Matt Aragona’s Experience with Solarize Philadelphia

Summary

Jared

Some of our listeners may have heard in previous episodes talking about a program called Solarized Philly. Great campaign here in the city. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what that experience was like for you, what you had to do to sign up, and how everything worked.

Matt Aragona

Absolutely. Going back a little bit further in our history together, I actually contacted Solarize Philly to start a potential partnership in helping Philadelphia residents, Philadelphia homeowners convert to solar. And we found the Solarize Philly program and actually did a coordinated event with Solarize, Solar States, and ourselves to bring that information to our client base.

And we actually had several of our clients convert to solar after that event, which was fantastic. So that was my first real experience learning about the Solarize Philly program and Solar States. At the time I owned a condo, which would have been a much more difficult conversion, or at the time, it was difficult to convert to solar.

But I knew in the future I was going to be buying a single family home in the city. So when I did that, I immediately contacted Solarize Philly to get into the program. And then they connected me with Solar States and Sebastian, who came out and did an analysis of my property and what kind of system we needed.

Very smooth. Everybody was very easy to communicate with. Very prompt in getting back to you with the communication and made it very easy to do it. Very easy to do it. Anybody that’s thinking about converting to solar: absolutely look into Solarize Philly to find out if your house qualifies for it, which most should.

Jared

Yeah, for sure. And I think that’s one of the great things about programs like Solarize Philly, when there’s a civic organization, whether it’s a local government or a nonprofit, or an environmental advocacy group, they’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting for you as a homeowner, unsure about where to go and how to navigate these waters.

They’ve made sure of the vetting and the pricing and then this and then that. As I’m listening to you describe your experience, the words of easiness and simple and smooth keep repeating themselves. And I think that’s a huge barrier to a lot of folks is it’s this big elephant: “How do I go solar? What does it mean? Where do I get all the information? Are these contractors being honest?” And you’re getting a lot of that taken care of for you right off the bat. So if you’re in a market where you can take advantage of that, the way you did. 

Matt Aragona

Absolutely. It’s interesting you say the easibility of getting into the program and getting your house converted to solar: I was talking to Micah the owner of Solar States last week about this, and he brought up a very good analysis of the type of person that goes solar.And there’s several different reasons why you would convert to solar and I feel like I hit both of the reasons equally. And one is from a financial perspective. We have our electric bill every month. “How can I mitigate that?” Solar energy is a way to mitigate that.And, the longer you stay in a house the more free the energy becomes from the solar energy that you’re producing. And then the second type of person that buys it is from the environmental perspective that we need to address climate change. We need to really think about our carbon footprint.

And in a city like Philadelphia, solar energy just makes sense. We have flat roofs. You don’t see the solar panels, they’re out of sight, out of mind. And yet we’re producing all the energy we need for our house every day. So there is the financial benefit and the environmental benefit that really matter to me on both levels.So that was realistically the main reason why I went for it. Both of those reasons being important to me.