New Peer-to-Peer Platform Allows People to Share Solar Power

Over the past decade or so, the peer-to-peer exchange of goods and services has seen immense growth, mostly affecting the transportation, real estate and finance sectors, and now, a startup from Israel is trying to introduce the sharing economy concept to the energy sector, as well.

Yeloha, a company founded by Amit Rosner, an entrepreneur from Israel, recently started offering its services from its headquarters in Boston, employing a business model that is based on the sharing economy concept, in a bid to make solar energy - a largely untapped energy source - more accessible to the masses.

The solar PV industry has great growth potential, but there are still a few obstacles that prevent solar power from becoming mainstream. First of all, there is the issue of insufficient infrastructure, as existing energy grids don't have the ability to allow integration with solar energy, which would be extremely expensive to resolve.

Then, there are the high costs associated with the installation of solar panels, which makes them unaffordable for many consumers. The average cost of a home solar power system is somewhere around $10,000, so it's a pretty serious investment for most people.

"We're creating a separate network on top of the old utility infrastructure that allows us to share the value of the electricity between more people," says CEO and co-founder Amit Rosner.

That's why Yeloha has decided to use the peer-to-peer model to make solar power more affordable. The company has started creating the "Solar Sharing Network", which will give access to solar power to those who can not afford to install solar panels or whose homes are not suitable for installing solar panels.

But, Yeloha's platform will also provide significant benefits to those who have the ability to install solar panels on the roof of their homes, but can not afford it. Yeloha's system will consist of two categories of users: "Sun Host" and "Sun Partner".

Sun Host will be anyone who will be willing to allow Yeloha to install solar panels on their house, with installation costs entirely covered by Yeloha, and get to use 25% of the energy generated by their solar panel system in return, while allowing the company to distribute the rest of the energy to Sun Partners. Sun Partners are people who either live in an apartment, or in a house that they don't own, or simply feel that the initial costs of installing solar panels are too high. According to Yeloha, both Sun Hosts and Sun Partners will see substantial savings on their energy bills. The company claims that its platform will cut consumers' electricity bills by an average of 15%. Yeloha, for its part, will take a cut from each transaction between Sun Hosts and Sun Partners.

Yeloha says that its ultimate goal is to eliminate the obstacles that prevent many people from going solar, by using social networks and the increasing popularity of the sharing economy, a concept that is used pretty successfully by the likes of Uber and Airbnb.