Stephen Lacey from Greentech Media recently reported there were 200,000 solar systems installed in the residential sector in 2014. We decided to take a closer look at the contractors driving this growth, by studying those with the most solar building permits from 2014.

Our building permit classifier labeled over 90,000 permits in our database as “solar installations” in 2014. Sometimes, multiple permits will be taken out for the the same project so to account for these cases, we ignored cases in which multiple solar permits were pulled for the same parcel or property. This reduced the total count to 66,260 cases. The list was then grouped according to the contractor on record (there were 6,226 total) and sorted in descending order.

After considering the top 25, a few things jumped out:

SolarCity’s dominance – SolarCity’s 16,867 permits, accounted for over a quarter of all total solar permits in 2014 and more than the next 35 contractors combined.

– SolarCity’s 16,867 permits, accounted for over a quarter of all total solar permits in 2014 and more than the next 35 contractors combined. Vivint is running a distant #2 – Vivint Solar made some noise when it IPO’d last October and their 4,475 permits in 2014 resulted in the #2 ranking on our list yet was only about a quarter of SolarCity’s total.

Vivint Solar made some noise when it IPO’d last October and their 4,475 permits in 2014 resulted in the #2 ranking on our list yet was only about a quarter of SolarCity’s total. Hawaii’s growth – Solar seems to have picked-up in Hawaii. 7 out of the top 25 contractors on the list were headquartered in Hawaii.

– Solar seems to have picked-up in Hawaii. 7 out of the top 25 contractors on the list were headquartered in Hawaii. Lennar Homes is a player in the solar industry – We were pleasantly surprised to see a large, national homebuilder like Lennar Homes show-up on the list.

The top 25 are listed in the table below along with links to their BuildZoom profile matched to their corporate headquarters. Most of these companies have multiple licenses and profiles on BuildZoom. Currently, you can see their other profiles by searching for their business name and location on BuildZoom. In the future, we’ll be introducing a section on these profiles to allow you to easily navigate all of the profiles associated with national companies.

If you have specific questions or comments, leave a reply using the form below or you can contact us directly.

Note: Building permits are collected from a total of 500 jurisdictions (400 cities and 100 counties), which collectively account for between 25-40% of the actual permits issued nationally.