This Week in Solar

A weekly look at what's new in solar, brought to you by Exact Solar. Clean energy news, policy updates, and stories that matter. exactsolar.substack.com

This Week in Solar is a news podcast hosted by Exact Solar, with 134 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Exact Solar hosts This Week in Solar, a news show with 134 episodes published.

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  This Week in Solar

  Nobody Goes Solar Because of Product Specs: Aimee Tuck

  Sep 30, 202639 min

  Aaron talks with Aimee Tuck, founder and principal of Corbae Creative, a branding, design, and marketing agency that works with solar, energy storage, and grid modernization companies. She’s been doing this for 25 years (since Aaron was 8 years old), and she recently wrote the book on it, which you can find here: Powerful Branding Screenshot from Corbae Creative’s Website If you’ve ever had someone tell you that your company’s website is too complex, or just blankly stare at you when you try to explain what your company does, this episode’s for you. Listen to this episode here, or on: YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Connect with Aimee on LinkedIn here. Read more about Aimee at Corbae Creative . This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-one-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Aimee and I spent a lot of this episode talking about how a company’s brand is made up of the feelings that people have upon encountering that company’s public presence, reviews, and testimonials. Companies that make people feel good about them at scale by doing great work over a long period of time have great brands. Exact Solar’s been installing solar in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for twenty-one years. Most of our work comes from people who had a great experience and told somebody else about us. If you’re interested in saving money on your electric bill as electricity prices climb to record highs, Exact Solar would love to help. Show Me How Much I Can Save With Solar Expect to learn: What does and doesn’t qualify as brand or branding One thing that damages a company faster than bad advertising ever could What to put in an ad if you want anyone to remember it Quote from the episode: “Most people think about energy about eight minutes a year. That’s just about enough time to pay their electric bill.” — Aimee Tuck

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  This Week in Solar

  We Met America’s Best Solar Installers

  Sep 25, 20268 min

  What’s new Exact Solar is an Amicus member , which means we’re in a purchasing co-op made up of the 90+ highest-reviewed, locally owned, most trustworthy solar installers from around the country. This week, I got to spend two days with America’s most highly reviewed, locally owned solar installers at the Amicus Sales and Marketing Conference. It was exactly the opposite of what the media tells us the solar industry is. Listen to this episode here, or on: YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Nobody in that room was talking about sending out door-to-door salespeople to lock customers into predatory contracts. They were talking about how to make sure that they’ll still be there in 20 years, so they can answer the phone to service their warranties when customers call decades from now. If you’re shopping for solar, here’s why that matters: The last couple of years have been brutal. SunPower filed for bankruptcy in 2024. That same year, Titan Solar shut its doors overnight and liquidated. Sunnova went under in 2025, followed by PosiGen , which served homeowners right here in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This spring, Freedom Forever filed for bankruptcy . Those companies were among the largest solar companies in the country. Each one of those bankruptcies left thousands of homeowners with no one to call if something goes wrong with their solar energy system. That’s why if you’re thinking about solar, you should go solar with a locally owned, trustworthy solar installer like Exact Solar, or any other Amicus member company if you live outside of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, because they’re thinking about this problem differently. Here’s how these companies are planning to stick around for the long haul:

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  This Week in Solar

  This Volunteer-Run Organization Funds Solar Projects Banks Can’t: Joy Baxter

  Sep 23, 202619 min

  One of the coolest things about the solar industry is that thousands of people involved are motivated by the belief that the energy transition just needs to happen . So they often volunteer their time, energy, and attention to deploy even more solar outside of the work they’re paid for. In today’s episode, Aaron interviews Joy Baxter, president of Clean Energy Co-op. This community-owned, volunteer-run cooperative pools money donated by ordinary Pennsylvanians to finance solar projects for nonprofits, co-ops, and community-minded businesses across the state. If you’re interested in how people can get together and affect change on a large scale locally by pooling their time and attention, this is the episode for you. Listen to this episode here, or on: YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Learn about the Clean Energy Co-op, or become a member, at cleanenergy.coop . See the Valley Greene Apartments project (the Co-op’s largest to date, which Exact Solar is building). Expect to learn: How a one-time $100 membership can help you crowdfund solar in your community. Why almost no energy supplier will lock in your electricity price for 25 years, and how an all-volunteer co-op can do exactly that for the buildings it works with. What researchers found when they studied climate anxiety (doing something about it by yourself doesn’t seem to help, but doing it with other people does). Quote from the episode: “Maybe the shift I hope for isn’t in the technology, but in the mindset — that we don’t have to just keep paying the man, and that we can produce our own electricity.” — Joy Baxter

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  This Week in Solar

  Plug-In Solar Will Be Legal in New Jersey March 1st, 2027. What Exactly Does That Mean?

  Sep 18, 20268 min

  What’s new The Garden State Balcony Solar Act (S2368/A4836) passed both chambers of the New Jersey Legislature in late June. New Jersey’s new governor, Mikie Sherrill, signed it into law on September 1. It was written with a six-month delay to allow the Board of Public Utilities time to get ready. This means that as of March 1, 2027, any New Jersey resident will be legally allowed to buy a plug-in/balcony solar inverter, buy a few solar panels, set them out in the sun and plug them into the inverter, and plug the inverter into a normal wall outlet. Listen to this episode here, or on: YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify The system will immediately start feeding electricity into their home and saving them money. There’s no permit, no utility approval, and no permission from a landlord or HOA required. To be legal in New Jersey, a plug-in solar system has to check five boxes. It must: Put out no more than 1,200 watts Plug into a standard 120-volt outlet Sit on your side of the electric meter and offset your own usage Be listed or certified to UL 3700, the safety standard written specifically for plug-in solar Include a feature that shuts it off during a blackout, so it can’t send power onto a dead line where a lineworker might be working Anything putting 400 watts or less into the outlet is exempt from any listing or code provision that would require you to change your building’s wiring or electrical panel. The law allows up to 1200 Watts of solar without approval. Plug-in systems are exempt from interconnection agreements and from net metering rules entirely. Anyone who maxes out that total could save roughly $50 a month on their bill, somewhere between $500-$600 per year depending on how much energy the system outputs. One of the plug-in solar inverters costs somewhere between $300 and $400. You can get good quality solar panels on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for $100 to $200 each. That means that a plug-in solar system will likely run you between $500 and $1,000, depending on how big it is. It’ll pay for itself in less than 2 to 3 years, just with the avoided cost of electricity.

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  This Week in Solar

  How Great Solar Companies Can Get Even Better: John Sheldon

  Sep 16, 202642 min

  Aaron talks with John Sheldon, founder of GreatSun Consulting, who has spent almost twenty years inside solar companies as: An installer A salesperson An operator (Now) a consultant who solar companies call when things start to fall apart. If you want to know why growing solar companies start to fail (and what it actually takes to fix the mess before it costs you customers) this is the episode for you. Listen to this episode here, or on: YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Connect with John on LinkedIn here . Learn about his consulting work at greatsunconsulting.com . This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your 21-year-old, locally owned solar installer for New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Right now, Exact Solar has a PPA backed by the Amicus Solar Cooperative that can put solar on your home for $0 down, dramatically lower your energy bill, and lock in the same price for energy for the next 25 years. If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania and you’re fed up with paying ever-rising utility bills, it’s time to see if your home qualifies for Exact Solar’s PPA. Book your Free Consultation With Exact Solar’s Team Expect to learn: Why the companies that call John for more leads, better salespeople, or a new CRM rarely have a lead, salesperson, or CRM problem. What “organizational entropy” looks like (it involves 30 separate spreadsheets, one key person’s memories, and processes nobody can explain beyond “we’ve done it like this since the dinosaurs”). Where AI actually earns its keep in a solar company (and where John has watched it quietly wreck a business’s finances). Quote from the episode: “I don’t think it’s a technology problem so much that they have. It’s a clarity problem. They just lack visibility at scale.” — John Sheldon

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