Lubershain: DER soft costs remained stubborn despite plummeting battery hardware prices
Andy Lubershane · Is now the time for DERs to scale? · Sep 18, 2025 · at 19:03
Andy Lubershain of Energy Impact Partners explains why early optimism around distributed energy resources failed to translate into widespread deployment a decade ago.
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“What we didn't get right was that the soft costs of deploying DERs would not fall, and that's largely the cost of customer acquisition. It's like getting people, getting customers, whether they're homeowners or businesses, to sign up, to put something on their property or to sign up for a load flexibility program. That was pretty stubborn. That still is pretty stubborn, unfortunately. And then also the installation costs. And you know, when you're shrinking down a large scale battery system and putting it into a box that has to be interconnected into a homeowner's a homeowner's circuit breaker, and you put all the safety switches in place. And you get a, you know, skilled labor out on site to make that happen. It adds a lot of cost, and so even during this period as, you know, battery prices plummeted, we didn't really see the same thing happen with, like, the cost of a fully installed residential battery system.”
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