pic from penelopesloom.com

The Senate added a lot of renewable energy legislation to the $700B bailout bill because that thing had to go through.  It was just passed by the house and the president signed it earlier this evening.  If that’s the way things gotta get done so be it.  Here’s what’s in there (it’s big, and it’s goooood):

• 30 percent investment tax credit, capped at $4,000, for installations of small wind turbines.
• A one-year extension of production tax credits for power companies that produce electricity from wind, biomass or waves and currents from oceans, rivers or irrigation canals.
• Expansions of credits for producers biofuels and the retailers who sell such fuels.
• Tax credits for refineries, factories and other businesses that use carbon-capture systems.
• Extension of tax deductions for builders of energy-efficient buildings and homes and manufacturers of energy-efficient appliances.
• The 30 percent investment tax credit for solar and fuel-cell installations through 2016 and removal of a $2,000 cap for such credits on residential systems.
• $2,500 tax credit for owners of plug-in electric cars and (and up to $15,000 for plug-in electric trucks, wow).
• Up to $800 million in bonds to help finance clean power plants
• Benefits for employers who help their employees bike to work

So, you are considering solar and need a few more rounds of ammo to seal the deal. Good! You’ve come to the right place. Let’s begin with the environmental benefits of choosing solar, then we’ll cover the juicy financials.

ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

• No emissions/pollution free

Unlike burning coal, oil, or even wood, solar power is clean. That is to say, there are no residual accumulating pollutants after a day’s worth of energy generation.

• Reduce your carbon footprint

Whether you are an eco-cognizant carbon worrier, or someone who does not know the difference between a carbon footprint and a criminal fingerprint, you’ll be glad to know installing solar equipment on your property lessens the detrimental impact you have on our environment. There are some curmudgeons out there that will argue the carbon cost of producing the panels outstrips the advantage of them, but they are flatly wrong. Those panels have a net zero carbon footprint after only 2 years on your roof, and that number is decreasing with new production methods. After that, you’ll be consuming significantly less energy produced by processes which release CO2 into the atmosphere, thereby doing your part to ameliorate our global warming and pollution problems. Go you!

• Provide clean energy for the next generation

Your home or business will probably be around for some years to come, even after you pass on to whatever you believe lies ahead. The equipment you install now has long-term warranties on it, and many panel manufacturers warranty their product for 25 years. There are installations done 50 years ago that still produce. Those that inhabit your home or work in your buildings in 2060 will be thankful you installed this equipment.

• Be a part of your communities’ solar future

By conserving and installing solar power, you now are providing a model for others in your community to follow. You would be AMAZED at the difference in receptivity to solar from people on a block where someone has it vs. people on a block who don’t. It’s also a great way to teach your children or those in the neighborhood about energy, the awesome power of the sun, and electrical engineering. Even though I studied psychology, this stuff is really cool. Just think, you can run your electric guitar, Cuisinart or power tools with photons careening off of our sun. Try to imagine explaining that to someone who was born in 1608. This technology is simple, elegant and really amazing.

FINANCIAL BENEFITS

Here we get down to the financial reasons to go solar. Experience has shown that this is the area many home and business owners really care most about. Well, let’s get to it!

• Stabilizes energy costs over time

Current utility rates are just that. They are current – meaning they have been a lot lower in the past and there is no reason to believe they will be decreasing any time in the near future unless you start generating some of your own power. Below, you can see the average cost of energy per kilowatt hour in California. Over the past 30 years, this rate has increased at 6.7% per year. Look for this number to increase US wide in the coming years due to the increase in natural gas prices, among other things.

By getting ahead of the curve and going solar, you can lock in future energy costs over several decades that are significantly lower than you are currently paying. Here’s a more practical example of why going solar for this reason makes a lot of sense. As you probably know, airlines are having severe problems maintaining their profitability after fuel hikes. Many are charging for additional bags, some are now charging for water! Water! Well, in the past 2 years, United filed for bankruptcy, Delta almost tanked, and others like America West and US Airways had to merge with each other to stay afloat.

Southwest was the only airline that made it through this continuing price surge. They recently reported their 28th profitable quarter in a row. Why? They locked in the price of fuel years ahead of time at a good rate by buying fuel futures. Buy your own energy futures with solar energy today. Don’t be the next United Airlines. Even if you don’t have pensions to sever, the money you save can be used for other things- like your bottom line, groceries, or your next tank of gas.

• Utilizes free fuel (sunshine)

Oil extraction is risky, dangerous, messy and expensive business. Sunshine however, is.. well.. pleasantly free. I’ll spare you the elementary math. Yes, while the equipment needed to harness the energy is not free, the energy produced after payback is. It’s like having your own oil rig in your back yard, except it’s not ugly, nor does it move. Plus you don’t have to set the product on fire to make it work, it just does.

• Adds value to your home

Having solar equipment on your home increases its value. How much? Appraisers are still getting their act together on this one and they may vary a bit from one to another, but according to The Appraisal Journal, solar energy adds $15-$20 times yearly energy savings to resale value. So let’s say you own a home in Pennsylvania and you install a solar power system on your roof, and it ends up saving you $4000/year in electricity bills. That means your home would increase in value $60,000-$80,000. That’s more than the system will cost, so your initial investment is recouped immediately and pays a $4000 dividend the first year. Instead of getting upset every time your utility raises power rates, you get a raise instead!

• Reduces your annual electric or gas bill

No brainer.

• Leverages lucrative financial incentives and tax credits

Incentives and tax credits were passed into law in many states. Check the right hand side of the page for further details. In some areas, you can deduct up to 50% of the cost of your solar power system (including installation!). However, these tax credits are not permanent. For some areas, credits like this are expiring and will be stepped down over the next decade. Now’s the time to lock them in. Once electric rate prices make solar more cost effective on it’s own, you will have purchased the same technology as the latecomers, but the government will have paid up to half the price for you. You’ve been paying for these rebates with your taxes and your electric bill…. TAKE THEM BACK!

• Adds credits to your utility account for future use

Many states have net metering guidelines they must follow when home or business-owners install energy producing equipment. Net-metering does not involve people from your municipality donned in orange hardhats coming through to measure the height of your basketball hoop net with meter sticks. Instead, your power company is obliged to purchase power you generate back from you at a wholesale rate. So, let’s say you’ve got some solar power panels up on your roof for the summer but you decide to go on and take a vacation for a month or so. All the power that is being generated gets credited to your account. At the end of the year, if you use as much power as you feed back into the grid, your power bill is… negligible. In Germany, legislation has gone a step farther. There, they have huge feed-in tariffs which means that home and business-owners get paid 4 times as much for the electricity that they produce than for the power they consume. Also, they are cut a check from the power company for excess power generation. This is why over 60% of the solar equipment produced in this country is shipped there, creating a panel shortage here. Though the subsidies there are about to be cut back quite a bit, look at the effects on the workforce and panel market:

Now, go get yourself hooked up with a local installer to get moving!

Clunk! Roller Coaster off the Rails More Info The House puts its foot down Roller coasters have, by design, a multitude of ups and downs, but it’s comforting even to thrill-seekers to know they rarely become completely derailed. The roller coaster that represents the latest iteration of the Congressional energy bill, however, has finally done that.The news from Washington is that the House of Representatives has no intention of moving forward with the “Cantwell-Ensign” clean energy provisions that the Senate made part of their comprehensive housing bill in early April. House Democratic leadership does not believe: that energy provisions should be included in housing legislation that energy matters should be part of any future ‘Economic Stimulus’-type legislation that bills with tax titles should be passed with no identified source of funding Unfortunately, those three characteristics well describe the clean energy amendment that Senators Cantwell and Ensign succeeded in attaching to the housing bill. This is, to say the least, a disappointment, particularly after the efforts of solar citizens helped to produce the overwhelming (88-8) Senate passage of the amendment. But for the short term, it seems there will be no useful activity on Capitol Hill that will promote the tax credits for clean energy or energy efficiency that we know are so important. And that doesn’t mean these measures will never again be a part of the economic equation; what it means is that those congresspersons who firmly believe the measures are necessary must find other legislative vehicles to carry them through the House, Senate and the White House. Will this happen this year? At this point we can’t tell you. There is talk of lumping the clean energy tax credits in with other credits and deductions in a broad-based ‘extenders’ bill, but nothing concrete has yet emerged. We do know that the attention of Congress in an election year tends to veer toward campaigns and polls instead of legislation as November approaches, so we’re hoping for action earlier rather than later. As always, we’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE:  SAN FRANCISCO SOLAR SUBSIDY PASSES!

The plan is to be announced today from city officials. It’s a proposed city based subsidy of $3000 – $5000 per residence, and double that for businesses. Also proposed are financing programs at solid rates that would remove one of the biggest hindrances to solar, up front cash (although not usually a huge problem in San Francisco as most home owners have $50,000 lying around).

There is not typically a lot a local government action on solar, it’s been statewide. But Berkeley is starting a program funding solar projects through taxes, and Oakland will be partnering with San Francisco State’s CS department (more on that coming this week) to automatically calculate solar’s financial gain on a house by house basis. There is a trend of this local involvement, which is good, because each city is different.

The target start date of the program is July 1st, and end of next year for the loan program. Here is the original article in SF Gate.

The comments on the article are telling. They show many of the common misunderstandings about solar, such as people mocking the idea of installing solar in such a cloudy place, and others doing simple incomplete math to disprove cost effectiveness. The best comment is this:

“Yes,Yes, Yes!!!!! This is great! I installed solar panels on my home in the mission 6 years ago and have been thrilled. My monthly PGE bill is about $5.00 to be connected to the grid and at the end of the year my true-up bill is under $20.00. This means, effectively I am self sufficient for my electricity needs. As for sunshine — photovoltaic panels are actually more effective in cooler climates than extremely hot ones. At some time or another nearly all of us has gotten a sunburn when outdoors on a cloudy day. That’s because the UV rays go right through the clouds and can both burn your skin AND generate electricity through your solar panels. I admit that installing solar is expensive (though cheaper now than when I did it) but they last forever and when you sell your property you will more than recoup the investment. Besides, standing and watching your electric meter run backwards as you feed electricity into the grid is a huge turn-on! Go Solar!”

APS claimed that they are deprived of “lost revenues” for which it deserves compensation if customers install solar systems. Excuse me, but that statement made me break out the giant “BULLSH*T” button. Hey, ASP, if a customer decides to invest in a system which draws less energy from the grid, you assholes are not entitled to compensation from them for “lost revenues”. Such a proposition is preposterous and flat-out dumb.

If this isn’t enough, ASP wanted to be paid about 6.7 cents for every kWh a customer-sited solar system generates. Yes, you read that right. If you buy electricity from them, it’d cost you 11 cents a kWh. If you install solar and don’t buy electricity from them, you still owe them 6.7 cents per kWh! Are you kidding me?!? The good people at Vote Solar got some colleagues together, hired a lawyer, and successfully fought APS’s proposal. APS will offer net metering up to 100 kW for the time being. However, the fight continues.

For some perspective, the Germans have this net-metering business all figured out. If you go solar there, the utility company is required to pay YOU three times the going rate for the electricity you produce. That’s why, even though it’s cloudy as all get out in Germany, there is more solar per capita installed than anywhere else in the planet. Meanwhile, customers that WANT to go solar in sunny Arizona have to deal with this kind of crap.

If this isn’t enough, there are no interconnection standards in Arizona. This is also a significant hindrance on solar development. Why?? According to a report by votesolar.org:

“Tucson Electric Power, one of the state’s larger utilities, recently decided that commercial grid-connected solar systems in its service territory must have a data monitoring system capable of collecting “plane of array solar insolation in watts/M2, ambient temperature in degrees F., wind speed in miles/hour and actual AC power output in watts … on an average time interval not to exceed five (5) minutes for each data point throughout the day.” Why is measuring wind speed relevant? It’s not — but purchasing and installing this system will increase costs by up to $8,000.”

Blech! To get involved in the fight against these big utilities, check in with Votesolar.org

EDIT: 11/4/07

I awoke to find a reasonable amount of chatter on this story at reddit.com. I’d urge many of you to read through the comments there as some are quite informative. One of the users submitted this link to an AZCentral story urging me to read up on the tariffs APS is proposing and all the incentives APS has already to spur on solar development. Indeed, since utilities in Arizona are required to have 15% of their power portfolio come from renewables in 15 years, they have provided some incentives to get more solar on roofs. They’ve also proposed a tariff similar to that in Germany to catalyze more solar installed. However, there are no standards for the rates they pay solar installers for the power they are generating once those systems are installed. This is the main problem. Installation incentives are there, however the utility seeks to maximize their revenues by proposing to bill solar power producers for electricity they are producing. This is rapacious and continues to be Bullsh*t.

More links:

Someone please make us a logo. There’s an 8GB iPod in it for you if yours rocks. Have you seen ours? Right, cause we don’t have one, and if we made it ourselves, it would suck, not rock. We need help.  Also, if any of you have a fark membership throw the contest up there if you don’t mind.

State and government incentives, coupled with net-metering laws make solar such an accessible option. Additionally, if financed with an energy efficient loan or mortgage, the monthly loan costs are usually less than the monthly savings from implementing the system.

Additionally, current utility rates are just that. They are current – meaning they have been a lot lower in the past and there is no reason to believe they will be decreasing any time in the near future unless you start generating some of your own power. Below, you can see the average cost of energy per kilowatt hour in California. Over the past 30 years, this rate has increased at 6.7% per year.

Source – CPUC electric rate compendium

By getting ahead of the curve and going solar, small businesses can lock in future energy costs over several decades that are significantly lower than they are currently paying. Remember how many of the airlines were having severe problems maintaining profitability after fuel hikes in the past 5 years? United filed for bankruptcy, Delta almost tanked, and others like America West and US Airways had to merge with each other to stay afloat. Southwest was the only airline that made it through the continuing price surge. Why? Because they locked in the price of fuel years ahead of time at a good rate. Don’t be the next United Airlines. Even if you don’t have pensions to sever, the money you save can be used for other things- like your bottom line.