How Much Solar did we do in the Bay Area in 2007?

This report, written by Norcalsolar.org, analyzes solar installation data in the bay area from 1998-2007.  

The bottom line?  

• We did 244 megawatts in all of California1998 up to 2007
• In 2007, we did just over a quarter of that again.  
• About 35% of the solar is in the bay area
• Average installed Cost/Watt for residential was $9.87

If you’re interested in helping take the bay area to the next level, check out One Block Off the Grid, which does solar group buying in the bay area.  They have a program right now.

One Block off the Grid Launches

One Block of the Grid is a competition in San Francisco to see which district can get the most San Franciscans to commit to getting solar energy on their homes, and they officially launch today, on the heels of the San Francisco Solar Incentive Program’s passage yesterday.

The winning team will get heavily subsidized (possibly free) solar energy systems by a corporate sponsor, and the other teams still win because by going solar in the same area at the same time, the installer saves money and passes those savings onto the consumer.

It’s a great way to blast through the early adoption phase for solar energy here in San Francisco, which lags behinds it’s neighbors in solar installs, mostly because of its heavy density of renters (Although Tom Price and I are going to change that)

I hope to be performing some of 1BOG’s installations; and I’m excited that knowing from my personal experience, the visibility of interest (below) this provides is going to help these guys overcome the main hurdle to early adoption: skepticism.   Note, it’s called 1BOG, not ibog.

::gmap(“blah”, “”)::

California Bay Area Solar Market Analysis

We’ve noticed that there’s been quite a bit of chatter and advertising dollars thrown into solar in the bay area over the past year or so. For instance, we were just at a San Francisco Giants game last week and couldn’t help but notice the numerous PGE ads for their solar installation at AT&T park urging homeowners to consider the switch to solar. Glitzy ads from large oil companies (ahem, right right, “energy companies”) also emblazoned large billboards with solar elements. Well, the incentives in California are so good, that we started to wonder how many homeowners out of total in the bay area are already on board. So, it’s time for some good ol’ fashioned data analysis of the Bay Area residential solar market. The figures below were generated from data sourced by one of Dave’s colleagues. See the sources below for more info on their lineage.

As you can see from the image above, Contra Costa county accounts for just about half of the solar installs in the bay area over the past 3 years. The other counties pale in comparison. However, you can see from the chart below that there is a substantial way to go to penetrate the rest of the bay area market. While Contra Costa county does account for half of those installs, consider that that county is only about 2% saturated!

Key Assumptions

1. Size, Installed Price and # of installs numbers based on solar installs from 11/05 -1/08 –See

http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/emergingrenewableslindex.html

2. Population and Households data based on 2006 ACS Census estimates –See
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/ for details

3. Penetration calculated as % of households with solar.

Solar Energy – What's Emerging in the San Francisco Bay Area

1. SF.solarmap.org is getting a makeover. The solar map is a Google map mashup of San Francisco where you can see who has installed solar in SF, and also see how much solar energy your particular roof can hold, as well as how the numbers work out for solar, financially. The software is a partnership between the San Francisco Department of the Environment and the magnificently huge company CH2MHILL (I can never remember the name I have to look it up every time. I always call it C3P0).

SF.solarmap’s mathematical analysis of rooftops’ (or rooftop ability) to hold solar energy has been pretty dubious in the past, but CH2MHILL has recently beefed it up with some serious image recognition software, and I have heard from Johanna Partin that the data she manually checked versus this new software is looking incredibly accurate. They use GIS (higher resolution satellite photos) data provided by (I think) DTIS coupled with publicly available real estate info to crunch the numbers for what you can do on your house, solar-wise.

Coming soon: Biking map, biodiesel map, wind energy resource map, and a partnership with Clean Power Estimator

2. Meanwhile Dr. Barry Levine and his class of super smart eco-geeks at San Francisco State University are working on something along a very similar path, but for the city of Oakland. I’ll be writing a much more extensive article about this solar energy open source project in the coming weeks when their website goes live. Bottom line – they take the same type of GIS data and have an intern trace the roof – then they perform some optical recognition software on it and run it through Clean Power Estimator. If solar works on your home, bam! You get an automatically sent postcard with all the numbers worked out for you. Scott Wentworth with the city of Oakland is the Project Originator.

3. Berkeley Solar Program – Berkeley has proposed something called the Sustainable Energy Financing District that allows Berkeley property owners to finance solar energy systems using a 20-year assessment to their property tax bill. My friends Doug and Jon are writing BerkeleySolarProgram.com to follow the pending program and to try and help combine it with some solar energy community purchasing.

4. San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission has a NEW LOCAL INCENTIVE for solar energy, providing $3000-$10000 cash subsidies to install solar energy for any property owner in San Francisco…. or at least, it will, once the rigmarole with supervisor McGoldrick is over. I created www.sfsolarsubsidy.com to track this San Francisco solar incentive program and all its merits and hang-ups. Despite the lock on the funding that essentially cripples all sales of solar energy in SF (like every customer isn’t saying “let’s see how this pans out”), I am confident the pilot program will be accepting applications relatively soon. Please visit sfsolarsubsidy.com for information on the catastrophe that is currently going on right now and how to contact your supervisor to yell about it. It’s causing solar businesses left and right to freeze here, and some withdrawing huge projects.

5. Straight Cash the Federal Government! – The Solar America Cities grant by the DOE provided $2.5 Mil for 13 cities. San Francisco was selected. Johanna Partin and the SFDOE have planned some use of the money, among them: a “train the trainers” class offered at the PGE energy center in San Francisco (if you haven’t checked this place out, do it, it’s great). This class will train neighborhood leaders in the fundamentals of solar energy to relay at neighborhood meeting

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In Summary, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, all have exciting solar energy policies, incentives, and programs coming out and when the pressure on energy prices hits us harder than it is right now, the Bay Area may be the only place in the US that’s ready. Let’s all make sure that’s the case!

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