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!

My Solar Adventure - Part 1 - Incentives

It all started about a year and a half ago (insert dream sequence here)...  I found myself needing to research solar incentives for a graduate class I was taking.  One thing lead to another and fifty-two solar panels later,  my house produces more energy than it uses.

I know... it's quite a leap going from a spring semester research project to a financial decision that you would think will keep my kids in student loans for the rest of their lives.  It turns out that it's one of the better decisions I've ever made (and I just sprained my shoulder patting myself on the back!).

So how did I get here, you might ask.  Well, it started with a web site where you can find any and all incentives available to businesses and homeowners interested in renewable energy installations in the United States. That site was created by the US Department of Energy, NC State University, the National Renewable Energy Lab and a few other organizations and in typical government program naming fashion, it has an strange acronym. DSIRE (careful Google-ing that one!) or the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency is your one stop shopping location for everything energy.

As you can see, you simply click on the state that you're interested in learning about incentives for and those state's incentives are listed.

In a nutshell, what I learned from this site was that Pennsylvania, my home state, had a program called the PA Sunshine Solar Rebate Program, which provided a $1.25 per watt rebate for the installed cost of electrical grid tied photovoltaic systems up to a 10 kilowatt size.  One item that I want to note a about this program, however, is that the grant has been mostly allocated and new installations are currently placed on a waiting list. More on that later, though, as there are additional incentives in place that I will discus at a later point in this topic series. 

One other PA state program that I wanted to mention is the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission - Solar Alternative Energy Credit program. This program provides owners of qualified, grid tied, PV systems with something called a solar renewable energy credit or SREC for every megawatt hour (1,000 kilwatt hours) of energy produced.  Public utilities in most states, Pennsylvania included, are required to provide a certain amount of their energy portfolio from renewable sources, so these SRECs can be sold on an open market to these utilities, restricted to some states, to help these utilities meet their renewable energy requirements.  The price of these SRECs goes up and down based on supply and demand of their market, but their purpose is to provide a longer term, performance based incentive for installing a PV system.

On top of the state rebate, the Federal Government offers a 30% tax credit on the installed cost of a PV system with no limit on size and some utilities offer additional incentives.  Some states, not including Pennsylvania, offer other incentives such a property assessed clean energy or PACE loans that allow homeowners to finance the cost of installing renewable energy systems by adding the cost to property taxes paid on the home and paid over a term of around fifteen to twenty years.  This loan stays with the home should the original owner move and spreads out the cost over time to the point where it's less of a financial burden. 

So, to keep this topic manageable, I will stop here and pick up with choosing an installer next time.  Unfortunately the incentive landscape can be very local and, I believe, is largely the reason why most people immediately think that installing a system is outside of their price range.  Honestly, I thought the same thing and only found out otherwise after I was forced to do a tremendous amount of research for my graduate course. 

To be clear, I know that the financial case for installing a system is very good under the right conditions especially when you consider the volatility of energy prices across the globe. If I didn't know this fact, I would not be writing this blog. In year one, my system is cash flow positive on a month to month basis and the pure payback of the system is under five years at current energy prices.  So, stay tuned and hopefully I can help clear up the fog.

I've Come to Drain Your Wallet!

I mentioned in a previous post how I use my home energy monitor to track phantom power and how much that power sucks from my wallet on an annual basis.  Phantom power, just to reiterate, is power that electronic devices consume even while they’re not in use.  You may also hear this referred to as "vampire" or "standby" power and a large number of electronic devices consume it.  In fact, according to the US Department of Energy, between five and ten percent of all residential power consumption in the US is phantom use and likely not necessary for operation of the device.

Devices in my home that were particularly large users of phantom power were my televisions, my DVR, and other entertainment system related devices. I have two primary home entertainment setups in my home; one in my living room and one in my family/daughter’s playroom.  Through use of my energy monitor I found that my living room setup was consuming 47 watts in standby power all the time even if I never turned a single device on. My daughter’s playroom setup was consuming 32 watts all the time. So how much was that costing me, you might ask? Here are some definitions and the math:

1,000 watts = 1 kilowatt or another way of stating this is 1 watt = 0.001 kilowatt

24 hours in a day

365 days in a year

24 hours x 365 days in a year = 8,760 hours in a calendar year

So, if you’re looking to calculate kilowatt hours (kWh) you multiply the amount of energy a device is using by the number of hours that it’s actually using that energy.  When considering phantom power, the electricity being drawn is constant, so in the case of my living room entertainment system the case is as follows:

0.047 kWh x 8,760 hours = 411.72 kWh

I then take this 411.72 kWh and multiply it by what I pay my electric utility company per kWh, which is approximately $0.12 per kilowatt hour.

411.72 kWh x $0.12/kWh = $49.41 per year in wasted money!

I can think of a lot of better uses for my $50 than throwing it at my utility provider for no apparent reason.  On top of this, the playroom setup was costing me an additional $33.64 per year.  OK, so this might not seem like a lot of money, but think of all of the other devices in your home that are constantly sucking power. If you have computers and monitor plugged in constantly, you can probably multiply this amount.  They quickly add up and result in billions (yes billions!) of dollars being wasted across the US each year, and growing, along with lots of bad things being put into the air that we breathe and water that we drink for no apparent reason.

My fix for this is shown below. It’s simple and cheap, paying for itself in both situations in about a year or less.  The way these power strips works is that a television is plugged into the “master” plug in the strip.  When the strip senses that you’ve turned off the power to the television, it cuts the power to the rest of the devices plugged into the strip.  There are “always on” plugs on the opposite side of the strip that allows you to leave power supplied to devices that, for one reason or another, you may want to leave plugged in. The strips also function as surge protectors.

360 Electrical's GreenSurge Device

Rocketfish 12 Outlet Surge Protector

This little device took the standby power in my living room from 47 watts to 7 saving me about $42 per year and the strip only cost $39.  I purchased a new EnergyStar rated television for the playroom due to the fact that the old television was starting to die.  This TV has internet widgets and allowed me to replace my TiVo with built-in Hulu Plus and Netflix apps.  This decreased the number of devices I had to have plugged in and the TV also has a proximity sensor built into it that automatically turns the device off after 15 minutes if no one is in the room watching it. All of these bells and whistles took my standby power from 32 watts down to 13 saving me $20/year and preventing my daughter from leaving the room and allowing the TV to run for hours for no reason.  I’m also getting closer to firing my cable company with this setup, but more on the energy implications of this later.

CNET has a good resource page to help you figure out what all of those entertainment related vampires are costing you, but the best method is to monitor yourself as usage levels can vary based on internal setting in many of these devices.  Lastly, when purchasing new appliances and electronics, always look for the EnergyStar label.

Happy vampire hunting!