Solar Cells Info

Paul Kilduff, Special to The San Francisco Chronicle  /January 6, 2007
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/06/HOGVMNCB361.DTL&hw=solarcity&sn=001&sc=1000

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to leave less of a carbon footprint on this overheated old orb of ours, no doubt you’ve considered going solar. That is, until you took a gander at the considerable costs of putting a rack of electricity-generating photovoltaic cells on your roof. After rebates for an average 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot home, it’ll cost you about $15,000. It’s enough to make you consider trading in your SUV for a used Prius instead.

But harnessing the sun’s power for your own electrical needs doesn’t have to be a solo project. As a group of homeowners in Portola Valley working with a new solar power company has demonstrated, economies of scale (i.e., getting a discount by buying in bulk) can apply to solar power installation as well. Working with SolarCity, 68 homeowners in Portola Valley signed up last month to convert their houses to solar power at a 25 to 30 percent discount over the cost of going it alone.

The Foster City company was formed in September when entrepreneur brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, looking to do something more meaningful, got out of the software business and purchased Palo Alto Solar and Declination Solar of San Francisco.

Admittedly, the Portola Valley’s 4,000 fairly affluent residents living near the Stanford University campus are not just environmentally conscious — they have the financial wherewithal to do something about it. The community has strict rules requiring the use of only native plants in landscaping, and homes must fit in architecturally with the landscape. Residents have also had speakers come from Stanford to talk about global warming and other environmental issues.

Things really came to a head last summer when a group of about 20 residents from the town’s Ladera development went to see Al Gore’s movie about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Afterward, they gathered at the house of Ladera Homeowner’s Association President Armand Neukerman to discuss it. Pretty soon the conversation turned to what they could do about global warming, and the idea of converting to solar en masse was hatched.

“We’re not talking just pollution — we cleaned up the environment in many places,” says Neukerman, 66, a semiretired physicist and engineer who plans to form an institute in Big Sur to, among other things, study global warming. “This (global warming) is something that’s much more threatening.” He sees putting in solar panels as being akin to “planting trees for the next generations. You don’t plant a tree for yourself.”

Great idea, but where to start? Since Neukerman had Palo Alto Solar install solar panels on his rooftop two years ago, he was familiar with the process and shopped the idea around to several companies, including Palo Alto Solar’s new owners, SolarCity. In the end, he chose SolarCity not just because of the price it offered but its service as well. SolarCity monitors all its clients’ installations online to make sure they’re operating at peak performance. It also makes house calls to fix problems, such as replacing shorted-out connection cables from the system to the power grid, as it did for Neukerman. “They’re extremely proactive,” he says.

To get the word out about the program, dubbed the Collective Power Program, Neukerman and others held three meetings along with SolarCity in Portola Valley churches and other venues that were attended by more than 200 residents. “It was sort of a spontaneous reaction,” says Neukerman of the meetings. “It’s not just the movie — there’s generally a reaction that we have to do something. It’s still very expensive, but eventually, by 2015, it will be quite competitive.” He points out that in 1980, solar power setups cost $20 per watt of potential production (not including installation costs). By 1986 it was down to $10 per watt. In 2000 it was $4 per watt and, using figures from Sun Power Solar, a solar panel manufacturer, Neukerman predicts the cost will be $1.40 a watt by 2014.

To make the Collective Power Program profitable for SolarCity, the company calculated that it had to be installing enough solar panels in one geographic area to produce a minimum of 175 kilowatts of electricity at any one time during the five optimum sunlight hours in the middle of the day that are best for generating power. In addition to the discounts SolarCity gets from suppliers by buying large quantities, SolarCity also can reduce the cost of sending workers hither and yon to install the panels.

Once the 175-kilowatt figure is achieved, SolarCity figures it can charge customers $7.90 a kilowatt for their system, as opposed to the $10.05 per kilowatt they can expect to pay on their own. The company also puts up the money that will be rebated later so customers don’t have to. With a total of 322 kilowatts, Portola Valley far exceeded the amount of electric power potential needed to make the program work.

The maiden voyage of SolarCity’s Collective Power Program went so well that Peter Rive plans to expand it to the Central Valley and Los Angeles, where, just as in Portola Valley, residents will be able to “make a positive environmental impact and save money.” “You’re going to be able to eliminate your electric bill forever and make it so coal- and gas-powered electric plants won’t have to make so many emissions,” Rive says.

For more information on SolarCity’s Collective Power Program, visit www.solarcity.com.