The importance of quality

Part two of an interview with Energy Matters co-founder and CEO Jeremy Rich.

Tristan Edis: There's been an influx of new entrants in this industry since 2005.  Things have changed remarkably in terms of the scale of the companies and the number of companies that have come in.  How do you distinguish yourselves in what is quite a competitive market?

Jeremy Rich: Our sales guys will ask what are you talking about, Jeremy, when you say, “We want to be the best”?

For me it's about getting it right the first time. 

We got into this business because we genuinely believe in solar helping to make the world a better place.  We believe in customers being self-sufficient and being able to control their electricity bills; to zero their bills basically. 

We don't want to have to go back to jobs.  Solar in theory should be maintenance free.  We want to use the best quality components.  We want to make sure it's a hundred per cent safe and compliant, so we design and manufacture our own framing system - the Sun Lock system. 

We've got a full auditing process.  We get photos of every job we do and we do a desktop audit of every single job.  On top of that we have five per cent physical inspections, so we do take quality seriously at Energy Matters. 

Also we only use Tier 1 and Tier 2 panels and quality inverters - Power One and SMA.

We provide a system that is equal in quality to the best of anyone else in the marketplace.  And the price for the solution we offer is the best in the market.  Now, there are cheaper say two kilowatt systems potentially, but of an inferior quality.  The return on investment and the payback on that cheaper system over its life will be lower than what our system will deliver.

You could just meet the bar which is the CEC approved list of inverters and panels, I mean ninety-nine per cent of the inverters on the CEC list fail our tests, our internal tests. 

We're only using SMA and Power One.  If you look at the list, there are hundreds of them now on there and we won't use any of them.  We've tried once or twice, but it's always been a failure for us, so we think it's a false economy to use them. 

Other segments of the interview:

-- The beginnings of Energy Matters

-- The importance of scale, diversified markets and a strong balance sheet

-- The changing nature of the market and the rise to quality

-- The increasing importance of non-hardware costs