Even before you install a solar system, an energy audit is surely in order to determine how much power you use—and whether you can produce enough power to make the installation worthwhile. You can learn your energy history quickly by reviewing your utility bill. You may also want to implement some of the energy-saving techniques we covered in Chapter 1 so you can get away with a somewhat smaller solar electric system.
Solar for the Midwest?
Now, you might be surprised to hear that my system was not installed by a Los Angeles company. It was put in by Michigan Energy Works.
People say, “Solar’s fine for you in California, Arizona, Nevada. These places have a lot of sun. What about the poor people in the Midwest?” I’ve seen this regularly in newspaper op-ed pieces and stories about solar.
Well, guess what, there’s a thriving solar business in the Midwest. Wisconsin. Michigan. Yes, it gets cold there, but it’s not cloudy so much of the time as it is in a place like Seattle, where solar wouldn’t be as viable. It’s often sunny and cold in the Midwest, which is good for generating solar energy. In fact, solar panels lose 15 percent of their efficiency when they get hot, and they don’t have that problem in a cold, bright state. On a sunny winter day in Wisconsin or Michigan, those panels are cranking out full current.
Solar is really practical in most parts of the country. If you’re not sure about your area, get out the Farmer’s Almanac and see how many sunny days per year are typical in your area.
Solar Water Heaters
Solar isn’t used only to create electricity—you can also install a solar hot water heater. Even if you don’t have a complete solar electric setup, there are standalone solar water-heating systems.
I’ve got a water heater tank that’s hooked up to the solar panels. The sun heats the water, and the hot water gets stored in the tank. Many days when it’s sunny out, the water reaches 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, I don’t rely on the solar tank exclusively, because you still want to be able to take a shower if it’s cloudy for a week—unless you live in a cabin and don’t mind being dirty, or you have a wife who’s more tolerant of such things. Since I do not, I have a secondary hot water heater that is a standard natural gas unit.
The majority of the time, the solar panels are heating my water, but I’ve got this superefficient natural gas hot water heater as a backup. It’s like I’ve created a hybrid water-heating system to go along with our hybrid car.
If solar hot water isn’t an option, you can get a superefficient Vertex natural gas hot water heater from a company called A. O. Smith. Most standard gas water heaters run at 70 to 75 percent efficiency, and this one runs at 90 percent. It’s the most efficient gas water heater on the market.
The Economics of Solar
Let me be clear: I went solar electric in 1990 because at the time I had a TV series and I could afford it. I wanted to do it as a research project, knowing that I was not going to get any payback anytime soon—or at all. I think I just got to the break-even point in 2007—seventeen years later.
Today, you can take advantage of subsidies available in many parts of the country that enable folks to reduce the high cost of installing solar. But back in 1990, there were no federal, state, or local subsidies. I knew I wouldn’t amortize the investment until way down the line because of how much these systems cost. Don’t misunderstand me: My electric bill reduction was substantial over those many years, because I got 6½ kilowatts of solar. I reduced my electric bill a great deal every year—and I nearly eliminated it for many years while I was single. That’s money saved. But because of the initial upfront costs, it’s taken me a long time to break even on this system.
If you want to find out what kind of subsidies are available in your area, look on the Internet or ask a local solar installer. They know these codes inside and out. If you call one to come out and give you a bid, he’ll tell you right away, “Here’s what you’ll get from the state. Here’s what’s happening now.”
It turns out that right now, as we’re writing this book, the coffers for solar subsidies in California are empty (we hope to have them filled again soon with the help of the state legislature). But subsidies still exist in other areas.
Even with the subsidies, though, the economics of putting up a solar system like mine have gotten such that you have to be a quarter- to a half-mile away from the grid for it to make economic sense today. If you live that far from real utility power—if you’re moving to a cabin somewhere or you’re building a house out in the country—you’d have to pay a substantial sum just to get connected to the grid. When you call the local electric company to ask about running power lines out to your home, they’ll say, “If you want power out there, we have to trench. We can get a crew out there.”
So then you ask, “How much will that cost me?”
“About $35,000 to run a quarter-mile of lines.” Or whatever it is.
You go, “Thank you, I appreciate the bid. I’m going to have Fred the solar installer come out, and I’m going to spend $35,000 to $40,000, too. Maybe I’ll have a little propane backup generator so I’ll never run out of power during a cloudy period. But I’m going to put my money into solar.”
I know many people who have cabins who have done that.
Solar Energy for the Masses
Now, $35,000 or $40,000 for a solar electric system clearly is beyond many people’s budget. Fortunately, there are some new opportunities that allow even folks on the most modest budget to get into solar.
With the solar electric setup like those I’ve discussed so far, you buy the whole thing, you have someone install it, and you own it—forever. But now there’s another way to go solar that makes more economic sense.
There are companies like Citizenrē that are doing solar panels with a totally different business model. Just like a satellite dish or a cable TV box, you won’t own the panels. You just want the service and the reliable electricity that comes with them—in this case, a twenty-five-year contract for a fixed rate for your power, a fixed kilowatt-hour rate. You get the bragging rights of having solar. You get the reliability if there’s a power outage that your refrigerator is going to work and that your alarm system is going to work and that your electric gate will open, but you don’t own the panels.
Why would they ever do this? Because solar panels are so reliable in the long run that after your twenty-five-year contract is up and you decide you don’t want to use them anymore, they can install them for somebody else and they’re still going to work.
There are companies that are trying different solar business models, and I think they’ll be very successful with this. I hope they will be, because why should rich guys who had a TV series in 1990 be the only ones who are able to afford them? There are certainly doctors, dentists, other wealthy professional people who want to do the right thing, and I think it’s great and I applaud them, but why should solar be restricted to those demographics? Why can’t everybody have it?
I’ll let my friend Rob Styler, the president of Citizenrē, tell you more about the benefits of solar energy and how his company works.
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Ed’s Green Friend: Citizenrē
Is the sun finally rising on solar power?
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Way back in 1931, Thomas Edison had a conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. Edison said, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
Over the last fifteen years, demand for solar energy has increased by 25 percent a year, while prices have dropped an average of 4 percent per year. But despite growing by record numbers, solar systems still represent only 0.01 percent of worldwide energy needs.
Why is this number so low when solar energy is such a plentiful, clean resource? In the past, solar power has been too expensive and too complicated. To switch to solar, people had to take out a second mortgage, invest their children’s college fund, or s
ell their second car to come up with the capital. Then, there’s the effort to make it happen—dealing with the installation, maintaining the equipment, getting permits. Who has the time, or the money? Not until solar power can reach parity with utility pricing will more people embrace this option.
Citizenrē has a bold plan to remove all of the traditional barriers to solar power. Our rental offer provides the benefits of solar electricity without the drawbacks: There’s no system to purchase. No installation costs. No maintenance concerns. No permit hassles. No performance worries. And no rate increases for the duration of your rental term.
Like most innovations, the Citizenrē model is so simple, it makes you wonder why no one thought of it before. You simply pay a rental fee that is based on the same rate per kilowatt-hour that you used to pay your utility company, with one big difference: Citizenrē guarantees that your rate per kilowatt-hour will not increase for twenty-five years.
With energy costs of all kinds increasing annually, this peace of mind can also save you money. You produce your own power from the sun and keep the savings every month. We even have a solar savings calculator on our website, www.citizenre.com, that will show exactly how much you can save.
In the past, “going green” usually implied sacrifice. You might feel good about saving the planet, but that good feeling came at a price, as many green products were more expensive than their “dirty” counterparts. With Citizenrē, going green can actually save you money.
State net metering laws make this possible. Through these laws, the grid acts like a huge battery. Your household meter is effectively spinning backward during the day when the sun is shining and forward at night when you pull back power that you have contributed to the grid. These laws were passed because residential energy production is one of the biggest causes of pollution in the United States. For solutions to be sustainable, they need to be simple and make sense on every level, including economic.
Solar power offers energy security, energy independence, no emissions, increased jobs, and economic benefits. Imagine a day when we can power our electric cars from our solar panels and decrease our carbon footprint to the point where each of us can once again tread lightly on the earth.
—Rob Styler
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I’m such a big fan of wind power that I’ve owned half a Zond turbine since 1985.
Wind Power
In Chapter 2, I mentioned that a sailboat is probably the most efficient form of transportation there is—because it’s powered solely by the wind. That’s not the only way to put this resource to work; wind can be harnessed to generate electricity and power your home.
Before I put a single solar electric panel on my roof, I was already putting ten homes’ worth of green power into the Southern California energy system, and I’d been doing that since 1985. Not just enough energy for my house, not enough for two, but ten homes’ worth of power.
How did I do that?
By investing in a wind turbine, a portion of a wind farm in Palm Springs, California. Specifically, I own half a Zond, a Danish wind turbine. And that half of a wind turbine has produced enough energy to power ten homes this size—maybe half a home Candy Spelling’s size—since then.
If you put a wind turbine—a high-tech kind of windmill—in the right windy location, you can harness that kinetic energy. So the wind turns the blades on a turbine. Then, in most cases, the turbine spins gears in a gear-box (like a car’s transmission), and the gearbox turns a generator, creating electricity. It’s beautifully simple.
The idea has been around for centuries. Windmills have been used on farms and in rural areas to pump water. The windmill has even become something of a nostalgic symbol of simpler, more bucolic days. Modern windmills can actually bring back some of that bucolic lifestyle. Nobody wants to live next door to a smoke-belching power plant that’s burning coal or crude oil, but wind farms are actually quite attractive.
Wind farms also operate pollution free. They don’t create any harmful emissions that could end up in the air and water, and they don’t use up any natural resources, like coal or oil or natural gas. Wind is abundant and free.
Best of all, wind farms can be every bit as cost effective as a modern coal-burning or natural gas-burning power plant.
When I invested in my wind turbine back in 1985, I was no millionaire. I’m not a millionaire now. But if the people who do have the dough would do what I did—invest in this clean, green power—that would be the end of coal and nuclear. And by the way, that wind turbine has been a good investment, too.
Residential Wind Turbines
So far, we’ve been talking about commercial wind farms, also called large wind. There’s also small wind, which refers to turbines that have a capacity of 100 kilowatt-hours or less, and these turbines are being considered more and more for residential use.
Here’s how it usually works. The wind turbine provides all—or some—of the power you need for your home, but your house is still connected to the grid. That way you can get electricity from your local utility company during those times when there’s no wind or not quite enough. If the wind turbine produces even more power than you need, you can feed that excess power into the grid via net metering—so again, you’re literally selling electricity to the utility company.
With this kind of residential wind power system, there’s no need for a battery setup like I have at home. But if you install a wind turbine and you’re not connected to the grid—if you live in a remote area or if you choose not to connect for whatever reason—then you would need a means of storing power at your home. A stand-alone battery system would provide a reserve for those days when there’s not enough wind.
It’s very common for wind turbine owners who have totally electric homes—that is, people who have no gas appliances whatsoever—to pay as little as $8 to $15 a month for their utilities nine months out of the year. True, those bills are likely to be higher in the summertime, when the air-conditioning is running, but for three-quarters of the year, they pay next to nothing for electricity, beyond the price of installing the system, of course.
What does this type of system cost? According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a small turbine can cost anywhere from $6,000 to $22,000 installed, so the investment is not insubstantial. But in several years it will pay for itself, much like my solar electric system has.
It’s important to note that the typical residential wind turbine is not appropriate for every home. These are still pretty large devices, and the rule of thumb is that you need to have at least an acre of land to install one. They’re not legal in many more densely populated areas, they can be noisy, and they’re not always bird or wildlife friendly. It’s like having a giant Cuisinart spinning away in your backyard. To be honest, they kind of scare me.
But now there’s another option. A new type of small wind turbine is much better suited to an urban environment, and it’s more affordable. It’s called a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT), and I just installed a 500-watt VAWT on the roof of my garage.
This way I’ve got solar during the day and then, when the sun goes down, I’m still making energy with the VAWT, which actually runs 24/7. So you could say I’ve got a true hybrid power system for my home.
I’ll let my friend Ken Johnson, COO of PacWind, tell you more about wind power and VAWTs.
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Ed’s Green Friend: PacWind
Wind power is, and always has been, the most inexpensive form of alternative energy available to us today. And because of this, it is also one of the fastest-growing segments of the alternative-energy sector. Our winds are ever present, and the amount of wind available to us is infinite. Wind turbines produce zero emissions. They relieve our dependence on foreign oil. They help keep our environment clean for future generations. And they help educate all of us about the need for constant awareness of our fragile environment.
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When you think of wind power, you probably picture massive
towering structures with swooping blades in our mountain passes and cornfields. This type of wind power comprises the “large wind” industry. This industry supplies clean wind energy to our power grids with the hopes of meeting future demand for power and also the critical need to convert our energy supplies to clean, renewable sources worldwide.
On a smaller scale, when people are looking to rid themselves of their ever-increasing electric bills and to help maintain our environment, they generally utilize a small wind turbine. This is a great way to produce power in rural areas. But to put a sizable dent in our current climate and energy crisis, we need to be able to harness the power of the wind in the populated areas of our world.
Propeller turbines, which dominate the current small-wind industry, have several severe drawbacks that prevent their use in these populated areas, including very high noise levels, instability, and safety concerns. So, then, how do we utilize our infinite supply of wind where we need it the most: in our cities, towns, and backyards?
PacWind has created a full line of revolutionary vertical-axis wind turbines that address this problem. The PacWind designs spin on a vertical axis, rather than a horizontal one, as propellers do, which makes them more adaptable to all types of urban and rural environments.
Our vertical-axis turbines are:
• completely silent
• stable
• safe in all wind conditions up to 100-plus mph
• virtually maintenance-free
• built to last a lifetime
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