Solar panels for rent

Jeff:

The site you listed is apparently the site of a new franchisee of the company.
The company sites appear to be
http://www.citizenre.com/web/index.php
http://renu.citizenre.com/

The concept is that you should lease rather than own. Do you lease your house or car ?

The company is NEW, their officers were named less than a year ago.  According to their website, installations will start in Sept. 2007.

If they are legitimate, I believe that their market share will be far less than they state.
 
Without any real knowledge of the company, take my comment with a grain of salt.
For some reason, I suspect that they may be more interested in selling franchises than in leasing systems.

Ken

Where did you come up with Evergreen Panels ?.

Citizenre is saying that they are building a plant to manufacture PV panels for themselves. They are going to have one of the largest manufacturing plants in the US. Nothing about using Evergreen panels.

I am old enough to remember all of the Solar Hot Water Heater companies that cropped up in the late 70's-early80's selling overpriced "solar systems".What happened to them?�  Where did they all go?�  A few honest companies survived, most of the “in it for the quick bucks” companies disappeared.  This, reminds me of that situation.

I’ve also seen a lot of other “alt-energy business plans” that ended up either cheating their customers or their distributors. Many of those had enthusiastic supporters or distributors that would use phrases like "motivated selling techniques (a forward looking Solar Lobby Building effort!)"  Or the ridicule "I'll stick with my tried and true ice chest instead of this new fangled Refrigerator".
Your use of both, compounds the “smell”, and does nothing to alleviate it..
(By the way, an ice chest is darn handy during a power outage, or when going to the beach)

I said that I had no real knowledge of the company and to take it with a grain of salt.
Your leaping to its defense so quickly just raised more flags in my mind.
As did so many of the distributors calling themselves “ecopreneurs” and inviting others to sign up to become “ecopreneurs” .

So, with a little more investigation

They are not trying to be Dell Computers, their marketing Plan is AMWAY or EXCEL long distance.
You are going to have Joe Citizen trying to sell the product and telling just as many lies through his ignorance and desire to make a fortune, as some of the slime-ball salesmen that may make the jump to this plan because their rainbow vacuums or timeshares are not selling as well as they used too.

So, regardless of the actual quality of the product, they may end up doing more harm than good to the industry.

So tell the truth Don, are you an “ecopreneur” ?

Added note:
If any one doubts that this is multi-level marketing,
here is a link to Citizenre's compensation plan.
http://www.citizenre.net/extras/downloads/compensation.pdf

Citizenre receiving more scrutiny.
http://news.com.com/Breaking+the+mold+in+solar+power/2100-11392_3-6161136.html

John, Thanks for posting the link.

On page 2 of the article, about halfway down the page, there is a link to a PDF file. I assume that it was written by Richard George, who they discuss in that paragraph.  The questions/criticism are well worth reading. There are many charts in the presentation, to support the position. But they can be skipped.  The text is far more important than the many charts.

He hit on many of the concerns that I have about their approach.

Ken

FYI. Here is another small company with an 'invest in solar and lease the equipment' scheme:
http://www.sunenergypower.com/aboutus.asp
Their site says they invest in commercial production site, not individual solar homes.  No franchises. They benefit from Oregon's RE tax credit laws.  And (some of?) the profit is used to fund non-profit RE projects in the developing world.
No idea how big or how successful they are.
They state that 'the principals have designed and installed ~ 3MW of solar in the US" but I think it's a total of what they have done in their (previous) careers.