Whether you’re a company owner, building owner, employee, or corporate sustainability officer, renewable energy presents new opportunities to cut operational costs, improve your image, and make your company more competitive – not to mention making the world a better place.

Federal and local incentives and Renewable Energy Credits have made renewable electricity much more affordable than even a few years ago. Typical systems have payback periods of between 5 and 10 years (a no-risk double-digit return on investment), and we have proposed systems with payback periods as low as three years!

• Cutting energy costs and selling excess power
• Fixing energy pricing (for up to 30 years)
• Monetizing under-utilized assets (roofs, parking lots, etc.)
• Meeting corporate sustainability goals with clean energy
• Heating and cooling more efficiently
• Providing back-up power
• Improving power quality with solar lighting

• Green branding, PR, and marketing
• Enhancing recruiting and retention
• Increasing real estate value & desirability

Turnkey, Build-Own-Operate, and "Monetize Your Roof" options

When solar electric projects are sufficiently large, Switch can offer your business or organization two interesting options, in addition to outright purchase of a turnkey system.

With Build-Own-Operate, Switch builds, owns, and operates the system, while you benefit from lower energy costs and a long-term power purchase agreement that makes your energy costs predictable and continues to save you money for 20 years or more. This arrangement eliminates the up-front investment on the buyer’s part, but it does require that the buyer be credit-worthy.

The “Monetize Your Roof” option lets you turn your roof (or unused grounds) into a money-making asset. You can either become an electricity provider by selling energy to a third party or lease the space to Switch for solar electric production.

Large-scale project management/financing experience

Switch is unique among D.C.-area renewable energy companies in having a founder with project management and financing experience in very large-scale energy projects. Over the course of his career, Chris Graves has been responsible for a total of almost $3 billion in energy development. So whether your project is big for you ($10,000) or just plain big ($10,000,000), Switch can help – from justifying a project to your CFO or CEO or board, to financing, to ensuring successful implementation.

Specialized project teams

Renewable energy installers vary in experience, but in reality, no one has more experience than the manufacturers' designers and installers. So our philosophy is to call on these experts to customize installations to each client's needs and each site's idiosyncracies. And because we can choose from different manufacturers, we can provide you with the best thinking in the industry – in addition to the best product lines.

A vendor-agnostic philosophy

Some renewable energy companies are distributors for only one brand of equipment. By dealing with one of the largest distributors in the U.S., Switch can offer you the very best technology for your needs.

For example, while some believe solar panels have become a commodity, there are incremental differences in efficiency between brands, as well as other factors that might be important to you. For example, we can offer you the panel with the lowest embodied energy or a U.S.-made panel with the guaranteed lowest variation in energy output.

And, of course, whenever improvements are made or a new technology appears, we’ll be ready and able to assess it and install it for you.

Guarantees that far exceed industry standards

Most solar companies rely on internal staff, certified by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP). Switch believes NABCEP is a step in the right direction, but has established relationships with some of the area’s highest- rated electricians, plumbers, and roofers. We use their Master Electricians, Master Plumbers, and Certified Roofers to install our systems – far exceeding the in-house expertise of competitors in these critical areas.

With this in-depth experience behind our work, we’re able to extend the industry’s typical one-year guarantee to five: If anything goes wrong with your system during that period, we will fix it. (The usual legal caveats about bad behavior on your part apply, of course.)

Industry-standard guarantees apply to the equipment we use: inverters are guaranteed for 10 years and solar panels for 25.