As the most decorated Olympian of all time—with 23 gold medals—Michael Phelps has a slew of sports-related endorsements, from Under Armour to Powerbar. But recently, he added a less expected endorsement: solar panels made by Panasonic.
“For me, now having four kids, I want to make the world better for them,” he says. His mission: to convince as many people as possible to install solar at home. More than 4 million Americans have solar panels now. Millions more people are interested in making the switch, but haven’t yet made the decision to do it. New federal support will help boost that adoption through incentives like tax credits and the $7 billion “Solar for All” program, which will install nearly another million solar systems on roofs.
Phelps helped launch Panasonic’s latest line of panels last fall, and then installed a system at his own Arizona home—with 90 panels, four batteries, four inverters, and two energy management boxes—that could cover all of his family’s power needs, including charging their electric cars.
“If we do have an outage or blackout, we have a 12- to 24-hour range of storage,” he says. “And living in the desert, obviously, there’s no shortage of sun.” As a “huge stats guy,” he says he’s also obsessed with the app that shows the system’s output and energy use throughout the home.
It’s not clear how much sway the Olympian will have on homeowners. But the industry could use a boost, especially as policy changes in states like California have led to a drop in new solar installations. There’s a strong case for home solar to grow, rather than just large, industrial-scale solar farms. Homeowners can save on energy costs, and it puts less strain on the grid, which is already struggling to build new infrastructure.
It’s the most cost-effective way, along with community solar, to move to a clean grid, by some calculations. And as climate change progresses, it also makes communities more resilient: With solar panels on the roof and batteries to store the energy, homeowners can keep the power on even if a hurricane or wildfire takes out the grid.
