Incentives and rebates are supposed to make widespread energy upgrades, electrification, and Distributed Energy Resource (DER) adoption easier and faster while supporting workforce development. By lowering the cost of high efficiency equipment and other upgrades, they make projects more accessible for residents, help contractors sell more work, and accelerate the adoption of technologies that ideally reduce carbon emissions and help make the grid more flexible, affordable, renewable powered, and resilient.
That’s the idea.
But in reality, there is a point where the process required to access an incentive starts creating more friction than the incentive removes. No one has seen this sooner or more clearly, or suffered more from the administrative burden of these programs, than Trade Professionals or contractors actually doing the work. The documentation burden associated with energy programs is consuming so much of their time that the intended purpose of the incentives, faster adoption and installation, can be sacrificed.
A project that should be straightforward suddenly requires extensive equipment documentation before and after installation, energy modeling, multiple (sometimes literally a dozen) forms, utility bills, income verification, receipts, homeowner signatures, rebate assignment documentation, repeated site visits from a multitude of entities, and repeated follow up. The documentation alone adds hours, and commonly weeks, which can extend projects by months. Time spent on documentation compilation is time contractors are not spending generating new proposals, talking with customers, or installing new projects.
It feels like we’ve lost the plot.
Program requirements have become one of the strongest sources of project delay we’re seeing for contractors trying to serve new customers and finish existing projects. And while the need for documentation with incentives at this unprecedented scale is understandable from a program administrator’s perspective, the burden has become so significant that contractors in programs across the country are finding ways around the process.
In some places, contractors simply stop participating in incentive programs altogether. That undermines the workforce-development component of these programs and leaves utilities with fewer contractors available to install the projects their incentives are designed to support. In other cases, contractors choose to give customers a comparable discount themselves rather than navigate the incentive program - cutting directly into contractor margins simply to avoid the administrative headache.
In programs where the utility prefers it, or where it creates a better customer experience, contractors may assume the rebate on behalf of the resident. The contractor discounts the customer’s project upfront by the expected rebate amount, assigns the rebate to themselves, and waits to be reimbursed. That can mean floating tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month which is clearly unsustainable for many small and medium-sized businesses.
Worse still, months after installation, if documentation is found to be wrong or incomplete, funds are exhausted, or the rebate is otherwise delayed or denied, the contractor absorbs the financial risk and can be left thousands, or significantly more, out of pocket. In a worst case scenario, the programs designed to support contractors can actually put those businesses at risk.
We’re seeing downstream effects on utilities and programs too. When contractor backlogs grow because of administrative burden, utilities understandably don’t want to continue sending residents to contractors who are already booked months out. So outreach and marketing are intentionally slowed down by administrators. That means that residents who may need help today won’t have access to resources that are technically available to them, and of course the utility also struggles to reach its program goals. Available funding and resources are being kept from the people they were designed to help simply because of process bottlenecks. This creates the exact opposite outcome from what incentives are meant to achieve.
For contractors, paperwork isn’t “the work”. It isn’t what moves the needle for their business. It’s not what they signed up for, or highest or best use of their time.
Trade Pros should be able to spend their time on places that matter for their bottom line, for residents, and for the industry: talking with residents, understanding needs, solving field problems, installing equipment, completing project installs, getting paid. And AI native software should be able to absorb repetitive administrative work so humans can focus on the work that requires humans.
Maiven was built for this.
With Maiven, residents can complete their own virtual energy assessment in just a few minutes. Maiven instantly runs a comprehensive energy model of the home, calculating program eligibility, income qualifications, potential measures, incentives, and the energy impacts of recommended upgrades. Once a resident is ready to move forward (which is typically within a few minutes with Maiven), Trade Pros can remotely review the project, request missing information as needed, and more - often eliminating multiple trips to a home. Enrollment is fully automated and all incentives and rebate applications rebate applications dramatically streamlined.
Trade Pros using Maiven have frequently seen labor cost reductions of more than 80% while simultaneously increasing the number of homes they can serve at once - delivering increased revenue and better margins in addition to fewer paperwork headaches.
Incentive programs are supposed to remove friction for the customer and increase revenue for an industry we critically need for the transition to a renewable, dynamic grid. They shouldn’t create a new layer of friction for the contractor.
Maiven’s core mission is to make the right thing to do both the easiest and financially the most advantageous - for everyone involved.
Connect with us and we’ll show you how we’re delivering for current partners and how we can change your workflow, too.
hello@askmaiven.com
