Consumer Protection is a Top Priority for Solar

Consumer Protection is a Top Priority for Solar
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In a recent Huffington Post blog, "Protecting Consumers: Making the Solar Industry a Safe and Fair Marketplace," former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard makes some important points on solar consumer protection that we can all agree with.

Unfortunately, he neglects a key piece of context. The solar revolution is sweeping America and bringing a choice of clean, reliable and affordable solar power to millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom are fully satisfied with their solar systems.

I agree whole-heartedly with Goddard's points that consumers deserve to be well-informed regarding their choices to go solar. They also shouldn't have to deal with the rare cases of misrepresentation of energy savings made by a few rogue solar providers, whom should be behind bars. Let's face it, every single industry in America has a few bad apples.

But that's no reason to condemn an entire industry. Especially one that employs more than 208,000 Americans and supplied more new power generation capacity to America in the first quarter of 2016 than all other fuel sources combined. In fact, this is why the FTC held its educational workshop and dubbed it "Something New Under the Sun": to learn more about competition and consumer protection in the new, fastest-growing source of electricity in America.

At SEIA, we want to see consumers and companies benefit by choosing solar. Consumers deserve accurate information and companies should have opportunities to grow using sound business practices. To that end, we proactively created a suite of consumer protection materials, working with states, consulting with the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission, and winning the accolades of the Better Business Bureau. The goal is to make sure consumers are fully informed.

Mr. Goddard states that SEIA's new Consumer Guide to Residential Solar, reviewed by dozens of consumer protection specialists and posted on state websites as a resource, is a "good place to start, but would be better with some enforcement mechanisms."

We're way ahead of him. Last year, SEIA's Board of Directors put into force the first national Code of Conduct for the solar industry, along with a complaint resolution and enforcement process by which every one of our 1,000 SEIA member companies must abide. Today, any American can easily submit a claim to SEIA for examination and enforcement. SEIA stands ready to work with state and federal regulators to ensure justice is served.

We also built and released disclosure forms - similar to HUD-1 statements for home purchases -to give consumers a snapshot of the key terms in a contract, as well as free standard lease and power purchase agreement templates to boost transparency. What's more, we're building out a full suite of educational programs for consumers, including hot topic alerts, a just-released community solar consumer protection guide, and Spanish language versions of key documents due out this summer to reach even more Americans. And all of these materials are available free of charge.

Placing consumer protection first is a top priority for our industry. The residential solar industry depends on good consumer experiences because referrals are the number one source of new business. It's unfortunate that some critics focus myopically on the rare instances of poor behavior in an industry that's installing more than one hundred solar panels per minute across America for very satisfied consumers.

A larger danger to consumers is red tape from well-intentioned regulators based on knee-jerk reactions to guard consumers from new products without first checking the laws already on the books. Today, all fifty states have consumer protection, fraud and contract laws on the books that provide strong protections to consumers. Combined with federal consumer laws, these state policies prohibit misleading savings claims, bar unwanted phone calls, require leases to disclose payment schedules, and more.

In Arizona, for instance, instead of enforcing existing law, legislators enacted purported consumer protection legislation that damaged residential solar markets in the state. The Arizona proposals crushed law-abiding small businesses, sent thousands of good jobs out of the state and nearly eliminated solar as a consumer choice.

Putting consumers first is both a legal and business imperative for the solar industry. When a consumer looks to solar as a competitive source of electricity, SEIA is committed to ensuring that consumers have all the information they need to make a smart decision. Let's also make sure that the fear of progress doesn't lead government agencies to strip consumers of the power of choice.

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