Sighten Final Technical Report DEEE0006690 Deploying an integrated and comprehensive solar financing software platform
- Sighten, Inc., San Francisco, CA (United States)
Over the project, Sighten built a comprehensive software-as-a-service (Saas) platform to automate and streamline the residential solar financing workflow. Before the project period, significant time and money was spent by companies on front-end tools related to system design and proposal creation, but comparatively few resources were available to support the many back-end calculations and data management processes that underpin third party financing. Without a tool like Sighten, the solar financing processes involved passing information from the homeowner prospect into separate tools for system design, financing, and then later to reporting tools including Microsoft Excel, CRM software, in-house software, outside software, and offline, manual processes. Passing data between tools and attempting to connect disparate systems results in inefficiency and inaccuracy for the industry. Sighten was built to consolidate all financial and solar-related calculations in a single software platform. It significantly improves upon the accuracy of these calculations and exposes sophisticated new analysis tools resulting in a rigorous, efficient and cost-effective toolset for scaling residential solar. Widely deploying a platform like Sighten’s significantly and immediately impacts the residential solar space in several important ways: 1) standardizing and improving the quality of all quantitative calculations involved in the residential financing process, most notably project finance, system production and reporting calculations; 2) representing a true step change in terms of reporting and analysis capabilities by maintaining more accurate data and exposing sophisticated tools around simulation, tranching, and financial reporting, among others, to all stakeholders in the space; 3) allowing a broader group of developers/installers/finance companies to access the capital markets by providing an out-of-the-box toolset that handles the execution of running investor capital through a rooftop solar financing program. Standardizing and improving all calculations, improving data quality, and exposing new analysis tools previously unavailable affects investment in the residential space in several important ways: 1) lowering the cost of capital for existing capital providers by mitigating uncertainty and de-risking the solar asset class; 2) attracting new, lower cost investors to the solar asset class as reporting and data quality resemble standards of more mature asset classes; 3) increasing the prevalence of liquidity options for investors through back leverage, securitization, or secondary sale by providing the tools necessary for lenders, ratings agencies, etc. to properly understand a portfolio of residential solar assets. During the project period, Sighten successfully built and scaled a commercially ready tool for the residential solar market. The software solution built by Sighten has been deployed with key target customer segments identified in the award deliverables: solar installers, solar developers/channel managers, and solar financiers, including lenders. Each of these segments greatly benefits from the availability of the Sighten toolset.
- Research Organization:
- Sighten, Inc., San Francisco, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0006690
- OSTI ID:
- 1410333
- Report Number(s):
- DE-EE0006690; DEFOA0000923
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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