Are you a Pacific Gas & Electric customer?  If you live in Northern or Central California, chances are you get your gas and electricity from PG&E.  You might have heard recently that you should get solar right now, before the CSI rebate drops 30%.  What does that mean for you?

The Background

In 2007,  California launched the California Solar Initiative (CSI) which provides solar rebates to homeowners.  The program was designed to last until 2016, although it could run out faster. The amount of money the CSI gives out for solar installations decreases over time, so people who get solar earlier get more money back.

Current PG&E rebates

The initial rebate to homeowners through the CSI was $2.50 per watt.   That amount has declined in steps, and will continue to decline.  The final step of the program gives a rebate of  just $.20 per watt.  Currently, the rebate is at $1.55 per watt, but it’s likely that it will  drop this month to $1.10 per watt.

What the Rebate Drop means to you

A homeowner with an average sized solar system who gets the $1.55 rebate would get about $1500 more from the state of California than that same homeowner would get with the $1.10 rebate.  If solar is something you definitely want to do, you should try to get the better rebate.  That probably means booking your reservation in the next two weeks, although nobody knows exactly when the rebate will drop.  It’s not done on a time-basis, but on a demand basis.  There are a certain number of watts available at the $1.55 level, and when those are taken, the rebate will drop.  Most solar companies believe this will happen somewhere towards the middle or end of this month.

How do I get the rebate?

To get the rebate from California, you’ll need to have a system designed for your home, and to sign a contract with a solar company.  It doesn’t require that your system is built, just that the plans are finalized.  The first step is to contact your solar company and have them give you a cost and savings estimate for your home.

a guest post by Mitchell Thomashow

We’re mired in the depths of winter in Unity, Maine. I’ve lived in Northern New England since 1975 and this is easily the coldest winter I’ve experienced. There have been countless below zero nights, many days when the temperature has barely cracked single numbers, and plenty of snow and wind. I’m not complaining because the cross-country skiing is sublime and I have the great fortune to live in a solar home—The Unity House.

Enter Tedd Benson, the founder of Bensonwood Homes in Walpole, NH. In the 1970’s Tedd revitalized modern timber frame housing and shared his techniques with the industry; most timber frame homes built today are based on Tedd’s best practices. Now Tedd wants to bring this same open source approach to creating housing that is adaptable, sustainable, and affordable.

As the result of the Open Prototype Initiative -a design and construction partnership between Bensonwood Homes and the Open Source Building Alliance – we have The Unity House, a zero-carbon, President’s Residence for Unity College, a small environmental liberal arts college in rural Maine. Our college aspires to be an exemplary sustainable campus. So what better way is there to “walk the talk” than to live what you espouse? We worked with Bensonwood to have The Unity House model frugal sustainability, multiple use space, and ecological awareness. In theory it seemed just wonderful. Five months into the project, after another icy cold night, you might want to know how well it’s performing.

On a sunny day, regardless of the outside temperature, even when it’s below zero, there will be enough passive solar gain to keep the house at close to seventy degrees well into the evening. The solar panels -designed and implemented by Gro Solar of White River Junction, VT- will generate over 5000 watts per hour. During the day we produce more electricity than we consume. The Hallowell heat pump won’t be needed until very late evening or early the next morning. Over a three-day stretch of dry, sunny, frigid days in late January, we generated as much electricity as we used. I can safely say that when the sun is shining in the middle of winter, the Unity House is carbon neutral.

However, when it’s cloudy, things change. We moved into The Unity House in early September. Up until around Thanksgiving we were ahead in our solar accounting—more electricity generated from the solar panels than taken from the grid. Two months later, we’ve fallen behind. However, I am convinced that with the warmer and much longer days of Spring and Summer, the balance will be restored and our solar accounting will prevail.

Solar accounting aside, there is another important aspect of solar living, beyond the environmental and economic virtues. It’s just plain fun. It’s interesting and rewarding to observe how following the path of the sun informs how you live. You know that you are contributing to a more sustainable world and you are living the future in the present moment.

Check out the Bensonwood website (http://bensonwood.com/unity/) to get a sense of all the different models of the Unity House. Notice the tight and elegant design, the use of local and recycled materials, the emphasis on intelligence and craft.

And check out my blog (http://www.ucesrealworld.blogspot.com/) at Unity College, Environmental Studies for the Real World, to understand why ecological awareness and sustainable living are at the heart of how we approach education.

Mitchell Thomashow
President, Unity College

The City of Angels is planning to up its use of solar electricity in a big way in the coming years, both through a ballot measure to increase the use of solar panels to be installed and owned by the city’s utility, and through a bold new initiative which aims to power the city with rooftop solar and solar electricity generated by large-scale plants in the Mojave Desert.

On March 3, Los Angeles will vote on a ballot measure that will allow the DWP to install and own 400 megawatts of rooftop solar panels by 2014. That amount of new generation would make LA the #1 city for solar electricity internationally.

But not everyone thinks the plan is so bright and shiny, since it was conceived largely by a group with strong ties to the union that represents the utility’s workers. The LA Times said in a recent editorial that the ballot measure “stands the priority list for intelligent solar policy on its head. Increased electrical generation capacity and benefit for ratepayers fall to the bottom. They’re replaced by secondary priorities, such as economic stimulus and job security for DWP workers, or even non-priorities (for L.A. residents, anyway), such as near-exclusive IBEW power [International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers] over awarding solar-panel-installation jobs and union support for elected officials.”

As if the ballot measure wasn’t stirring enough controversy, on November 24, “Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa unveiled an ambitious long-range plan Monday for securing enough solar power to meet one-tenth of the city’s energy needs by 2020, a move aimed at making L.A. a hub of the solar-energy industry.”

This ambitious plan calls for 1,280 megawatts of new solar generation to be built in and around Los Angeles by 2020. To put this in perspective the total capacity of new solar electricity installations worldwide in 2006 was 1744 megawatts.

According to the LA Times, “DWP General Manager and Chief Executive H. David Nahai said his agency will spend the next 90 days developing a financial analysis of the solar plan, including its effect on ratepayers.”

As the news unfolds, we’ll be back with another post. Stay tuned…

Today most of our electricity and the energy we use to power our vehicles come from someplace far away.

Typically it’s a hole in the ground. We use a lot of energy to dig that hole, pull carbon out of the hole—coal, oil, and natural gas, and transport it to a location where we refine and/or store it. Then some energy gets used to transport this fuel to yet another location where we feed it to a massive furnace, creating the heat we need to make steam to spin an electromagnet—more energy gets lost here too. Finally, we lose yet more energy sending it over a long distance to end users. A lot of energy gets lost making energy in our centralized system.

Decentralized energy generation, like solar panels on a roof, eliminate much of this inefficiency. With rooftop solar, photons get turned into electrons where customers use the energy. That cuts out digging the hole, extracting the fuel, hauling it, storing it, burning it, and sending it home. Sunshine on your roof is an effective way to charge a cell phone or power a hybrid car.

In last week’s Sunday New York Times, Al Gore called for the country to invest $400 billion in a “unified national smart grid” so that electricity generated in the desert can be sent to population centers. Not only is that a lot of money to lose electrons going a long distance, it doesn’t take into account the power of localized, decentralized power generation to cost-effectively deliver clean electricity to customers today.

The North American Electricity Reliability Corporation recently reported that new centralized renewable generation—big wind turbines and desert solar—will stress our current electricity grid. However, local solar generation has the opposite effect. When photons become electrons at the point of consumption, consumers demand less power from the grid, thereby making the grid more reliable.

We don’t have to spend $400 billion (or ≈$1,333 for every American) on a new grid to run our cars off solar. Today SunRun customers can charge their cars using the sun from their roofs for 50% of the cost of burning gasoline.

here are other benefits to decentralized renewable energy generation too. For example, it’s hard for our enemies to attack, which is among the reasons why former Director of the CIA Jim Woolsey called on the country to invest in it following September 11^th.

Local renewable generation, like rooftop solar, is an important part of our national energy strategy and is a complementary part of our nation’s changing generation fleet.

Are you in California and interested in solar for your home? Call us at 877.SUN.MOJO or visit our website to learn more.

Are you still undecided about which box to check on November 4th? While all the back-and-forth about lipstick, Joe the Plumber, ACORN, and hockey moms continues, the least we can do here is cut through the muck and add some clarity to the candidates’ policies in the arena we know best: energy.

Common ground

The good news is that both candidates intend to reshape America’s energy supply quickly and thoroughly. And both vow to attack climate change and our dependency on fossil-fuels as soon as they enter office. It’s very exciting that both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned solar energy several times during the first presidential debate. In their third debate last week, both candidates stressed that America is beholden to the countries that export energy to us. We are in dire need of national energy independence. As Senator Obama said, we need to save the “money we’re borrowing from China to send to Saudi Arabia.”

Both McCain and Obama recognize that our country needs a diversified energy portfolio which favors renewable energy and relies less on fossil fuels. They both want to remake how we fuel transportation.

They both want to dramatically reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century through a cap-and-trade system. And both candidates see that America needs to stop dithering around and lead the global fight against climate change.

Reshaping the power grid

Senator Obama is calling for a federal renewable portfolio standard (RPS) that would require the entire nation to produce 10% of its electricity from renewable sources – including solar – by 2012. Numerous states have already adopted RPS requirements. Senator McCain does not support a federal RPS and thinks this matter should be left to the states. McCain wants to see technology upgrades that make energy metering more efficient, and both candidates support increased energy efficiency across the power grid. According to the Obama campaign, America is the 22nd most energy efficient nation among the major economies in the world. It is high time for our power grid to be updated from its early 20th century roots.

Going nuclear and unearthing clean coal

Both candidates envision a power grid that emits less carbon by supporting nuclear energy and carbon-capture clean coal technology. While both nuclear and zero-carbon coal are good in theory as far as emissions are concerned, both technologies nonetheless present significant drawbacks. Even though Senator McCain said carbon-capture “clean coal technology is key in the heartland of American”, clean coal is still on the drawing board and might not ever be economically feasible. Nuclear power contains at least one pesky problem: as a nation, we do not have a secure facility or definitive strategy for dealing with nuclear waste, nor is scaling up nuclear an easy proposition. For example, the last nuclear plant to be built in the US took 24 years to construct, and cost $7 billion.

Big Coal and Big Nuclear, I suspect, might have more influence over our candidates’ support of these technologies than does economic, political, and environmental feasibility.

Fueling transportation

Both McCain and Obama sing the praises of hybrid, flex-fuel, plug-in hybrid, and pure electric vehicles. Obama wants to put one million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, which would represent . McCain proposes a $300 million prize to entice entrepreneurs to develop a better car battery, and wants to offer a $5,000 tax credit to Americans who buy a zero-emissions vehicle. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to buy such a car in the first place, and have a personal tax liability that’s large enough to claim the credit. Obama thinks all cars should conform to higher fuel efficiency standards, and that all new cars built in the US should be flex-fuel – that is, able to run on ethanol as well as traditional gasoline. On the ethanol issue, McCain wants to roll back subsidies for domestic producers and drop the current tariff on ethanol imports from big producers such as Brazil. However, McCain has long opposed raising auto efficiency standards – and even failed to show up to vote on raising them in 2007.

Phew. There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to the US auto and automotive fuel industries. But we can all be certain that both Detroit and the new White House will need to collaborate extensively, as average gasoline prices continue to rise above $4/gallon.

Protecting the environment

Numerous economists and policymakers argue that a cap-and-trade approach to regulating greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to incentivize polluters to change their dirty ways. Additionally, a cap-and-trade system encourages significant investment in clean energy technologies, and creates jobs as a result. Under a cap-and-trade system, polluters are issued permits which allow a certain amount of emissions. This worked successfully to clean up acid rain emissions in the US with the Clean Air Act of 1990. If they don’t need to use them, they can sell them to heavy polluters at a profit. Obama wants 100% of pollution permits issued under the cap-and-trade system to be sold through an auction format, which means that polluters will need to cough up serious money to have the right to pollute, regardless of their pollution history, be it dreadful or otherwise. McCain wants to give pollution permits away from the outset, requiring no initial cost to major polluters. There are differing opinions on which approach – auction or giveaway – provides the best economic incentive to businesses to reduce pollution.

Obama’s cap-and-trade goals are more aggressive than McCain’s – Obama wants US greenhouse gas emissions to be 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, whereas McCain wants to reduce them to 60% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Shining a light on solar?

Of course we encourage both candidates to look at all the costs associated with their energy plans, and especially in determining which costs will fall on the energy industry as opposed to consumers. When it comes to electricity production, the president should implement policies that protect the environment and reduce costs for consumers. As Senator Obama said, “some have compared the quest for energy independence to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moon landing.”

When it comes to solar, the records are pretty clear. Senator McCain failed to show up for eight crucial votes to extend renewable energy tax credits in the past year, whereas Obama voted three times to extend the credits.

It’s a tall order to overhaul the system, but we’re living in the greatest country in the world at a turning point in our nation’s history. And we know that solar is a responsible solution – financially and environmentally.

Are you in California and interested in solar for your home? Call us at 877.SUN.MOJO or visit our website to learn more.

It’s been an uphill battle on The Hill for solar this year.

If you’ve been following the solar industry – and definitely if you’re part of it – you know that the federal solar investment tax credit has been a political beach ball this year. Before last Friday there had been 15 votes in Congress that somehow involved the tax credit. None were passed.

An investment tax credit basically reduces what individuals or businesses owe in taxes when they invest in certain pre-determined areas. Solar being one, of course.

Many industry advocates have been working all year long to ensure that the current solar tax credit didn’t expire on December 31^st, as it was set to do.

And guess what? The solar tax credits were finally extended – for 8 years, nonetheless! – as part of the big bailout bill last Friday.

This is great news for SunRun, the solar industry, and the economy as a whole.

A recent study by Navigant Consulting demonstrated that almost half a million permanent jobs and $232 billion in investment would be supported by the solar energy industry with an 8 year extension of the tax rebates.

At SunRun, we’re excited to finally know that these credits have been renewed. The long-term extension will allow us to continue to innovate on SunRun Solar Service and continue making solar more affordable.

And that, of course, is always the goal!

Are you in California and interested in solar for your home? Call us at 877.SUN.MOJO or visit our website to learn more.

Lynette Bunyard and Joe Pambianco wanted to add solar panels to the roof of their downtown San Jose home. But instead of shelling out $47,000 for the installation, they found a popular alternative financing method for those who want to go green but don’t want to go broke in the process.

The couple used a power-purchase agreement, or PPA in industry lingo, transacted through a San Francisco company called SunRun. The company works with a homeowner and a solar-installation company; it finances the deal; it owns and operates the solar system, and sells the homeowner the electricity being generated on the homeowner’s roof at a fixed rate (13.5 cents per kilowatt hour) for 18 years.

The result? With the PPA, Bunyard and Pambianco paid about $17,000 to SunRun — or $30,000 less than the original installation estimate from installer REC Solar. (State incentives and a federal tax credit would have reduced the $47,000 estimate to about $35,000.) Their monthly power bill from SunRun is just $80 to $100, while their PG&E bill is negligible — as low as $4 one month this spring. So the couple, who once paid between $200 and $300 a month for electricity before installing solar panels, are thrilled with their savings.

“I talk to people about what almost seems impossible when I look at the numbers,” Pambianco said. “I could pay less up front and less overall. That’s magic.”

Pambianco, a sales trainer with Cisco Systems, and Bunyard, a Advertisement software programmer with VeriSign, spearheaded a community solar program in their downtown San Jose neighborhood earlier this year. They interviewed solar vendors, got bids, considered financing options, and even negotiated a discount for their group. Ultimately, 35 homeowners participated in the effort, and about 75 percent of those used PPAs to pay for their solar systems.

The concept of a PPA for solar power isn’t new. Major retailers such as Macy’s and Wal-Mart, and governmental entities use PPAs to pay to install solar arrays on their roofs. Now consumers are doing it, too. The take-away from Pambianco: “You don’t have to be independently wealthy to consider getting solar.”

Nat Kreamer, president and chief operating officer of SunRun, uses cell phones as an analogy to explain what his company does. Imagine, he said, if cellular companies tried to sell you parts of the infrastructure needed to make a phone call. Nobody wants that, he said, adding that people “just want to talk on the phone.”

The same is true of solar panels. People want to use the electricity they generate, but they don’t want to have to maintain or monitor the solar panel systems on their homes.

“We only get paid for the power we deliver to our customers,” Kreamer said. Typically, he said, homeowners who install solar panels and use a PPA to finance the deal save 30 percent or more each month on their electricity bill. For example, a family with a $240 monthly electricity bill before adding solar panels would have to make only an $80 payment to SunRun and $40 to their utility after adding solar panels. That’s a 50 percent savings — not typical, but frequently achieved, Kreamer said.

Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar, a solar-panel installation company with locations throughout California, said 20 to 25 percent of residential solar buyers in California now use PPAs. And he expects that number to grow. Also, Cinnamon noted, PPAs “definitely appeal to buyers more strapped for cash.” Only something that makes solar drastically cheaper, such as much higher government incentives or other policies, could derail PPAs, he said.

Dean McConkie, who lives in San Jose’s Santa Teresa area, became intrigued by solar panels after a neighbor had them installed, but was taken aback when he heard how much the system cost. Still, he wanted to reduce his huge electric bill, so he looked into PPAs.

In the end, he decided to use a SunRun PPA, then used a home equity loan to prepay his entire solar-panel lease. McConkie, a manufacturing engineer, questioned SunRun about how it could offer solar for a lower price; after all, it seemed too good to be true. He learned the company receives both federal and state rebates, and is eligible for tax credits and other incentives that homeowners can’t obtain.

SunRun, which does most of its deals in California, has few rivals. Helio Micro Utility, a Berkeley start-up, entered the residential solar PPA market this summer. Solar City, a solar-panel installer based in Foster City, offers a leasing program.

Before going solar, McConkie said he was paying about $258 a month for electricity. This summer, his bills have dropped to $20 or $30 a month.

“We love it,” he said.

Article courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News.

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the news that the time for renewable sources of energy is now. Sadly too many people still think that alternate energy is a dream.

Imagine getting the electricity you need from a clean, renewable source right at home. Now imagine paying only a fraction of the cost to get that electricity. Feeling warm and fuzzy inside?

Sweet Solar Home has been designed to help you understand the technology, news and advances of the solar power movement. We’re here to clear the misconceptions behind alternative energy and explain how everyone can tap into this vast resource to save money and the environment.

We invite you to take this journey with us and we welcome your comments and thoughts on solar energy.

We think that everyone should be able to harvest the clean, free-flowing energy the sun gives us every day and enjoy total peace of mind. In the weeks and months to come we’ll explore the lives of people who have already made the solar choice and share with you how you can do it too. Welcome to Sweet Solar Home.

- Nat Kreamer
President & COO
SunRun

Do you have a question about solar energy? Ask us! We’ll feature your questions on our blog.