Net Positive -One Year and 13.1 MWh

Our photovoltaic system has now been in place and operational for one full year and as you can see below, it generated a whopping 13.1 MWhrs of electricity!

As shown in the illustration, this amount of power is equivalent to the energy consumed by 435 typical homes for a single day or the amount of carbon stored by 233 trees.  Even if you could care less about the issues around energy security or climate change, those numbers have to make you think.

To add to the story, we only consumed 7.80 MWhrs (see below) of electricity, giving us a delta of 5.3 MWhrs of positive electricity production that we sent back to the grid.  Actually it probably went to my neighbor's house and his 8,000 Christmas light. I won't bore you with the calculation, but that 5.3 MWhrs was more than enough to offset the energy we consumed in propane to heat our home. So it's official, in my own mind anyway, that our home is net positive.

Our PowerHouse Dynamics eMonitor System

The 7.8 MWhrs we consumed was also over 1.2MWhrs less than we consumed during the same period in 2010. At an average price of $0.11/KWhr, that saved us $132 in electricity. Add that to the 5.3 MWhrs of electricity that we sold back to the power company and it adds up to $715 in my pocket that otherwise wouldn't have been there, and this is before the sale of my renewable energy credits, which at the price I locked in at, adds a few thousand dollars more to the business case per year.

My whole reason for writing this blog is that there is a tremendous business case to be made by investing in renewable energy before you factor in the societal costs associated with other forms of energy.  I agree that the case is often complicated to understand, but that's an excuse! The fact of the matter is that I do not worry about the price of oil rising because people that do not like us block a canal where a large supply of the world's energy originates from.  I'm in control of my own costs and there really isn't a reason why the rest of this country couldn't be in the same boat... pun intended!

I only consider myself a wealthy person in the sense that I am blessed to have a loving family, good friends, and a job that I love.  If my family can do what we did just by adding some panels to our roof and without needing to make any sacrifices what-so-ever, so can others!

This isn't the kind of story you see on the news or read in so-called mainstream publications, which is really a shame.  Energy has been, at least on the surface, so cheap in this country for so long that we lost the motivation to innovate our way out of a problem we couldn't see.  Truth is that we've paid dearly for it and will continue to do so unless we collectively make smarter choices.

Anyway, I'll step down from my soapbox and leave you with something to read (other than this blog), if you want to learn more about alternatives to the same old story.  Check out the book Reinventing Fire.  It lays out the picture of where we could be if we start taking energy security seriously.

My Solar Adventure - Part 2 - Selecting an Installer

In Part 1 of this series I discussed some of the incentives that are available to homeowners interested in installing a photovoltaic (PV) system.  As I mentioned, understanding fully what incentives are available, what you'll have to pay out of pocket, and how long it will take your system to pay itself off is often confusing and time consuming.  That is unless you have a good installer to help you navigate the process.

Once I completed my evaluation of incentives I turned my focus to understanding exactly what the payback would be if I installed a system.  I've had linked on this blog since the beginning a clean and renewable technology blog that I read regularly and still do today.  That blog is cleantechnica.com  and at the time I was doing my solar research, CleanTechnica was sponsored, and I believe, partially owned by another organization named One Block Off the Grid (1BOG). 1BOG's mission is, as their name suggests, to help communities go solar by organizing group purchasing discounts with installers.  Anyone interested can go to 1BOG's site and sign up to see if there is a group purchasing plan available in their area.  I would suggest checking out 1BOG's site and signing up as you might be surprised at the number of people around you that have already signed up.  There is no obligation to buy anything or to even participate if there is an active program in your area, so it's a good place to test the waters.

Unfortunately for me, there was not yet an active 1BOG program in place in my area, but the site referred me to some installers near me as a place to start, so I checked out the websites of each of the installers that 1BOG recommended. This ended up being a great next step because a few of the installers had some really good tools on their sites where I could input my address, my energy use, and a few other details and the sites would provide a detailed explanation of what incentives were available to me, what the energy producing potential of my property was, and even what my payback interval would be.

I checked the information that each of the installers websites provided me against what I already knew from my incentives research and surprisingly, the information jived.  Next, I met with each of the installers to discuss my options further and finally arrived at my decision to go with Astrum Solar as my installer.

I chose Astrum for a number of reasons. My first impression of them was through their website, which was the best I saw in the way of providing tools to show me, with some pretty stunning accuracy, what a potential system was going to cost me and what incentives I would be able to take advantage of.  Astrum had a good offering of products and everyone I spoke with there seemed to know their stuff based on the research I did.

To make a long story short, a good installer will make the incentive process as easy for you as possible.  They should know their products and why certain products are good in different applications, and lastly, they have the whole process for selection, from financing, to installation, through product support and SREC sale, locked up.  My installer had all of this together and verified what I already knew, so I had to peace of mind to know that I wasn't being taken for a ride.

More on the process through installation next time... Happy New Year!