Why BYOP Exists
I grew up in Mongolia. Where I'm from, the grid doesn't come to you — you carry a solar panel, a battery, and a generator, and you make your own power. You own what runs your life. That idea stayed with me.
I came to Utah for college — electrical engineering at BYU — and then went to work at Rocky Mountain Power. I kept hearing homeowners talk about residential solar like it was either a luxury product or a scam. A technology that should have been cheap had somehow earned a terrible reputation. I didn't understand why. I moved on.
Then in 2023 I bought a house.
The house came with a 7.5 kW rooftop solar system — good panels, clean install, nothing wrong with the hardware. But the previous owner had to pay off a $40,000 loan before she could transfer the property. Forty thousand dollars. For 7.5 kilowatts.
A few weeks later, a friend told me he'd just signed a contract for a 5 kW system. His price: also $40,000.
Something was wrong with these numbers. So I did the math an engineer does.
Panel prices had dropped roughly 80% over the past decade. Inverters were commodity parts. Microinverters — once exotic — were reliable and cheap. Add fair install labor, city permits, and a normal business margin, and a 5 kW rooftop system in Utah should top out around $12,500.
Not $40,000. So where was the other $27,500 going?
- A door-knocker earning 10–15% commission for landing the contract.
- A sales rep earning another 10–15% to close it.
- A dealer network taking 15–25% for sitting between the company that sold the system and the company that installed it.
- A finance company skimming a hidden dealer fee, then collecting 25 years of interest on an inflated principal.
- State and federal tax credits baked into the sticker price, so the incentive mostly padded the margin.
The panels were fine. The industry in front of them was the scam.
A business model that inflates the price three to four times over to fund commissions and financing kickbacks cannot survive. That's why so many of the big American solar names, and the dealer-finance companies that rode behind them, are now in bankruptcy. You can't thrive on a scam.
I still believe in the technology. Solar panels work. Batteries work. The grid should be optional for anyone who wants it to be. So I left Rocky Mountain Power to start BYOP Electric.
Bring Your Own Power is the same principle I grew up with: make your own electricity, store it, own it outright. No middleman, no lease, no dealer interest.
My job is to size the system honestly, install it well, pull the permit, and charge you the real price. That's the whole company.