🔋 How to Sell Solar Without Talking About Solar

How do you make residential solar adoption irresistible? You don’t talk about solar. At least, not the way the industry has for decades—endless kilowatt-hour math, obscure rebate programs, and a tech-first obsession that makes it sound like you need an engineering degree to keep the lights on.

This week Supercool explores a different approach: turning solar into a product that customers actually want—one that feels as intuitive as streaming Netflix, as easy as depositing a check with your mobile app, and as indispensable as Wi-Fi.

On the podcast, we hear from  Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun, the country’s largest residential solar provider, and Jessica Bergman, a marketing strategist who knows how to make clean energy the obvious choice. 

Together, they lay out a masterclass in productization—the strategy behind turning solar-plus-storage from a niche upgrade into a must-have solution that saves you money.

Mary Powell: The CEO Who Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here

Mary Powell’s earlier career does not intuitively lead to this moment. If you scanned her early résumé—running HR for the State of Vermont, working as an executive at a regional bank—you wouldn’t have pegged her as the future leader of the clean energy revolution.

And yet she’s running the first U.S. company to surpass one million solar customers.

Her pivot into energy came not from an obsession with technology but an obsession with customers. She led Vermont’s utility, Green Mountain Power, with the same mindset that shaped her early years in finance: put the customer first, strip out unnecessary complexity, and make the experience feel easy, modern, and empowering.

That perspective led her to distributed energy—solar paired with energy storage solutions that give people control rather than leaving them at the mercy of a century-old grid increasingly ill-matched for modern demands.

Texas often makes headlines for its troubled grid, but it’s not alone. Between 2020 and 2023, Michigan logged 157 power outages—second only to Texas’s 210. Grid instability is a nationwide challenge.

And it’s influenced the speed at which Mary pushed Sunrun to become storage-first, moving battery attachment rates from 12% to over 60% in just three years.

Because for Mary, this isn’t about tech. It’s about the people using it.

Jessica Bergman: The Marketer Who Sees What the Industry Doesn’t

Jessica Bergman, Senior Strategist at ID Lab Global,  also didn’t set out to be here. She imagined a career fighting deforestation and corporate greenwashing, but the Great Recession had other plans. The only job offer she got was promoting energy efficiency.

She took it and discovered a fundamental flaw in how clean energy is sold.

Working on projects for EPA, DOE, and Energy Star, she saw the same pattern repeat:
🚀 Pilot programs worked.
📂 Reports were written.
🛑 Then... nothing scaled.

Why? Because the industry treated adoption as a logical decision, not an emotional one.

Jessica’s big realization: People don’t buy kilowatts. They buy comfort, convenience, and control.

That insight shaped her marketing career—working with Google to drive smart thermostat adoption or studying why heat pump water heaters (despite being everyone’s new darling) still only have a 2.6% adoption rate.

The takeaway? Innovation is meaningless unless adoption is effortless.

Which brings us to what Sunrun is doing differently.

Solar Is Dead. Long Live the Clean Energy Lifestyle.

Under Mary Powell’s leadership, Sunrun quietly stopped being a solar company and became something much bigger: a storage-first, customer-obsessed, clean-energy-lifestyle brand.

With customers now pairing batteries with their solar systems, homes are becoming mini power plants that keep the lights on when the grid goes down and hold potential for new features that put savings on automation mode.

For Mary, the shift to storage isn’t driven by new technology. It’s driven by how the solution is framed.

Sunrun doesn’t lead with tech specs but with lifestyle benefits.

✅ Energy independence.
✅ Peace of mind in an outage.
✅ Freedom from unpredictable utility bills.

Which brings us to the real game-changer: Sunrun’s Domino’s strategy.

The “Pizza Tracker” for Power

Buying solar has historically been about as enjoyable as refinancing a mortgage. Sunrun is changing that.

Inspired by Domino’s legendary order tracker, the company is rolling out an app-based tool that lets customers follow every step—from installation to the final grid connection. “We literally call it the pizza tracker,” says Mary.

Why does this matter? Because transparency kills friction.

Customers aren’t left wondering why their panels are stuck in permitting purgatory. They know exactly what’s happening and when. And when people trust the process, they don’t back out.

From “Maybe Someday” to “Why Didn’t I Do This Sooner?”

Sunrun’s strategy works because it addresses something bigger than tech—how people actually make decisions.

Jessica calls it social adoption. People buy when:
✔ They see others doing it.
✔ It feels familiar.
✔ It feels easy.

That’s why Sunrun meets customers where they are—at Lowe’s, at Home Depot, in their neighborhoods, in their inboxes. They speak the language of Main Street, not Silicon Valley.

They’re selling peace of mind, energy independence, and freedom from utility rate hikes—not just panels and batteries.

The result? More than a million customers—and growing fast.

The Takeaway: It’s Not About Innovation. It’s About Adoption.

The clean energy industry loves innovation. But innovation doesn’t scale unless adoption is effortless.

Mary and Jessica make this point plainly: if the industry wants to move beyond early adopters, it needs to stop selling tech and start selling lifestyles.

And if you want to hear exactly how Sunrun is making it happen—listen to the episode.

Listen to this podcast episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Number of the week: 28%

That’s the percentage of U.S. households that paired home batteries with their new solar systems in 2024—a significant jump from 2019. Sunrun doubled the industry pace, reaching a 62% attachment rate in Q4 2024.

Quote of the week

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Related

Sunrun is shaping the future of residential clean energy in America. Across the Atlantic, another transformation is unfolding—one that’s redefining clean energy access on a massive scale.

While Europe surges in renewable energy, Africa is where innovation meets urgency. With unreliable grids—or no grids at all—solar is filling the breach. No company has done it at scale like d.light.

With roots tracing back to Stanford’s d.school (see course on Designing for Extreme Affordability), d.light powers the lifestyles of over 30 million African homes with its suite of solar and ultra-efficient products— for lighting and charging, plus appliances and even televisions.

On Supercool, I spoke with d.light CEO Nedjip Tozun about the company’s innovation playbook—from rugged product design to last-mile delivery and fintech solutions that make solar affordable for low-income families.

d.light’s objective: enable families to leapfrog fossil fuels and go straight to clean energy, transforming 1 billion lives by 2030.

This week, news broke that d.light has been tapped as a key participant in Nigeria’s $750 million DARES program, a World Bank-backed initiative to bring solar power to millions in Africa’s most populous country of 200 million people.

Necessity is also forging fascinating partnerships. MAX, a Nigeria-based EV company, locally designs and manufactures vehicles to meet the needs of Africa’s market. 

Like d.light, MAX prioritizes affordability, reliability, and convenience—its $2,000 bikes paired with a lease-to-own financing model make EV ownership accessible.

With 70% of its fleet used for commercial taxis, MAX creates income opportunities for drivers and operates battery-swap stations along key commercial routes to keep drivers moving.

Last year, MAX partnered with Energicity, a venture-backed solar startup that builds and operates microgrid power stations across West Africa.

Starting in Sierra Leone, MAX drivers can now charge and operate their vehicles entirely on solar power—fulfilling the zero-carbon promise of electric transportation.

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