As the Investment Tax Credit shifts and utility rules evolve, residential solar is undergoing a market reset that moves the value proposition away from financial engineering toward resilience, hardware performance, and energy control, according to Energy Access Innovations chief commercial officer Nicole Tommasin.
pv magazine USA: How did the old way of selling solar overcomplicate things for the average homeowner?
Nicole Tommasin: The old model sold a 25-year financial instrument and called it a home improvement. Homeowners were handed escalator clauses, third-party ownership structures, and a savings projection built on assumptions about utility rates a decade out. The complexity was not an accident. It existed because the sale was optimized for the financing product, not for the person buying it. Then add the sales rep working on a stacked commission, where the payout was often large enough to eat the very savings the equipment was supposed to deliver. The homeowner wanted reliable power and a bill they understood. We gave them a contract they needed a spreadsheet to evaluate and a salesperson whose incentive ran against theirs. Simplify the question back to what it always was, which is who controls your power and what does it cost, and most of that complexity turns out to be sales machinery, not value.
pv magazine USA: Now that incentives are shifting, what does “real value” look like to a customer shopping for solar and storage today?
Tommasin: Storage was always the product. The battery is what gives the homeowner independence, protection from whatever the utility decides to change or do next, and savings when they are in a VPP program area where the system can dispatch and earn. That last piece matters, because the grid has not been able to serve as the homeowner’s battery for quite some time now, and much of the sales force still has not caught up to that. They are selling net metering as though it is permanent while utilities are actively rewriting the terms. Real value now is the integrated system, inverter, battery, software, and a clean install, doing the work the grid no longer reliably does: holding power through an outage, managing what you draw at peak, and earning where the programs exist. Value moved from a subsidy on the purchase to performance the homeowner can see every day.
pv magazine USA: Are you seeing homeowners shift their mindset from “How much money will this save me on day one?” to “How do I keep my lights on when the grid goes down?”
Tommasin: Homeowners have been asking that question for quite some time. It is the industry that has been slow to catch up. Energy independence is what actually sells storage in this country, and the savings, while real, are the second sentence now, not the first. What changed is not the homeowner’s instinct but the evidence behind it. People have sat through enough outages, watched enough rate volatility, and read enough about strained infrastructure to stop treating reliable power as a given. When the question is “will my house work when the grid does not,” you are no longer selling a payback period. You are selling control. That is a more durable reason to buy, and it does not evaporate when an incentive changes.
pv magazine USA: Is a market contraction actually a good thing for the long-term health of the solar industry?
Tommasin: Yes. The ITC made parts of this industry lazy. A decade of subsidy-driven demand let companies survive that had no durable business underneath the credit, and a business that only works when the incentive works was never really a business. A contraction clears those out.
What is left are the companies that can win on product, on installer economics, and on real value to the homeowner, which is exactly what a healthy market should reward. Contractions are painful and they are honest. The industry that comes out the other side is built on demand that exists with or without a subsidy, and that is a far stronger foundation than the one we are leaving behind.
This October 20-22, Nicole Tommasin will be a featured panelist for pv magazine USA Week 2026, our annual live webinar event. Stay tuned for a full list of expert speakers and industry leaders as we discuss solar manufacturing, the evolution of distributed solar and storage, grid-scale solutions, AI data centers, and more!
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