August 16, 2010
For the past six years, Bob Schildgen has been writing the popular environmental advice column, Hey Mr. Green, for Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club.” He often receives questions from his readers about getting solar for their homes. Curious, we asked Mr. Green to guestblog for Sweet Solar Home and let us in on some of the most frequently asked questions about home solar power. This is his first SunRun guest post, but we hope not the last!
“I’d like to go solar, but it seem to cost so much. Does it really pay? What can I do to reduce the price of solar? I don’t seem to have enough room on my roof to meet our needs.” These are the most common questions I get about solar from the readers of the environmental advice column I write for Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club.
I don’t answer these questions right away, for the simple reason that most people don’t know how much solar capacity they really need to purchase, and they often overestimate their actual requirements. So, I recommend that before installing solar, they carefully monitor their electricity consumption and take steps to reduce it as much as possible. Most households use far more power than they really need. For example, in the U.S. we use about twice as much electricity per capita as, for example, Germany or Italy. Air-conditioning accounts for over 30
Two uses, which are extremely easy to reduce, air-conditioning, account for over 30% of average household electricity consumption.
There are many excellent, common-sense sources for information on reducing electrical (and all other) energy consumption, including tips from the Environmental Protection Agency and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy’s (ACEEE). (If this country were to follow the energy advice and energy policies advocated by ACEEE we wouldn’t have to build another power plant, let alone some of the nuclear monstrosities that have been proposed.)
Once you’ve slashed your electricity use by following as much of this free advice as possible, your usage in kilowatt hours should be substantially reduced. This will be obvious when you compare bills from the same periods of the year before you tightened things up. (If you want to find out instantly how much you’ve managed to cut your use, there are now a number of power monitors available.)
After this, you might be surprised to find that home solar is more affordable than you thought, and that you, in fact, have plenty of space for it.
Once you have determined how much solar power you truly need, it is important to take advantage of all incentives in state, local, and federal tax breaks, or rebates. For example, you can get a federal tax credit of up to 30% of the cost of a solar electric system. (For details on this, and all other types of federal tax credits, see the U.S. Department of Energy’s Consumer Energy Tax Incentives. Your prospective solar company should be able to provide up-to-date information on every aspect of solar economics.)
You can also get a rough estimate of costs by using online solar calculators, but local installers will also be able to give you a precise estimate.
