Yesterday, a company called Sungevity announced the availability of what they're calling the cheapest solar system in the world: a rooftop solar panel system, fully installed, for $2,000.
That's as much as I paid for my computer.
For that price, the average home will save $21,000 in electricity over 25 years -- a 45 percent return on investment.
From a simple web interface, customers can plug in their address and Sungevity will use satellite and aerial imagery to assess their rooftop solar potential and offer them a range of options within 24 hours. Ordering can be done online, as easily as ordering a book from Amazon. (The company fills out all the necessary permits and mails them for a signature.)
Rather than the months of a typical PV order, the entire process, from quote to installation, takes just a couple of weeks.
Now, to bring us back to earth, the caveat -- and it's a doozy.
This system is available only to residents of San Francisco, and only temporarily, as it is pegged to the $1.5 million in incentives the city will begin handing out today through its Solar Energy Incentive Program. The program will offer up to $6,000 to individuals and $10,000 to businesses to install PV. In non-SF reality, Sungevity's 1.5kW starter system is around $8,000 installed.
Still, the company's got plenty to boast about. In fairly short order, it has undercut the price of other solar providers in California by up to 10 percent. How? By taking steps to commoditize the PV market.
"There's so much money being spent on the hardware and technology end of the business," says Sungevity CXO and president Danny Kennedy, "and yet 50 percent of the cost the customer pays -- which is the only price that matters -- is downstream of the factory gates. Even if a Nanosolar panel came out and it was free, it would still cost $5/watt to get it up on a roof." While press and investor attention largely focus on whizbang new generation technologies like modular CSP, nanotubes, and printable films, Sungevity is focused on distribution, installation, and customer service.
Kennedy worked for years as a Greenpeace organizer, pushing for solar support in California. Now, with a group of fellow green expatriates, he's knee deep in commerce. (Says Greenpeace USA head John Passacantando, "Danny Kennedy was one of our greatest warriors fighting for a green and peaceful future. But I always knew victory would be at hand when some of the warriors would shift their focus and raise the capital to literally build the green energy future with real green jobs.") When I spoke with Kennedy, what he's most excited about is a recent milestone: "We made our first fully online sale! It was to an octogenarian, which sort of blew away our assumptions about who the customer was."
Sungevity only went state-wide in California a few months ago, one of many businesses pulled into the slipstream of the state's Million Solar Roofs program, but its ambitions are large. Right now the company is limited to Calif., because that's as far as its installer subcontracting network goes, but Kennedy expects to go nationwide, or at least to top solar states, within a year or two. And he wants to start building a nationwide network of reputable, certified installers:
The whole point of Sungevity is to facilitate the scaling of solar by making it easier, not just for customers -- that's the first innovation -- but also for installers and other contractors to get in the game. Our view is that to save the planet with solar we've got to something like 700x the solar installed capacity. You're not going to do that just by growing the mom-and-pop shops. With all due respect to them -- and they're wonderful people, and I've known and loved and worked with them for over a decade -- that high-end, low-volume, high-cost business will always have a place for the premium and elite customers, but there also has to be a Dell.
(And sure enough, Fortune's Todd Woody has dubbed Sungevity "the Dell of solar energy.")
Because rooftop assessment can be done remotely and on the cheap, Sungevity can size up large numbers of roofs at once. Kennedy is open to working with larger customers, "be it a city that wants to reduce its carbon emissions, a corporate that wants to support its staff to do the green thing, or a utility that wants to value add to their grid and preserve them from the need to invest in substation upgrades or new transmission."
For a small East Bay town called Albany, the company remotely assessed around 3,500 roofs and discovered that roughly 2,000 were solar-appropriate. "If every one of those customers went solar with Sungevity, the 2,000 homes combined would save that community $30 million in electricity over the next 25 years and 40,000 tons of CO2," says Kennedy. The company sent direct mail to those 2,000 addresses; each mailer had a picture of the house with a PV installation on it, a price quote, and a pitch for the investment benefits of PV. Through this kind of marketing, Sungevity is attempting to scale the solar market beyond the LOHAS choir.
As it happens, the aforementioned octogenarian was one of those Albany customers.
"This is a serious way to make the dream of a million solar roofs in California real, or tens of millions across America real," Kennedy says proudly. "We now can effectively model, aggregate demand for, and design a cost-effective way to deliver that dream."
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Power in Texas is often among the highest in the nation so this would seem to be a better scheme for those areas.
WOW, that seems like a LOT of money.
That would be something like $5,500 per kilowatt, and its only when the sun shines.
I think that compares to something like around $4,000 per KW for the new generation of coal and nuclear plants that will meet our carbon balance and oil -independence goals.
But, those nuclear plants will not produce anything for around ten years, and the carbon-sequestration timeline for the new coal plants is like 2020-2025.
So, if the price of the solar systems come down a little, or if we retool our thinking about training homeowners on both installation and operation of home solar systems, you know we could install millions of those solar home energy systems in the meantime.
And it wouldn't take an unprecedented runup in the cost of those nuclear plants before they're not really economical anymore.
Big problem for solar is not that it only works during the daylight, because that is when our electrical systems peak, for the most part.
The problem is that with the electrification of our present petroleum-based mobile fleet, the charging systems required will have to be run at night.
The coming holy grail of electric cars means that we will need to add to the night time supply of power. Present thinking is this is where we would need more nuclear plants.
Atomic powered cars.
For our solar powered households.
There is a hearing at the CEC on Monday to discuss Feed-In Tariffs in CA - let's all weigh in with their demands for REAL rates that reflect the enormous savings in capital outlays, eminent domain, new transmission, failed technologies and speedy RPS achievements. Current rates are punitive and unrealistic:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/portfolio/documents/index.html#063008
Germany pays 40 Eurocents/watt for 100% of power produced (ratepayers then buy power back), plus up-front tax breaks/incentives, resulting in over 500,000 residential PV systems installed in the past few years. Last year alone 1.1 GW was installed, with a 40% increase projected this year.
LADWP, even with the halfhearted rebate program in place, has installed only 1,000 systems (residential and commercial combined), or far fewer than 5% of Germany's installation rate, on a per-capita basis, despite superior solar resources. Because they refuse to pay the REAL value of power generated by ratepayers. Because they want to further entrench their monopoly, and all CA's policies are geared towards enabling that. Even under CA's new feed-in tariff experiment, ratepayers have to refuse the up-front incentives for meager pennies in power purchases (the peak rate is less than half Germany's steady rate). The payback in the Mojave is 20 years, even with no consumption!! WTF?
sorry, to be continued...
Study some physics and thermodynamics. You'll be in a much better position to understand what are viable alternative energy storage and transport mechanisms and what are not.
I went to the site, and they do not service anywhere outside of the Bay area at this time. I am only 100 miles east, so maybe they will be in my area next year.
Right now I believe the national average is about $10,000 / kW installed.
Not so good is the real numbers involved. I power a cabin/studio in central Texas. I do not have refrigeration or A/C - consumed too much power, and during the winter, amps in and amps out have to be watched. I paid approximately $2000.00 for my system, installed it myself, and it has served me well. It would never work for a family or even a typical couple. Not powerful enough.
So, I laud the efforts, but it's just not enough. Having said that... every little bit helps.
Or you can look at it from the other angle and see it as citizen-subsidized power production. Instead of the city paying a company to build a power plant to supplement the grid, they've arranged it so citizens can choose to pay for their own power plant upfront and make up the costs later. Either way, the ultimate goal is to provide power to the city as a whole.
I do applaud you for standing your ground and getting off the grid.
We put 30 Kyocera PV panels on our roof last year. Before we could hook up this system, we had to upgrade our house from 150 to 200 Amp service to comply with City of Phoenix building code. This cost us $3000. Our local power company paid for half on the rest of the $36,000 installation. We rolled $18,000 into a refinance and have found that the increase in our mortgage payment is less than the savings on our monthly power bill, so every month leaves us with more money in our pocket. We also got $1000 tax credits from both the Feds and the state.
The PV's produce just about all of our "On Peak" electrical demand on a "Time Advantage" billing structure employed by our power company. The system has been in place exactly one year and has generated 9 MW of electricity. A typical home our size in Phoenix, AZ uses 12 MW, but it would not be economically strategic to generate all of our "Off Peak" electricity due to its low price. We run 7.5 tons of 12 SEER HVAC, a large swimming pool, and all fluorescent lighting with ceiling fans in each room. Depending on the time of year we produce between 38 and 49 kW/h each sunny day. Cloudy winter days produce around 20 kW/h.