On Sunday I took the Williamsburg portion of the
Hampton Roads Solar Group's homes tour. Two of the homes were new construction and two were existing homes where the owners added solar panels. I came home with lots of literature to share with my husband. Although we want to do this at some point, it's too expensive for us at the moment. It looks like a system that would supply 50 percent, perhaps more, of our power needs would cost something like $38,000. I was happy, though, to have the process demystified. It's really not such a big deal to do and homeowners say the systems pay for themselves within a few years.
At the owner-built home in Lanexa (top left), products were selected by the homeowner and there was no literature to share. But at the other homes, two used
Solar Services, Inc. of Virginia Beach and one used
Urban Grid Solar of Richmond.
I loved the new "energy neutral" home that used
Urban Grid for solar products. The house was designed with a number of energy saving design features (geothermal heat, natural lighting) and products (Energy Star appliances, half-flush toilets, high performance doors and windows, and insulation), so the 36 photovoltaic panels supply more than enough energy to power the home. The gross cost for the solar panels and inverter box that changes the DC power to AC power (the "magic box" between the solar panels and the home's electrical panel box) was $58, 600. So if you do the math, that's $1,628 per panel (including a portion of the inverter).
The two retrofitted homes where
Solar Services, Inc. was contracted were better examples for me, since I would want to add a system to my existing home. In both, the homeowners had retrofitted in two steps. First, they had added a
solar water heater to their homes. The water heater is a separate unit of panels that have a type of antifreeze running through to heat the water. This sort of unit costs $4,000 to $5,000. The panels look a little thicker than the photovoltaic panels and have tubes running from one to the next to circulate the antifreeze.
For photovoltaic panels, the panels that soak up the sun (watch this
U.S. Dept of Energy video for a quick explanation of how photovoltaic panels work) , the home above used 24 panels and the home to the right used 16 panels. In both cases, Panels ran about $1,500 each and the inverter box was an additional $3,000. Even though they had different numbers of panels, both said they got about 40 to 50 percent of their power from solar. Both home owners said the juice usage was variable depending upon how much you use the two major culprits: the air conditioner and the dryer. (Like us, these homes are lived in by two people. They both mentioned that they used their dryer and air conditioners a lot. I hang about 50 percent of my laundry outside to dry and we love the fresh air best, so I think we'd save a little more than these folks.)
Doing the math for my own home, I estimated $5,000 for water heating, 20 photovoltaic panels at $1,500 each, and $3,000 for an inverter box for a grand total of $38,000.
Virginia is currently offering a 30 percent
tax write-off, so that would bring us down to $26,600. Virginia also lets you sell your energy savings credits through a
carbon credit exchange (your savings can be bought by companies that can't reduce their energy use by the required amount). According to the two retrofit homeowners, they get about $200 a quarter by selling their energy credits. So, let's do the math again. If we didn't spend any money for electricity and received the energy credits, we would save and earn about $2,000 a year. Our system would pay for itself in about 13 years.
Very cool, don't you think? They say the prices are coming down with increased demand, so we'll look at this again next year!
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