Solar power systems gaining acceptance from campus, city residents

californiaaggie.com By Beth Walker Aggie News Writer

May 05, 2003 - What do a graduate student at The Domes, students at the Agrarian Effort Co-op and 100 households in Davis have in common? They all use solar panels to cut down on electricity use from fossil fuels. Tim Krupnik, a UC Davis graduate student who lives in The Domes — the fiberglass igloo-like dwellings on the west side of campus — spent about $400 for the batteries and inverter and installed some donated photovoltaic, or PV, panels on his roof. With the 170 watts it produces daily, he runs his lights, stereo and computer. The energy his stove and refrigerator consume comes from the utility company. “[The Domes] are obviously ecological dwellings,” Krupnik said. “I wanted to literally practice what I preach.” He said plans to build a solar-powered community structure are underway, so that all 28 residents in the 14 domes could share common resources instead of using more energy to power every dome’s kitchen. Krupnik is one of an increasing number of local residents pursuing solar power, spurred on by state-sponsored rebate programs and a desire to use cleaner energy. And, like the communal power systems planned for The Domes, solar energy can power more than one home. In summer 2002, solar panels were installed behind the Agrarian Effort Co-op on campus. During the summer months, they collect enough current to power the three co-ops and provide enough for one house during the winter. Solar power had been a project for the past eight years, according to Co-op resident Morgan Cisar, but was delayed by campus bureaucracy and building codes. The $26,800 price tag — $13,400 after state rebates — was funded entirely by the Co-op residents. “We tax ourselves,” said Cisar, a sophomore and activity director of ASUCD’s Project Compost. He said money from past rents accumulated in the Co-op’s bank account until residents could make the payment. Not only are people in alternative housing and co-ops choosing to use renewable energy, but more than 100 Davis residents have also installed solar paneling. Liz Merry and Bob Schneider, who live in the Village Homes development on Westernesse Road, obtained their 2.5-kilowatt photovoltaic system in November 2001. They spent $22,000 on the project; state rebates later brought the total to $14,500. Merry, a resident of Davis for 10 years, has been active in environmentally active groups, such as the Sierra Club and the Davis Energy Efficiency Project, for two decades. In 2001, motivated by the energy crisis and looking for ways to save money, Merry called around to find out about solar power options, but could not receive direct responses. “They didn’t have a three- or four-step answer,” she said. She said her frustration led her to research PV systems on the Internet for a month and a half until she understood the process and cost. Merry teamed with five other Davis homeowners interested in obtaining the technology but did not know where to start. So she organized the Davis Solar Group, at whose meetings PV neophytes could assist each other with paperwork and hiring an installer. “The people who are early adopters, anybody who buys photovoltaics [and] wind [energy],” she said. “It’s called early adopters in a business sense — those people really need to hang together and talk and make sure the technology is working well.” Talking with an alternative-energy user The California Aggie met with Merry and her husband, Bob Schneider, at her home to discuss her experience equipping her home with solar power. California Aggie: What factors led you to use alternative energy? Talking with an alternative-energy user The energy crisis got me interested in renewable energy….And then we had that workshop, the Energy Choices Workshop, and there’s a lot of people just like me that year who wanted to invest in PV and knew that’s what they were going to do and just needed their questions answered. So I organized us and we all installed PVs.

CA: So what exactly about the energy crisis prompted you to look into it? LM: That electricity prices were going up and that the state rebate program went up…which made it…relatively affordable. Other than that, people would have a hard time doing it.

CA: Your community here, Village Homes — is it a kind of ecological community? LM: It’s a very ecologically oriented community, with “community” as the big term. It’s a development of 225 houses, but we don’t have fences between our houses, at least not tall ones; we have a lot of communal areas. We share greenbelts on the front and back of our homes. Cars take a really secondary role in the community. We don’t have big garages all over the place.

CA: Have you been saving money on your energy bill? LM: Definitely. We’ve saved a lot of money. We use a lot of electricity…we’re not a typical PG&E customer or what you’d call conservation customer because that aquarium…takes a lot of pumping to keep the salt water where coral will be growing in it. So I actually use probably 1100 kilowatt-hours a month. An average home would probably use 700 to 900. I knew that we were going to get this reef tank when I started looking into PV…I wanted to make sure that [PV] was offsetting [the tank’s energy use]. PG&E sends you this huge statement every month. They treat all of the residential PV owners as mini-utilities, independent power producers…. We’re using about 1100 kilowatt-hours, but…we’re being charged for 560 kilowatt-hours….We’re producing more than half of what we use.…We would be paying about 26 cents a kilowatt-hour…the way the tiered rates go, but our PV system is producing all that so we don’t have to pay more than 11 cents a kilowatt-hour.

CA: How did you get the rebates? What was the process? LM: The first thing you do to get your rebate is to sign your contract with a PV installer. Get a copy of the contract that has the price and the warranty. The warranty has to be five years and then you submit that to California Energy Commission. They give you a reservation number. As long as you do just what you said you were going to do within nine months, they’ll give you this check when you do it. You install everything and you get the check at the end.

CA: Was it a real bureaucratic nightmare or was it easy? LM: I did it with this group of people, which we informally named the Davis Solar Group afterwards….We all learned together. So we had meetings at my house, did all the paperwork, actually used the same installer so he gave us a price break at that time because there were six of us all at once. That was a really good way to do it. Now we all share information on how our systems are doing and if there’s anything wrong.

CA: How does it work? LM: The sun hits the panels and the panels send direct current down these wires, and the direct current gets inverted to alternating current and the alternating current goes straight into the panel and the fish tank uses it. Today we produced 9 kilowatt-hours; right now we’re doing 324 watts, so that’s not very much. But total, we’ve done 5,471 kilowatt-hours since we started. To conceptualize, a kilowatt-hour is 1,000 watts over one hour, so like 10 100-watt light bulbs running for an hour. When it’s a really sunny, beautiful day [the electricity meter] will go backwards, and that’s a lot of fun. It’s feeding the grid instead of costing us money.

CA: Do other houses end up using some of this electricity? LM: It’s going into the PG&E utility grid. We’re all on the grid. It just feeds power back into the grid and goes wherever it’s being used. And this is a little [8-watt] panel. In the summertime the sun hits it and it powers a little fan [to cool the inverter].

CA: How much does the system generate? LM: There’s 2,880 watts up there. Through the panel inefficiency and the inefficiency of the inverter you get more like 2,200 watts on a really peak, perfect day. If it’s really clean I’ve seen it at 2,400….So that’s the kind of games renewable-power people go out and play…look at their meters and watch how much power their inverter is producing and call each other and say, “Wow, I did 18 kilowatt-hours today, oh boy.” Just know that’s power that’s not being produced by coal or nuclear or oil or even a dam you didn’t like…it’s a pretty good feeling.

CA: How long did it take to put it up? LM: About three days total. Once the equipment got here, we had a crane to put things on the roof. It’s a tile roof so that makes it more expensive than a regular roof. For a regular house [installation] would cost between $10,000 to $12,000 to put PV on for a regular size system…. It produces about twice as much; if it’s a 2,000 watt system it produces about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per year.

CA: Is there newer solar technology? LM: Solar, renewable energy is as new as you get. But how you collect it is certainly being developed. These are panels, and that’s almost old technology at this point. It’s film, except much thinner; it looks like an X-ray.…You see [new technology] on tiles. They’re blue and green and they look really, really pretty. And they’re PV panels, each little tile. Developers in California are adopting that. It’s called building integrated photovoltaics.

CA: So people are building it right into roofs? LM: Exactly. You can do your roof and your PV system at the same time. We don’t have very much of that around here because the developers bought all the equipment. But [panels] are the most economic thing to do.

CA: Why do you think Davis is so ecologically friendly? Bob Schneider: There were visionary people here early on…Because there’s a university here, and there used to be really activist students.

CA: Have you ever had problems with your PV system? LM: It did get dirty last summer. The production was about 10 percent lower than it should have been…so the guy who installed it came out and squeegeed it off.

CA: Why would you recommend this particular system or alternative forms of energy? LM: It’s a good thing to do for the planet. Because every watt that you’re not using and that you’re producing with renewable energy is one that doesn’t have to be developed in some other country or here in California. People in California don’t really have a sense that everything they consume affects Venezuela and Colombia and places really far away: Africa, India…we really are having an effect on other people’s environments.

CA: How long does it take to pay for PV? LM: There’s two ways to figure out the payback period. We paid for it in cash…It’s going to be taking us about 14 years to pay it back to the point where we’ve saved or not paid PG&E….A better way to finance your system…is when you’re doing a home loan or a mortgage and add $15,000 on a 30-year mortgage and pay $35 a month and be saving $70 a month….Over time you may have bought the system one and a half times…but cash flow-wise you’re actually paying less. I’d say it’s the difference between renting and owning your electricity. From PG&E, I rent it and use it, but I have to keep paying them….This way I own it and it’s always mine. Should we choose to conserve and just use how much it produces, it would all be free.

CA: Would you ever be able to power your whole house just by PV? LM: Yes. With this house we could do that. It’s a 2.5-kilowatt system. If we didn’t have the aquarium and we didn’t turn our heating and air system on, and didn’t have such a large Energy Star refrigerator.…There’s several things we could do….I’m very confident we could get to the point where it’s doing 90 percent of our electricity….I like solutions that involve common, easy things…put things on timers, use your software ability to put computer asleep at night….I like technology answers where we have them, at least. So PV is one of the easy technology answers.