neighborhood in order to accept more solar power.” Although it will cost these customers more money to upgrade the Utilities grid, much of the upgrade costs make financial sense in the long term. Many of these customers are now orphaned by their original solar installer and are looking for a team to pick up the ball where the others have left off. Haleakala is poised to enter the picture for these customers.