 The city looks at ways to reduce the financial burden of going solar
But will the federal government cooperate? The city of Berkeley is in the early test stages of implementing an unusual incentive program for homeowners who want to install solar photovoltaic panels. The purchaser can finance the panels with the city, and pay back the costs with no interest via their property tax bill over a number of years. Because the panels (and their financial benefits on the energy bill) stick with the house, the financing does too, so if the homeowner sells to someone else, the buyer also inherits the remainder of the bill. Now, some city and county leaders are looking at a way to implement that scheme, or something like it, for Santa Cruz.“We’re looking at creating a financing authority that is a revolving fund,” says Mayor Ryan Coonerty, who is working with County Treasurer Fred Keeley on the project. “The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to install solar panels.” He says it depends on state legislation issues as to whether the program will just be citywide or for the entire county, but the goal is to make it as wide as possible. “A big piece of this is the feds have to keep the tax breaks for solar panels,” he adds. “Otherwise, a major financial incentive to go solar will disappear.” As it stands, the federal rebate for solar photovoltaic panels is scheduled to expire at the end of the year, and there’s very little hope that it will be renewed, since several attempts to do so have passed through the House of Representatives, only to die in the Senate. There is also a California rebate, but that’s in the sunset phase as well. “Unfortunately that state rebate is on a declining schedule, designed to scale down at a rate that the industry would make up for,” says Clint Biddle, the sales and marketing coordinator for Santa Cruz-based Solar Technologies. “But it’s been too fast and the industry hasn’t caught up. That might slow the industry a little. Dwindling incentives are an issue. If we can take action at the local level, it might make up for some of these things.” There’s still time for homeowners to take advantage of the federal rebate, provided the system is installed and integrated into the PG&E grid by Dec. 31. Biddle says a smooth installation takes just a few days, and homes rarely take longer than a week at worst. There’s also a slim hope that the rebate will be renewed after the election. “The House has been creating these extensions for 10 years,” Biddle says, “but maybe we need to compromise and dumb it down, just to get something pushed through.” Mahlon Aldridge, the vice president of Ecology Action’s energy group, says the disappearing federal money will have a big impact on industry-scale solar projects as well. “We just signed contracts with Optus and Sun to do an 8-megawatt system in San Luis Obispo, but it’s contingent on the tax credit. It might knock at least half of the incentive out of the picture for them.” Aldridge also says that his group has discovered that the key to making solar affordable has nothing do with panels, and everything to do with people. “We’re focused on efficiency,” he says. “We’ve been doing retrofits on businesses around Northern California that have saved enough energy to take the equivalent of 65 percent of all Santa Cruz single family homes off the grid. We’re trying to determine how to best bundle efficiency and renewables so a customer can get a cost-effective package. There’s a lot of out-of-pocket costs with solar, whereas efficiency is fairly cost-effective. If you bundle that with solar, your payback is longer, but faster than solar alone, because you can reduce the size of the photovoltaic system needed.” According to Biddle, a typical 5-kilowatt system costs about $40,000, give or take a thousand depending on the home’s roof and location, whereas a 3-kilowatt system (by far the most popular size) costs in the $25,000 to $30,000 range. “The biggest variable in cost is how much electricity you use,” he says. “The panels are by far the largest expense.” Biddle also says the property tax scheme makes sense, as solar panels have the lifespan that makes a long-term payoff make sense. “We sell a fair amount of Mitsubishi panels,” he says, “and they have panels from the 1970s that are still going strong today, and there have been advances in the technology since then. The industry standard for warranties is 25 years, so obviously we expect them to last at least that long, if not much longer.” The solar business is booming, at least for Solar Technologies, despite the financial hurdles. The company just moved its headquarters to a new office on Soquel Avenue across from Shopper’s Corner, where there’s also room to warehouse the panels for one integrated location. “We’re just expanding like crazy,” Biddle says. “We grew four-fold last year, so we wanted nicer, bigger, higher profile office space, with a nice showroom and room for some community gatherings.” At the city, Ross Clark, the climate change coordinator for Santa Cruz, is working on the property tax financing scheme along with some other possibilities for making solar technology affordable to as many people as possible. In addition to what he calls the Berkeley model, he’s looking at a similar way to finance solar hot water via the homeowner’s utility bill. “Solar hot water is a lower up-front investment that still has big returns through greenhouse gases and energy uses,” Clark says. Clark also says that public meetings have hammered home just how many people in Santa Cruz are renters—both in the home and at the office—making it imperative for the city to find ways to make solar an attractive option for landlords. The city is also working with Ecology Action to find ways to ensure that renewable energy credits are spent here with local green businesses. Clark’s office is putting the finishing touches on a 2005 greenhouse gas audit for the city, and is hoping to use that document to find the best projects to tackle in order to reduce the city’s carbon footprint. “Since 1990, the community as a whole has reduced by about 10 percent, so we’re a third of the way toward our overall reduction goals,” he says. “But we have some struggles ahead, particularly with transportation and electricity use.” It seems that as long as the sun rises and sets, there will be a need to find ways to be friendlier to the planet.
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