Summary

The purpose of this monthly report is to track consumer concerns with their utility in regard to preventing outages during severe weather events, consumer interest in home generation sources such as solar, energy storage, or generators, and consumer likelihood to seek information from their utility about solar solutions. The results of the analysis are presented by age, U.S. region, and gender. The data in this report was collected at the end of April 2022.

The supporting data and figures in this report can be found in the accompanying file

Source

The data and graphics in this report are from Zpryme’s monthly and quarterly consumer benchmarking surveys. Data is based upon a nationally representative survey sample of 1,000 U.S. adults (margin of error: +/- 3.5%).

Highlights

• Three-tenths (30.0%) of the sample said they had a high level of concern with utilities about storm outages, with the south having the largest group of those highly concerned (32.5%).
• While 14.7% of the sample said they would likely buy a DER in the next 12 months, about twice as many males (19.1%) as females (9.8%) said they would buy one. The typical DER purchaser was male, living in the northeast, and 18-24 years old.
• There was 17.3% who said that they were likely to ask their utility about solar power.
• A review of findings from March 2021 to April 2022 revealed a slight increase in the percentage of high concern about storm outages from 28.6% (March 2022) to 30.0% (April 2022), but still within the range from 23.6% to 30.0% seen over the last 14 months. The 14.7% who would purchase a DER in April 2022 is above the all-time low of 10.2% (July 2021) but below the high of 21.2% (November 2021). Those who were likely to ask their utility about solar power in April 2022 (17.3%) had a percentage that fell in between the range of 26.0% (November 2021) to 14.2% (in both September and October 2021).