SunRun and PV Solar Report today announced a list of the fastest-growing solar cities in California.   The list recognizes cities that added more solar installations than their counterparts throughout the state in 2011. Compare this with our previous joint release of the Top 10 Solar Cities in California to see which cities have both the most solar and the greatest increase in 2011!

While cities like San Jose and Bakersfield are no strangers to the list, newcomers like Rocklin, Hemet and Apple Valley are paving the way for solar adoption on a broader geographic scale. In fact, even at number ten on the list, Apple Valley’s solar installations grew by nearly 70 percent in 2011, reflecting speedy growth. The list is based on the California Solar Initiative’s (CSI) database of residential rebate reservations for 2011. Did your city make the list?

1. 1. San Jose
2. 2. Bakersfield
3. 3. Simi Valley
4. 4. Lancaster
5. 5. Fresno
6. 6. Corona
7. 7. Murrieta
8. 8. Rocklin
9. 9. Hemet
10. 10. Apple Valley

How are these cities seeing such a rapid increase in solar installations? PV Solar Report’s analysis shows a tremendous increase in the number of homeowners who chose solar power service over purchasing panels.

“The cost of solar is coming down, which makes it more affordable for families in a more diverse range of cities,” said SunRun President and Co-founder Lynn Jurich.  “At SunRun we’ve also seen solar expand to more median income communities because our service allows homeowners to make the switch for zero or very little money upfront, and they lock in a low rate for clean electricity.”

Has the falling cost of solar helped you make the switch? Share your solar story with the SunRun community on Facebook.

Wish you could look up a year’s worth of historical usage data from your utility at the click of a button? Well now you can, with a project announced today called Green Button.

Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric have collaborated with the White House Office of Science and Technology to offer Green Button as a consumer-facing tool and guide. When it goes live, Green Button will allow utility customers to log in and view up to 13 months of their detailed usage information down to one hour or 15 minute increments. All data will be downloadable in the same file format, enabling easy sharing and distribution to 3^rd parties.

Pilot programs have shown that when homeowners can access this kind of data, they can cut their energy use by an average of 8.7%. The reduction in usage comes just from having a better understanding of their habits.

There’s also a huge benefit for homeowners looking into going solar. Giving homeowners simple access to usage data means they can quickly and easily relay that information to companies like SunRun during the sales process. That information essentially streamlines the designing of a new solar system, making it much easier to size a system for optimal production based on historical energy usage. Taking advantage of these important steps could make it possible for a homeowner to get solar in a matter of days instead of weeks or months.

SunRun Director of Business Development and Government Affairs Ethan Sprague spoke at a press conference today celebrating and announcing Green Button.  He offers an excellent description of the benefits:

“Green Button marks an important event on the path toward making energy services as simple to use and as compelling  as smart phones.  To appeal to the mainstream, buying solar must become more like using Amazon or changing a cell-phone plan – fast, easy and consumer-friendly.”

“Indeed, providing consumers usable access to their consumption data is similar to allowing consumers to take their telephone number with them as they switch carriers.  Like a telephone number, a person’s consumption data is unique to the customer and is fundamental to enabling providers to better serve them.”

What ideas do you have for making energy more consumer-friendly? What has been the most time-consuming process or barrier to access for you?

2011 was a great year for both solar and SunRun. At SunRun we nearly doubled our employee headcount, helped thousands of American families switch to solar more affordably, and expanded to three new states.  As the company of choice for one in every three Californians switching to solar, we are working with policy makers at the federal and state levels to help reduce the costs of solar installations and promote supportive solar policies that save consumers money while helping the planet.  Here’s a quick snapshot of this year’s highlights:

More Solar Homes in More States:
SunRun expanded to three new states this year, increasing our total number of states served to ten. We brought solar power service to Oregon in April, Maryland in July, and New York in November. We also opened new offices in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to better serve our partners, growing team of employees, and families switching to solar on the East Coast.

Industry Advancement:
We started off the year unveiling a report that shows inconsistent local solar permitting and inspection processes add an average of over $2,500 per home solar installation. With streamlined permitting, California alone could generate over $5 billion in additional growth and help support the already expected $30 billion economic gain from natural solar market growth.  We collaborated with the Department of Energy and the White House on this challenge and that work resulted in funding opportunities for local jurisdictions to streamline permitting.  Our very own Lynn Jurich helped announce the funding awardees with Energy Secretary Steven Chu in early December.

On October 17, SunRun and PV Solar Report announced that 3rd-party-owned solar has eclipsed cash purchase as the preferred way to go solar in California, accounting for 59 percent of the California solar market and 51 percent of the national market in Q3 2011. On November 15, SunRun and PV Solar Report announced families in median income zip codes make up the majority of California’s home solar market. As solar prices decrease, the number of residential projects in lower income zip codes continues to go up.

Awards and recognitions:
SunRun’s hard work is getting us noticed! We received a number of prestigious honors this year, including:

• Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) Solar Champion
• 2011 Global Cleantech 100 honoree
• Named as an innovative home energy company by “GE ecomagination Challenge.”
• Lynn Jurich appointed to Startup America Partnership Founding Board
• Edward Fenster and Lynn Jurich named 40 under 40 “Ones to Watch” by FORTUNE

New Faces:
2011 was an incredible hiring year for SunRun. We welcomed 88 news employees and have more coming in every week!  New additions include Vice President of Marketing Bill Stewart, previously the Chief Marketing Officer for Kmart, Vice President of Engineering Miguel Pinilla, and Vice President of Human Resources Beth Steinberg.  We also welcomed thousands of new customers who are starting to show us their faces and the faces of their panels through conversation on our Facebook page.

We look forward to another year of growth, happy customers, and affordable solar for all!

When Tom moved into his new neighborhood in 2003, he knew he had high electric bills, and he knew his neighbors did too. With an annual electric bill of $2,400, the thought of home solar appealed to Tom, who was only spurred on as he learned that his electric bill was projected to reach $3,200. Something had to be done.

Unfortunately, financial realities came to the fore as Tom learned that the high upfront cost of owning a solar system was much more than he wanted to spend. He began to think solar would be unaffordable until he spoke with an installation company that told him about SunRun and its solar lease. Tom was immediately impressed, and signed up for solar with SunRun.

During Tom’s installation, his neighbor Jim came over to see what was going on. Tom explained the appeal of SunRun, and Jim signed up within 24 hours. The next day, another neighbor named Richard came to visit. Tom explained how he could lock in his electricity rates with renewable energy and add value to his home. Richard, like Jim and Tom before him, was hooked.

In a short matter of time, Tom became the “solar guru” around the neighborhood. Friends and neighbors would come to him to talk about their high electric bills. Others would ask if he knew how to make solar affordable. Tom helped all of them, and all of them switched to solar through SunRun.

The word spread like wildfire. Before he knew it, six of Tom’s neighbors had solar installed. Now when they get together, they talk solar. Tom has upgraded from “solar guru” to “solar patroller”, and keeps track of PV generation for the entire neighborhood. To see what made Tom upgrade to solar, and for a flavor of what got his neighbors to switch, check out Tom’s solar case study.

How big a role did your kids play in your decision to go solar? When we spoke with Lance, an electrical engineer in San Jose, CA, we discovered that his daughter’s impact was pretty big.

Lance has always been interested in solar technology, but was never really serious about it until his nine-year-old daughter started learning about the environment in school and brought her lessons home with her. She started asking how her family could do more to go green, and to Lance the answer was obvious: they would get solar panels for their home.

Lance started doing a ton of research and really shopped around for the best deal. He knew that a solar system would be a big investment, and started keeping a budget. Then he heard about SunRun while in conversation with another solar company, and he knew it was the way to go.

“Dollar for dollar,” says Lance, “SunRun was far and away the best deal for me. I love the fact that it’s absolutely painless and it hasn’t disturbed my life at all.”

Today Lance saves on his electric bill and doesn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on his system. Plus he can tell his daughter that they’re all making a difference by powering their home with clean solar energy. To learn more about how much Lance is saving – and how much you can save – check out Lance’s story in San Jose, CA.

Even if you haven’t gone solar, how do you work to secure a brighter future for your kids? We’d love to see your comments in the space below.

Congratulations California! The Golden State has just reached a major milestone in renewable energy, installing 1 million kilowatts of solar energy across the state. To put this in prospective, if we assume the average home solar system stands at around 5 kilowatts, that means there have been 200,000 solar systems installed!  California is one of the few locales in the world to have reached this milestone, and is joined only by Germany, Spain, Japan, Italy and the Czech Republic. In fact, reports Environment California, a statewide advocacy group, California has installed more solar than France, China or Belgium.

Much of the credit for the expansion of solar in California belongs with the California Solar Initiative. The aggressive program encourages homeowners, businesses, local governments and nonprofit organizations to install solar panels on their roofs. The initiative has resulted in about 600 megawatts of solar installed. So much in fact, that Michelle Kinman of Environment California says that California has the potential to become the “Saudi Arabia of the sun.”

Solar installations across the state have seen a constant uptick over the past several years, and 2011 alone saw 205 megawatts installed. As panel prices continue to fall across the global marketplace, affordable home solar is becoming a reality for families who could not afford it even five years ago.

For a list of some of the best cities for solar in California, check out SunRun’s recent post on the Top 10 Cities for Solar Power in California. Who knows, you might live in a top solar city in America’s top solar state!

SunRun’s 8th customer guest post comes from Rob in Kalapana, HI. Check it out to see why Rob chose to go solar with SunRun, and for his thoughts on the solar experience. If you’re a SunRun customer and interested in contributing a guest post to our blog, please email customers@sunrunhome.com. We’re eager to add new voices to our online solar community and we look forward to hearing from you!

Having moved to the Big Island of Hawaii from the Bay Area in 2008, I was looking forward to more environmentally sustainable life – growing my own food, consuming less, getting my water from the rain through a catchment system. I built my own home and budgeted for solar hot water, but installing a solar power system would have meant major sacrifices in the design of my home. While in time solar panels would have paid for themselves I did not have the money up front and wouldn’t have qualified for all the tax breaks since I had no income the year I built my house. Going solar seemed impossible unless I wanted to take out a loan to do so.

In Hawaii, and the Big Island in particular, we not only pay about the highest electrical rates in the nation, we also get almost all of our energy from imported diesel fuel. Knowing that everything has to be shipped thousands of miles to get here, the most isolated inhabited land mass on the planet, it has always seemed crazy to me that we don’t get more of our power from the sun.

When my partner and I first heard that SunRun was starting to provide solar in Hawaii, we contacted them immediately and became one of their first customers to have a system installed on the Big Island. We were skeptical about the savings, and honestly were not motivated by it anyway. We wanted to dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels and our contribution to all the problems related to them. Now that we’ve had our system a few months, the initial estimates of what we would save have been extremely accurate, maybe even conservative. Our energy use increased since our initial estimate since I had begun working at home right before the panels were installed. Our total electrical bills went from $100-135 to only $90 since our SunRun home solar system was turned on. Over time that difference will increase dramatically. This past month our utility meter actually went backwards since we fed more solar power into the grid than we used from it! The savings will start to increase every time our utility increases rates, which has seemed pretty frequent since I’ve lived here.

After signing the paperwork we really didn’t have to do much until the system was installed. The local installer SunRun works with took care of everything from design, to permits, to installation.

SunRun really makes solar feasible for so many homeowners, especially here in Hawaii. Lest you think it only works because it’s “sunny Hawaii,” we actually live in one of the wettest areas in the state, getting about 100 inches of rain per year versus around 20 inches where I lived in California. Even so, from the moment we turned our system on, late on a cloudy day with the sun on the opposite side of the house from our panels, we were able to see our meter show we were generating electricity and keeping greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere!

For us, SunRun was a no brainer and we’re very happy with the results. Mahalo SunRun.

Rob and Bob

Kalapana, Hawaii

A team of students from the University of Maryland took first place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon 2011. The super-efficient home they designed, called WaterShed, is powered by a twin focus on efficient, renewable energy and water quality and conservation. According to the university, the house harvests, recycles and reuses water, while harmonizing modernity, tradition, and simple building strategies.

The DOE’s Solar Decathlon challenges teams of college students and faculty to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency.

Panels of experts judge the competing homes on ten dimensions: architectural design, market appeal, engineering, affordability, comfort, hot water systems, appliances, home entertainment, energy balance and the educational/communication effort surrounding the home’s design.

WaterShed was a front-runner in every category, and topped it off with 100% energy efficiency, meaning the home generates as much power as it consumes.

According the University of Maryland, WaterShed integrates a unique array of sustainable features, including:

• Split-butterfly roof, well-suited to capture and use both sunlight and rainwater;
• Constructed wetlands that filter storm water and grey water (household water with limited contaminants);
• Green roof to retain rainwater and promote efficient cooling;
• Photovoltaic array to harvest enough solar energy to power WaterShed year-round;
• Solar thermal array to fulfill all domestic hot water needs;
• “Edible landscapes” that support community-based agriculture;
• Patent-pending indoor, liquid desiccant waterfall for high-efficiency humidity control;
• Efficient, cost-effective, durable and time-tested structural system.

SunRun and PV Solar Report today announced the top solar cities in California for the first half of 2011.  With San Jose in the number-one slot and Bakersfield, San Francisco and Fresno in the top five, the list indicates that families in northern and central California are setting the precedent for taking control of their electricity costs by switching to solar.

The list of the top ten solar cities in California is based on the California Solar Initiative’s database of residential rebate reservations (solar sales) this year through August 31, 2011.

1. San Jose

The City Council’s adoption of San Jose’s Green Vision in October 2007 set aggressive goals in the use of electricity and implementation of renewable technologies. Among the more ambitious of the city’s goals in ensuring that 100% of its electricity needs are met by renewable energy sources by 2022. San Jose is working to remove barriers to solar adoption and enable both residential and commercial sites to contribute to the city’s goal.

2. San Diego

San Diego is one of the leading solar cities in the country with thousands of photovoltaic systems installed. It’s not surprising that residents are looking to renewables: San Diego homeowners pay more than the national average for their electricity needs, and utility rates in the area tend to rise each year. In addition to already high costs, San Diego homeowners are punished even further the more energy they use.

3. Bakersfield

Families in Bakersfield have some of the highest electric bills in the state, so it’s not surprising that more homeowners in those areas are looking for ways to save money on electricity by switching to solar. There are 461 commercial, residential and industrial solar systems in PG&E’s Kern County territory that have been eligible for $12.6 million in funding under the California Solar Initiative. Of those solar systems, 436 were residential and all but 32 were in the city of Bakersfield.

4. San Francisco

San Francisco has always been at the forefront of smart and innovative technologies – and photovoltaics have been no exception. The city is home to countless photovoltaic companies and solar homes, and is teeming with entrepreneurs, scientists and policymakers hoping to reinvent how we use energy. Homeowners in San Francisco pay some of the highest prices in the country for electricity, and the cost goes up with usage.

5. Fresno

Homeowners in Fresno suffer from some of the highest electricity bills in the state, and rates have been increasing every year. In the summer, turning off the air conditioner to save money just isn’t an option – Fresno County gets more sun that any other city in California with almost 3,700 hours of sunlight every year. Tiered billing makes the burden even greater by charging more for heavy usage or peak hours during the day.

Getting interested? Click here to get started with a solar lease in California!

6. Corona

With more than 270 sunny days a year, it’s no wonder Corona opted to install solar panels on top of its bus stops. The whole system is grid-connected and provides electricity relief during peak usage hours while operating traffic signals and street lights. The best part about the city’s solar bus stops is that residents of Corona can get the exact same thing on their own rooftops, protecting them from peak hour price jumps and bringing down power bills in general

7. Simi Valley

Simi Valley is home to numerous parks and land preserves, and its residents are dedicated to conserving the city’s natural resources. In order to amplify their efforts, many homeowners are switching to solar to power their homes. The sun shines all day in Simi Valley, and electric rates are constantly rising. Residents have discovered that setting up with a home solar system is the best way to take control of where they get their power and how much they pay for it.

8. Santa Rosa

More and more green-minded homeowners are turning to solar power in Santa Rosa. The city was named as one the U.S. Department of Energy Solar America Cities in 2008, and is part of a proposal to create Solar Sonoma County. Funds from SSC will assist Santa Rosa in its efforts to increase the amount of solar installations by reducing or removing financial barriers for municipalities, businesses, and homeowners and creating additional incentives.

9. Murrieta

In November 2009, Murrieta received nearly $900,000 in federal stimulus money for various projects aimed at making the city more energy efficient. Following the grant announcement, several residents founded the Solar Club, and began discussing the feasibility of installing solar panels on their homes while taking advantage of the city’s new financial incentives.

10. Lancaster

The city of Lancaster sees about 300 days of sunshine a year, and is home of the new Sierra Suntower, a 5 megawatt utility-scale solar power plant that uses thermal solar technology. The Sierra Suntower was completed in just over a year, and is distributing enough clean energy to power 4,000 area homes. Homeowners inspired by solar continue to put solar on their roofs to power their homes and lower their electricity bills.

If you could have locked in your gas prices ten years ago, would you? After taking a look at the infographic below, you might start wishing you could’ve. The cost of gasoline has been volatile and on the rise. Just ten years ago in 2001, news reports were lamenting the cost of gas at $1.70/gallon. Since then, gas has shot up ever higher.

The cost of solar, however, has dropped and settled down over the past few decades.

While the cost of solar dropped significantly in the second half of the 20th century, prices have been relatively stable since 2001. That’s why now is the best time to lock in low rates for solar electricity – while prices are low, but before solar rebates and incentives go away. Take the first step in controlling your electric bill by requesting a free solar quote.