the pros and cons of installing solar
When Ray Tse and her family moved into their Irvine home in April, their electricity bills averaged $250 a month. Then the long hot summer hit, increasing air conditioning use and pinching their pocketbook.
But this fall, their bills are projected to fall $20 to $30 a month now that a crew is finished bolting solar panels on their Stonegate home roof.
Tse is just one of thousands of Orange County residents seeking to save a buck with solar power and solar industry watchers expect a gold rush in 2015 with lower prices, greater financing options and changing rules aimed to encourage alternative energy.
It a confluence of factors that, experts say, is unprecedented http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ and has one message: The time for solar is now.
Over the last decade, solar technology has improved and the cost of raw materials, such as silicon, has declined, making it cheaper than ever to produce the panels. China, experts say, drives much of the price drop.
Additionally, the price of installing solar has plummeted. A typical home system a decade ago cost about $45,000 before incentives. Today? That cost is about $20,000.
A typical solar panel used to cost $4 per watt of electricity. Now, it 80 cents per watt. Part of the reason for that drop was the lower cost of raw materials. Part of it was better technology. And cheap jerseys part of it was mass manufacturing in China.
cost has come way down, down to the point where it has become interesting financially, said Roland Winston, a solar expert and professor at UC Merced.
With solar gaining popularity, it increasingly common for homebuilders to build it directly into the system. Winston likens the effectiveness to a house with central cooling: It much easier to include central cooling in the design than to retroactively install air conditioning and ducts.
Tse, the Irvine mother, skipped having solar installed directly into her newly built house for one reason: The builder didn offer to put in enough panels. Rather than go with the eight or nine the builder offered, she got 14 installed by Sullivan Solar Power.
The panels will help power not only the house, but the electric car Tse husband drives.
the long term, it more economical, especially with the car using electricity, Tse said.
But experts warn to be cautious. With the price of solar technology dropping and the number of options for financing growing, it takes diligence and careful attention to separate good deals from bad.
In the 1970s and banks hesitated to issue loans for home solar systems, according to Ron Durbin, executive director of UC Solar. The panels were sometimes of spotty quality or poor construction, and banks weren confident they were good investments.
Things have changed, with myriad financing options such as paying upfront, taking out a loan with a local bank or leasing panels from a solar company.
For homeowners needing tax write offs, buying a solar system makes the most sense, either with a loan or with cash. Homeowners can write off up to 30 percent of the cost of the system with the Solar Investment Tax Credit.
For homeowners without large tax bills, leasing the system sometimes makes more sense. The solar provider builds the system and owns it, and the homeowner pays them for the electricity. They pay a set rate for the life of the lease an advantage in an age when electricity prices from utilities are going up.
I trading one bill for two bills, but that second solar provider bill is guaranteed not to go up for the 20 year life of the bill, Durbin said.
This month, SolarCity, which installs a third of the nation solar systems, announced it was offering loans not leases for solar systems, and not loans through a bank, but loans through SolarCity itself. At the end of 30 years, customers will own their systems without ever dealing with a bank.
A week later, the company announced it was offering bonds to any investor large or small. The bonds allow investors to hand money to SolarCity, which the company will pay back in one, two or seven years, with interest, using the revenue it collects from residential solar systems.
need to deploy large amounts of energy, and we need to do it as fast as possible. We have big climate challenges we have to face, said Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity.
While the solar industry comes up with ever new ways to finance installations, regulatory changes also are afoot. And how these rules change in the next year will affect industry growth.
The way it works now, the electricity a homeowner produces goes directly to powering the home. Sometimes, though, such as on a bright afternoon when no one is home and the air conditioner is off, the system produces more electricity than the house consumes.
That electricity can be stored, and so, in a system called net metering, it fed back in to the large grid.
Essentially, when the solar system is producing more electricity than the house consumes, that house electric meter runs backward, and the homeowner accrues credit.
Later in the day, when the solar panels aren generating electricity but the homeowner is consuming it, the electric meter runs forward again, and those credits are used up.
At the end of the year, the homeowner gets a bill for the amount of electricity they consumed but didn produce.
That system is about to change.
The California Public Utilities Commission is currently discussing the next version of net metering. The new rules aren yet known, but industry watchers say they probably won be as favorable for home solar owners.