Citizenre sets goals to help more than the environment.

2 Comments

1. Reggie "Razmataz" Rasmussen says:

   November 2, 2007 at 10:58 pm

   News article on Citizenre. This reporter is mostly accurate; however, he must not have read the Solarjoules article dated Oct 18, 2007 “The Citizenre Solar Rental program improved again.”

   Had he done so he would have realized that billing was no longer tied to, “Monthly payments based on how much electricity.”

   By Alex Breitler
   Record Staff Writer
   October 25, 2007 6:00 AM
   The dream of a solar-powered home energized Rick Mielbrecht.

   “Until I saw the price tag,” he said.

   The retired San Joaquin Delta College instructor figured he would be dead by the time he saved enough on his utility bill to offset the $30,000 cost.

   How it works
   • Prospective clients sign a waiting list, locking them in to current utility rates for anywhere from one to 25 years, depending on the length of the contract.

   • Citizenre says it eventually will send inspectors to each home to see if they are suitable for solar and to determine their energy needs.

   • Customers put down a $500 security deposit, and the equipment is installed.

   • Monthly payments based on how much electricity is generated are made to Citizenre, which also collects rebates from the government.

   • If you move, Citizenre officials say they will move your panels once for free. Contracts can also be passed on to new homeowners.

   But there may be another way.

   Mielbrecht signed on with a startup company that says it will manufacture solar panels and loan them to customers, who will buy their energy from the company at a fixed rate for up to 25 years.

   Some see this as a way to dodge future hikes in utility rates. The Delaware-based company, Citizenre, says it is a way to make solar power mainstream as California strives to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

   Existing solar providers, such as Stockton-based BTA Solar, say plenty of people are willing to buy solar units outright, adding that companies are coming from out of the area to court prospective buyers.

   Those who do invest in the purchase of solar panels can make the cost less colossal. Cash incentives can cover about 25 percent of purchased solar panels, and federal tax credits also are available.

   Still, the idea of relatively little money down – Citizenre requires a $500 security deposit – has prompted about 24,000 people across the nation to sign up for renting solar panels, including nearly a dozen Stocktonians who attended a meeting organized by Mielbrecht on Monday night.

   Citizenre has its critics, who point out that the company has not actually built any of the solar equipment that it promises to one day install on residential rooftops. It has not even decided where its manufacturing facility will be located.

   This leaves other solar providers skeptical whether Citizenre can deliver.

   Jeffrey Wolfe, chief executive officer of national solar firm GroSolar, earlier this year said Citizenre is “not going to be able to stand up to their promises.”

   Solar power harvests energy from the sun and converts it for use in the home. This can reduce global warming, since much of the state’s conventional energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

   Power plants emit gases that scientists say are contributing to climate change, future consequences of which include rising sea levels, more intense floods and droughts, and the demise of some animal species.

   Homes with permanent solar systems are more desirable to potential buyers than homes without, said Terri Steele of the California Center for Sustainable Energy. Citizenre officials Monday said those who can afford to buy solar panels should go ahead and do so. “Our goal is just to have the solar out there,” company representative Mike Hackley said. “This is a new option that we offer.”

   Contact reporter Alex Breitler at (209) 546-8295 or abreitler@recordnet.com.
2. Reggie Rasmussen says:

   November 13, 2007 at 10:37 am

   <p>The wall street journal chimes in on solar. This is a great story that shows the benefits, the challenges, and the work associated with purchasing a solar system. Keep in mind, costs for solar systems are now figured using net metering. If storage capacity are added, the cost of systems goes up dramatically.</p>
   <p>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119463286133388158.html?mod=googlenews_wsj </p>
   <p>A New Generation<br />
   Renewable energy increasingly begins at home<br />
   By CASSANDRA SWEET<br />
   November 12, 2007; Page R4</p>
   <p>Two years ago, after Stan Gelber had retired and started an Internet company out of his home in Santa Cruz, Calif., he took a good, long look at his $3,000-a-year utility bill and decided to make a change.</p>
   <p>”My electric bill was skyrocketing,” he says. “I really needed to get a handle on what was going out, versus what was coming in.”</p>
   <p>I’m in support of anything that will address global warming and our power consumption,” the 65-year-old Mr. Gelber says. “That’s very important to me. But I think that’s secondary to the economics of it. It’s going to pay for itself in eight to 10 years, and essentially I have free electricity for the rest of my life.”</p>
   <p>As electricity prices rise and government incentives and technology improvements make renewable-power systems more affordable, a growing number of people are embracing self-generation. And while as much as 85% of the demand for home solar-power generation is in California — the state with the most generous financial incentives — the market is growing in other states, including New Jersey and New York, and could take off nationwide if more states implement favorable rules and funding, advocates say.</p>
   <p>”This market wouldn’t be happening without these government incentives,” says Lisa Frantzis, managing director of renewable and distributed energy at Navigant Consulting, an independent consulting firm in Burlington, Mass. “There’s a convergence with prices coming down, concern about climate change, volatility in the power market and people concerned about energy security.”</p>
   <p>California Takes Lead</p>
   <p>By far, the most widely used home renewable-power systems are rooftop solar panels that absorb the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity.</p>
   <p>In California, people who install their own solar power or other renewable generators can get rebates of as much as $2.50 per watt of electricity produced. Residential customers of San Francisco-based PG&E Corp. utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co., who install an average-size system of about 4,600 watts, can expect to obtain a rebate of at least $10,000, utility spokesman Keely Wachs says. California’s rebates are based on the electricity output of the solar generator. The highest-performing, most efficient system would qualify for the full $2.50-per-watt rebate, whereas systems on roofs that have heavy shade, or smaller surface areas, for example, would qualify for a lower rebate amount, such as $2.20, $1.90, $1.55 or less per watt, Mr. Wachs says.</p>
   <p>In the first nine months of this year, requests for solar rebates — from both residential and commercial customers — covered 160 megawatts of electricity generated, the California Public Utilities Commission has reported. That is slightly less than the 198 megawatts of solar power installed in California over the previous 26 years, the regulators said. Almost 90% of this year’s 5,109 applications are from consumers eager to generate their own electricity.</p>
   <p>Mr. Gelber says that after rebates, his solar-power system cost about $28,000 to install. The system, which gets full sun, generates about 4,500 watts of electricity, enough to satisfy Mr. Gelber’s daytime energy needs, including multiple computers and appliances. After dark, Mr. Gelber and his wife, Jean Pierog, rely on power supplied by PG&E.</p>
   <p>Mr. Gelber’s system feeds electricity into the utility grid, and any surplus is used as a credit toward the cost of power purchased from the utility on cloudy days or at night, a process known as net metering. If a resident like Mr. Gelber produces more power than he or she consumes, the home’s utility bill is zero. Mr. Gelber says he ends up paying PG&E about $225 a year.</p>
   <p>The Long Haul</p>
   <p>Installing a home solar-power generator can take quite a bit of effort.</p>
   <p>California requires extensive documentation before it pays a rebate, and building permits are required to install a solar-power system, as are scheduled inspections by the local utility, county and city. Mr. Gelber also had to replace the roof on his house to ensure that it would be able to handle the extra weight of the solar panels and converter.</p>
   <p>”There’s a lot of work putting them in,” Mr. Gelber says of solar-power generators. “It’s not a spur-of-the-moment thing.”</p>
   <p>In its Northern California service territory, PG&E charges tiered rates for electricity, between 11.4 cents and 36.4 cents a kilowatt-hour, depending on usage. (A kilowatt-hour equals the energy needed to run a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours.) Utility spokesman John Tremayne says the average PG&E customer pays about 15 cents a kilowatt-hour, including surcharges and fees.</p>
   <p>Solar power generated with photovoltaic panels, meanwhile, will run a homeowner about 18 to 19 cents a kilowatt-hour, assuming a cost of $24,000 to install a system that produces 4,300 kilowatt-hours of electricity, over 30 years, according to Barry Cinnamon, president and chief executive of Akeena Solar Inc., a solar-power installer based in Los Gatos, Calif.</p>
   <p>Some customers have managed to cut their installation costs to as little as $15,000 after state rebates and a $2,000 federal tax credit, which, over a 30-year period, would produce power for about 10 to 14 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to Mr. Cinnamon, who says PG&E rates in his area are around 36 cents a kilowatt-hour, after surcharges and fees.</p>
   <p>Gold Standard</p>
   <p>California’s incentive program is the gold standard among advocates of solar power. When demand exceeded expectations last year, regulators expanded the state’s self-generation incentive budget to $342 million from $42 million. This year, the state earmarked $3 billion for solar-generation incentives over 10 years, with a goal of installing 3,000 megawatts by 2017.</p>
   <p>New Jersey has a rebate program, too, but it ran into trouble last year when demand far exceeded allotted funding. New Jersey consumers now have to wait, sometimes a year or more, for a rebate. But the state has a separate funding program under its renewable-power mandate for utilities that offers consumers 20 cents to 30 cents a kilowatt-hour for their solar generation. In return for those payments, the local utility collects renewable energy credits that it can use to comply with New Jersey’s requirement that all power providers use renewables for 20% of their retail power by 2020.</p>
   <p>The U.S. currently has about 700 megawatts of installed generation from solar panels connected to the grid, according to research by the consulting firm Navigant. That represents less than 1% of all of the electricity generated in the U.S. About half of that generation comes from residential solar generators. If state policies remain unchanged, generation from solar panels in the U.S. — both from commercial and residential generators — is expected to grow to 6,000 megawatts by 2015, with 3,000 of those megawatts in California, according to the research Navigant compiled for the U.S. Department of Energy.</p>
   <p>Growth in the home solar-power market won’t take off until more states adopt favorable net-metering rules, advocates say. Not only do such rules help offset the cost of installing a renewable-power system, they also prevent electricity from being wasted.</p>
   <p>If every state that currently limits the amount of self-generated renewable power that can be sold back to the grid lifted those caps, an additional 3,000 megawatts of solar-panel generation would likely be developed in the next eight years, Navigant said in its study for the DOE.</p>
   <p>A separate report published by New Energy Choices, a nonprofit clean-energy research firm in New York, graded states on their rules for net metering and interconnection, or allowing home generators to connect and send power to the grid. As of September, 39 states had adopted programs and rules for compensating consumers for sending self-generated renewable power to the grid, according to the report, which was produced with help from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.</p>
   <p>California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland garnered the highest marks for net metering, while a number of states received low scores because of barriers in their policies, such as requirements that force consumers to purchase extra equipment or pay extra fees to participate, says Shaun Chapman, a spokesman at New Energy Choices.</p>
   <p>States without net-metering rules didn’t make the list at all, Mr. Chapman says. Those states include South Dakota, Kansas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Arizona, though the latter two states are working on adopting such rules.</p>
   <p>”While it’s true we don’t have rules, most of our utilities now have net metering,” says Kristin Mayes, a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s electric utilities. Small utilities that serve about 5% of the state don’t have net-metering programs, however, “which is why we’re adopting statewide rules,” she says.</p>