How much money do I make in green jobs?

Published on November 16, 2011 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: 1bog, Affordable Solar.

One Block Off the Grid published some data about how much different green jobs pay. Check it out by clicking the image below.

Home Solar Power Discounts – One Block Off the Grid and Solar Power Rocks!

One Block Off the Grid Expands with Solar Leasing

Published on May 27, 2011 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: 1bog, Affordable Solar.

Original article here from Susan Carpenter of the LA Times.

The group solar buying program, One Block Off the Grid, announced this week that it will begin offering leases for solar panel installations in addition to outright purchases.

Targeting homeowners who want to go solar to generate their own, renewable electricity but who don’t want to bear the entire cost burden up front, One Block Off the Grid’s solar lease lets consumers get a price estimate online without a salesman coming to their homes.

One Block Off the Grid is a San Francisco-based company that, since 2008, has been gathering homeowners in L.A. and other cities into buying groups that allow the company to negotiate a reduced solar-installation rate from a single contractor. The rate is typically 15% below market average.

In the Southern California Edison service area, an average 5.2-kilowatt installation purchased outright through the company costs $5.25 per watt, or $13,800 after rebates and incentives. The same installation financed with a 20-year lease would cost about $125 per month with zero money down.

Funded with referral fees from solar contractors, One Block Off the Grid has helped homeowners install 1,400 photovoltaic systems nationwide.

“The question was, ‘How do we get solar to mass adoption?’” asked One Block Off the Grid founder Dave Llorens.

Llorens thought the best strategy was to allow the individual players in a solar power installation to each do what they do best. One Block Off the Grid gives the price estimate. California Green Designs installs the panels and handles the paperwork for applicable rebates from L.A.-area utilities. And the firm Sun Edison provides financing when needed.

With its entry into the solar lease market, One Block Off the Grid joins Sungevity, Sun Run and five other companies offering solar leases to homeowners.

– Susan Carpenter

Photo: Rooftop solar panels. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

What has five times the ROI of solar in the desert?

Published on June 16, 2010 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: New Jersey.

Plugfoot brings tidings of new Solar Group Discounts

Published on June 15, 2010 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: Solar Trends.

Hey Y’alls, quick up date on where group purchases are now available at 1BOG:

Homeowners in Orange County, Inland Empire, Los Angeles, and the southern part of New Jersey are now the newest areas of the U.S. that now have access to a 15% group discount on home solar energy installations. The discount is offered by my other company 1BOG which helps you buy home solar by negotiating group discounts with local solar energy companies. So, 1BOG is now available to more than 23 million people, woot.

Taking the Mystery out of Solar Energy

1BOG has established installation and performance standards for its installers, which include Heliopower (Orange County and Inland Empire), Trinity Solar (Southern New Jersey), and REC Solar (Los Angeles). To see all of the details you can sign up right here on SolarPowerRocks.com.  Once signed up, you’ll see specific information on the solar panels used by each company, pricing, timeline, and your personal checklist for what it takes to go solar. After checking that out, you will be contacted to determine if your home could make a suitable site for a solar installation by using the online estimation tool. If you’re interested in moving forward, the installer will get in touch and perform a free home assessment.

If you’re not in one of these cities and you sign up, we will tell you how many people near you are signed up so we can get closer to launching a solar group purchase program there!

Need your help

Published on May 27, 2010 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: tax credits.

From our friends at votesolar.com

Friends,

Building a strong solar industry, complete with local jobs and new business growth, is a national economic imperative. Congress gets that, and that’s why it passed a Treasury Grant Program as part of the Recovery Act to help make solar and other renewable projects more cost-competitive with heavily subsidized, dirty fossil-based energy sources.

Just launched in July 2009, this Treasury Grant Program is already scheduled to sunset later this year. Can you ask Senators not to pull the plug on support for solar right when we need it most?

One of the most important federal policies supporting renewables today, the Treasury Grant Program awards selected commercial solar project developers an upfront grant totaling 30% of the project cost (an alternative to taking the solar investment tax credit). In less than a year, the Treasury Grant Program has resulted in 400 large solar energy systems that have supported 17,000 construction and manufacturing jobs across the country. That, my friends, is policy success. Now is not the time to call it quits on a program that’s putting Americans back to work.
We are asking Congress for a two-year extension on the program to strengthen our growing renewable industry and create another 65,000 domestic solar jobs. Can you help?
Onwards,
Annie + The Vote Solar Team

The Vote Solar Initiative
300 Brannan Street, Suite 609
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.votesolar.org
http://twitter.com/votesolar

Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) Explained

Published on May 25, 2010 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: 1bog, SREC, Solar Financing, solar video.

Even among the solar-savvy, many people do not know what Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) are or what potential benefits they represent. As we’ve mentioned before, SRECs (or often simply RECs) allow generators of renewable energy to sell credits to businesses like utilities who need them to comply with government regulations. These credits accrue automatically to solar panel owners and often can be traded and sold like stocks on the stock market.  The team over at 1bog created this video that explains SRECs and how they can yield financial benefits to owners of solar panels.

Solar increases the resale value of your home… fo’ reals.

Published on March 16, 2010 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: Affordable Solar.

I cooked up this video on 1BOG and thought it would be helpful to post here.  Take a look. I’d love to see some real estate data on this.  Seems like enough time has passed to have some solid data on turnover of homes that have solar installed.

If you look at Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data and you’re considering buying a home, or you’re a real estate agent, you can basically sort by everything down to “granite counter tops.”  But there’s not much in there in the way of any energy saving value–yet. Having solar will be a check box that you can sort by soon enough. Here are the math and details behind this video on how details on how solar effects the value of your home.

I’m moving to New Jersey just to buy homes and put solar on them. Seriously.

Published on March 2, 2010 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: New Jersey.

The Solar Situation

There’s a situation. With Solar. In New Jersey.

Did you know New Jersey is the #2 solar market in the US just behind California? Well, there’s a reason such a tiny state has more solar per capita than the best solar market in the United States. The reason is SRECs. SREC stands for “Solar Renewable Energy Credit.” They are a certificate for renewable energy production you can trade on the open market.

How do you get an SREC?

You own something that creates renewable energy. In this case, solar.  When your thing that you own that creates renewable energy pumps out 1mWh or 1000kWh (1000 kilowatt-hours) of juice (enough to power a big giant home for a month), you get one.

How much is an SREC worth?

At the moment, $700. Why you ask? Because if the utilities don’t meet their RPS standards, which they are not, they get ding’ed to the tune of $720. It makes sense then, that they’d be happy to buy your SREC’s for anything under $720, so it’s pretty easy to set the market rate for them. If they all the sudden start magically meeting their RPS standards, that could change, but for now, SRECs are a freaking gold mine for any homeowner who has a good roof setup in NJ.

Why is solar in NJ such a sick investment?

This is best shown with an image. Here is a financial breakdown of an example system estimate in New Jersey taken from 1BOG’s solar estimate tool (it only works where they have active solar group purchase campaigns).

In other words, the SRECs, which are money in your bank, are four times as valuable as the money you spent on the system in the first place. That DOESN’T EVEN INCLUDE your electrical savings. Yes, it’s crazy. Yes, I know it sounds too good to be true. I know, I know, I know. Believe me, I know. Most are skeptical, and yah sure there’s some fine print:

The Small Print – What’s the catch?

There’s not a REAL catch, it is actually a ridiculous investment where you get a free solar system that makes you money for 40 years. But here’s the small stuff you should know.

• The SREC incentives are so sick, that they state will try to keep you from gaming the system and installing a system in suboptimal conditions. You can only have the state rebate (which is currently $1,750 per DC kilowatt) if you have a roof situation that will be 90% efficient (good orientation and no shading). Some people who do not have this install systems anyway just to get the SRECs and abandon the state rebate)
• There is enough money for the state rebate at $1,750 per kW to last a few more months, then it drops to $1,550. That’s about a $1,400 decrease in rebates on the average sized system in NJ, so you better get moving.
• If the utilities all meet their RPS standards, albeit extremely unlikely, the SREC market could become volatile. They will still be worth considerable amounts of money, but they won’t have a clearly defined market value like the current penalty is pinning it to close to $720.
• SRECs are hard to trade personally, although there are some online tools coming about to help you do it. Most people sell them to aggregators (which the solar installers help you with). The aggregators of course take a cut, I think around 10%
• The utility penalty I talked about drops 3% a year, so expect SRECs to do something similar

If you live in New Jersey and you are interested in solar (hopefully you are now), sign up to find out if solar works on your home in New Jersey. There is currently a group purchase program in the north and there will be one coming soon in the south.

C'mon Solar Industry! We can do it.

Published on November 18, 2009 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: Solar Trends.

Let’s sell solar like the other industries sell their stuff!

I was inspired recently. I sat on a panel with Danny Kennedy from Sungevity at Solar Power International. Danny gave a great speech about how (and of course, I’m paraphrasing) we’re never going to get anyone to buy solar if we don’t start removing words like “inverter,” and “photovoltaics,” from our lexicon, and instead start talking about how solar makes your beer cold, your kids popsicles hard, and puts money in your wallet.

That’s what we’re all about here at SolarPowrRocks.com. We try to simplify the rebates and incentives for your state, and we’re also interactive. If you leave a comment under a post, we’ll get back to you in a couple of days. We also try to present the info in a fun way, while still being serious about solar. If you can’t see how solar applies to your budget and your life now and in the future, then we’re not doing our job.

Sadly, we think that other installers are doing worse than us at explaining solar. Why? Solar in the U.S. is at about 0.2% market penetration for residential rooftops. That’s weaksauce. But hey, the market is huge. The sky is the limit. If you look at California’s PG&E’s territory alone, just a good chunk of northern California, there’s over 700,000 customers who would show savings with SunRun’s PPA or SolarCity’s lease on day one. Even for people buying through a conventional home loan, the savings can be with in a year after taking the 30% Federal solar tax credit and write off the interest on the mortgage. The same with PACE/municipal financing.

As more financing options like these come online, how can a homeowner say no to $0 to very low-money down, clean energy, and saving money from the very first day? They can’t, but first they need to be educated, and that’s why we want you to educate yourself here and to get a quote from a local installer who will take you through all of the advantages for your home in your area.  The great thing about getting a few quotes is that you can prove that solar is right or wrong for you. No more guessing and thinking “it’s a good idea, but…” It costs you nothing but a little bit of time.

With that in mind, here at SolarPowerRocks.com, we’re going to continue to make solar easy to understand and show you what you’re missing.  We also urge all solar installers to clearly and patiently show potential customers how much they would have made with solar instead of stocks or real estate for the last few years. Where else can you get such a high and fixed return? We’ll be the first to tell you that it doesn’t pencil out everywhere, but where it does, it’s our job to let people know that solar’s not just for rich environmentalists. It’s for people with Hum Vee’s who have high electric bills, too.

Solar Power in Phoenix, AZ – Dry Heat? No, it's a Hot Heat!

Published on October 18, 2009 by Dave Llorens.
Categories: Solar Trends.

Phoenix, AZ is one of the US’s hottest solar markets right now. Maybe the hottest.  (FYI, Solar Fred recently updated the Arizona page if you’re looking for solar power rebates, incentives, and tax credits in Phoenix, AZ).

I recently got back from Phoenix where my coworker, Brad, and I were meeting with local solar installers to pick a winner for 1BOG’s Phoenix solar group purchase program.  I’ve had the luxury of traveling around and looking at different cities for 1BOG and it’s interesting to see the differences between them. Solar markets are so nuanced geographically.

Why is Phoenix’s solar market so hot?

• GPEC – GPEC‘s chairman is also the president of the AZ Cardinals, and they have worked heavily to get the solar industry to come to Phoenix, and they’ve succeeded. They’ve worked on legislation to make AZ attractive to big solar business.
• Lots of Sun – As simple as it may sound, the residents of Phoenix know they get a lot of sun.  There’s a heat tolerance of solar panels that makes crystalline silicon solar products perform poorer in the heat, but that effect is outweighed by the massive year-round sun.  Technology aside, the year-round sun makes its citizens more receptive to listen to the idea (something we have to fight in SF, or Seattle, for example).
• Large rebates – Both utilities that service the region, SRP and APS have handsome rebates.  SRP does $2.70 per DC watt (although the cap at a 5kW system is a real hindrance in a place with huge bills due to year round AC), and SRP does a whopping $3.00/DC watt.  Pile on a $1000 AZ state solar tax credit with the 30% federal tax credit and you’ve got a solid financial proposition for most everyone in Phoenix.

What’s interesting there?

• The way they quote the Federal tax credit:  Here’s one super interesting thing.  I’ve now seen SF, LA, San Diego, Denver, Sonoma County, New Orleans.. and this is the first market where many solar installers are quoting the Federal tax credit differently.  Typically, it’s 30% of your out-of-pocket expense (the correct way, although hey, legal small print: we are not tax professionals and please consult yada yada….).  But many installers are quoting the tax credit as 30% of gross price, making it look much more attractive. I think one lawsuit (poor tax advice makes you liable to the tune of 3X your damage I believe) will settle this dispute once and for all.
• Two separate meters!  Most places that allow net metering will come and swap out your meter with a net meter when you get solar.  In Phoenix, they come and put in a second meter which is your “production” meter, and then they come every month and compare the two.  Not a biggie,  but just another piece of evidence that shows we need some national standards if you want big companies to be able to scale quickly.
• Spanish tile – Er… there’s a ton of Spanish tile and most companies don’t seem to charge adders for it because it’s so common in Phoenix. But typically tile roofs are more expensive install.  You have to be delicate with it and replace the tiles you break.

What does Phoenix’s solar market still need?

• Inspector training - It’s a relatively new market.  It’s like Denver two years ago, and so a few installers noted that there is significant expense dealing with new inspectors, who in this country, are allowed to interpret electrical code.  Because they have not seen a lot of solar, they’re likely to hold up installs, sometimes unnecessarily.
• Standards in permitting and coding:  Line side taps are not yet legal in a lot of places in Arizona, but those make solar easier (some people have to change their electrical service to get solar, which is very expensive.  A line side tap is a cheap, and excellent, alternative to that solution).  Some neighborhoods disallowed a roof mount system called tile trac (which is a great system) for whatever reason.  Things like this make it difficult for install crews to do scalable business all over the city.

When it’s all said and done, however, Phoenix is still the land of the sun and solar. Get a free quote and find out if you can take full advantage of this abundant natural resource.