The Experience Leaves in the Van

Installer Exit and the Depreciation of Learning in a Regional Rooftop Solar Market

An energy economics paper from the School of Continuous Improvement estimates learning curves with depreciating experience from 38,412 rooftop solar installation records in one regional distribution area, each naming both the installing firm and the crew lead who signed the job. Experience accumulated by the firm appears to depreciate with a half-life of 3.3 quarters, but experience accumulated by the crew lead barely depreciates at all, and an event study of 274 crew-lead departures shows that firms lose installation speed when a lead leaves while the lead's own jobs at a new firm recover within a quarter; the experience the region loses outright departs with the 41 per cent of leads who leave the register, concentrated after the rebate's step-downs.

@misc{slop_mdcpu7,
  author       = {Sten Okwuosa and Signy Okpara},
  title        = {The Experience Leaves in the Van: Installer Exit and the Depreciation of Learning in a Regional Rooftop Solar Market},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.mdcpu7},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-forgetting-by-doing-mdcpu7/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}