I don't know much about solar energy panels & their lifetime, etc. Today I was wondering if investing in solar panels to provide energy for a multi-family or a small strip center would be worth it. So I did some googlin' and stumbled upon this article.
What's your take on this..
From the NYT
About New York
(Solar) Power to the People Is Not So Easily Achieved
By
JIM DWYER
One day nearly four years ago, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to give solar electricity a try at home — home, for me, being an apartment house in Washington Heights, alias upstate Manhattan. The price of electricity was climbing. A war was being fought, if not over oil, then certainly over the ground the oil was in. Solar technology had proven that it could generate real power.
And while the building may not have been in the eternal sunshine of Arizona, it does stand on one of the highest spots in Manhattan. The first rays of the morning come blazing into the windows on its east side, and the last tangle of daylight bounces off the west side. The roof bakes in the sun all day. As far as I could tell, our building needed only one star aligned in its favor, and we happened to be locked in at just the right spot.
Oh blissed ignorance.
So now, a few lessons from a private co-op apartment building that is getting enough solar powe , during daylight hours, to run the elevators, the laundry room, and the hall lights.
Crowded as New York is at ground level, it is the Great Plains of roofs, with acres and acres of sunny, open space. Anyone so inclined can write a big check and probably get electricity from solar panels in a few months.
If, on the other hand, you want the panels to make a semblance of economic sense — if, for instance, you live in a 50-year-old building that has bills to pay — the path becomes serpentine and the pace drops to a crawl.
New Yorkers pay a small monthly fee on their utility bills that goes toward a fund for energy improvements, administered by the New York State Energy Research Development Authority, the main wrangler of incentives for alternative energy.
Four solar companies gave us proposals. All of them said that since the building had a one-story garage, it would be much less expensive to put the panels on that low roof rather than on the building’s roof, saving the cost of about 170 feet of cable and conduit. The lowest price, after negotiation, was $370,000 from Altpower of Manhattan for a 50-kilowatt system, about 25 percent less than the average cost per watt in the state. It was still a ton of money, considering how much electricity the system would provide.
We gathered capital from state grants and tax credits amounting to $265,000, and financed the balance with a low-interest 10-year loan. Over that decade, the residents will pay roughly the same amount for the solar loan as they would have paid for commercial electricity distributed by Con Edison. After that, the panels are guaranteed to run for another 15 years, cranking out electricity at very low cost.
Having been raised in the city, I believe that apartment life is humankind’s natural state, but in the course of this project I discovered, to my amazement, that not everyone thinks so. Many state and federal incentives are geared to single-family houses and simply don’t work for New York co-ops. The trail of blind alleys is mapped out in detail in a report by the
City University of New York’s Center for Sustainable Energy.
Two people from the building managed to fix one of those problems. New York State gave a tax credit for 25 percent of the installation cost — but capped it at photovoltaic systems of 10 kilowatts, not nearly enough for our array, which would be five times larger. Laura Hembree and Gene Bernstein, who serve on the building’s co-op board (as do I) explained the situation to
Herman D. Farrell, a Democratic Assembly member, and Dean Skelos, a Republican state senator. They sponsored legislation that changed the tax credit so it could be used by apartment houses, and Gov.
Eliot Spitzer signed it into law on July 3.
At the end of November, the panels were hoisted onto the garage roof. We will get to this stirring moment. First, though, one final lesson, that comes with a warning: this part is so boring that it turns strong people into stones. But it is the crux of how the financing works, of what makes it all possible.
The solar power from our roof has to be segregated from the power supplied by Con Ed. All the electricity delivered by Con Edison runs through a new master meter, and the solar power is fed separately into the building supply. The master Con Edison bill is paid by the co-op. The residents in each of the 217 apartments pay the co-op at regular retail rates for any electricity they use, whether it comes from Con Edison or from the solar panels. This provides the revenue to pay the monthly loan.
The 266 panels form an elegantly simple jigsaw puzzle, linked to each other across the garage roof and connecting the cosmos to our refrigerators. They were nearly four years coming, and one day in arriving. That great thinker, Kermit the Frog, was right: It ain’t easy being green.
But no one had said how beautiful the panels would be, the deep indigo blue framed with a border of white stone ballast that keeps them earthbound. A blind woman in
Seamus Heaney’s poem “At the Wellhead,” tells of a revelation at the moment she realized there was something besides water in a well: “I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.”
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