SunRun is now offering solar leases to Colorado homeowners. (Photo: Pink Dispatcher)
The rooftop solar industry just got a huge shot in the arm on Tuesday when San Francisco-based SunRun announced it would be offering Colorado homeowners solar-power leases for as little as $1,000 down. The new program is the first of its kind in Colorado and can help with the high initial start-up costs of installing solar panels, as well as with installing, maintaining them and repairing them.
Most people will see payback from their initial installation fee in less than three years,” said Lynn Jurich, president and co-founder of SunRun in a statement.
The new leasing schemes were made possible by a law passed in April. Colorado Senate Bill 51 allows solar companies to own and maintain solar panels on residential roofs and for homeowners to pay for solar power via leasing programs. “With great support from the Legislature, we’ve passed some of the most forward-thinking legislation in the country to help us attract companies like SunRun to Colorado,” said Gov. Ritter in a statement earlier this week. Senate Bill 51 is one of several legislative initiatives from Ritter to grow green jobs and attract clean energy companies to Colorado
Colorado joins other states including Massachusetts, California and to offer solar leasing laws for homeowners.
SunRun will be working with Colorado solar installers Namaste Solar, REC Solar, and Real Goods Solar to offer the solar leasing plan.
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Image via Pink Dispatcher
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Finally, a company that gets it! Make alternative energy equipment as easy to lease as an SUV, and as easy to plug in as a Dell PC and everyone will want it. I hope to see this idea go Nationwide.
And then you pay 10x market rate for the resulting electricity for the rest of the panels’ lifetime. Naturally they don’t say this up front, or anywhere on their website. But do the amortized cost analysis, with discounting. From SunRun’s page: >Overall, the cost of a solar system is usually between $8 and $10 per AC watt http://www.sunrunhome.com/learn_about_solar/cost_of_solar/ In line with every other figure I’ve seen (N.B. the panels alone are just 60% of this cost.) They also say the system will last for 18 years: http://www.sunrunhome.com/sunrun_home_solar/sunrun_total_solar/ A typical PV capacity factor, for a temperate climate at mid-latitude, with non-solar-tracking panels (e.g. roof mounted), is around 10%. As my reference example, I use this large commercial roof installation in Massachusetts, which is nice enough to provide actual generation statistics (you can get the raw numbers in a table, or a graph): http://www.sunviewer.net/portals/MoCA/ For the year of 2008, they generated 47,514 kWh (over 366 days), compared to a nameplate capacity of 52 kW; hence a capacity factor of 10.4%. Now let us apply the standard discounting model, as is explained in e.g. appendix 5 of the IEA cost study (they use both 5% and 10% discount rates). http://www.iea.org/publications/free_new_Desc.asp?PUBS_ID=1472 For these purposes, I will ignore maintenance costs, assume a constant rate of power generation over 18 years, and a single up-front solar panel purchase/installation, which is *not* discounted (because it is in year 0). The basic equation simplifies to: levelized cost of electricity = I / (? E(t) * (1+r)^-t) Where ‘I’ is the investment cost, ‘E’ is the electric generation (which for this purpose is a constant function of t, E(t) = E0), and r is the discount rate, and ‘t’ ranges over the useful lifetime of the solar panel, that is [0,T] where T=18 years. The ? might as well be replaced with a continuous integral, whose solution is a much simpler formula: E0 * (1 – (1+r)^(-T)) / (ln (1+r)) where ln is the natural logarithm (r>0 of course). (Easy to check that in the r->0 limit this is reduces the simple integral of E(t), that this, the total amount of electricity generated in the whole lifetime.) The LCOE equation becomes: LCOE = I* ln(1+r) / [E0 * (1 - (1+r)^-T)] So finally: at the lower discount rate of 5%, an investment cost of $9/W, an economic life of 18 years, and an electricity generation rate E0 of (0.10 * 1 W) = 0.88 kWh/year, the levelized cost estimate is **86 c/kWh**. (If you were to naively sum the electricity generation without discount, as many naive solar advocates do, you would get "only" 57 c/kWh.) For comparison, the average residential electricity cost in Colorado is 9.55 c/kWh (2009): http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_b.html (Of course the R sector pays much more than average; industry for instance, only pays 5.94 c/kWh). In short, the expected real cost of rooftop solar power is an order of magnitude above the grid cost. (I emphasize this is end-user, retail cost – not the production cost for utility power plants. Those are far lower, e.g. for coal about [2c/kWh](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lfibbBnlKt8/SlDvz6DbO-I/AAAAAAAAAPw/hGT8_rouDGk/s400/US_Electricity_Production_Costs_blk95-08.png), or 1/60th the cost of solar generation). No financial trickery can hide this cost; either they pass it on to you, the victim, or to other victims, taxpayers, or they operate at a huge loss. It is an exercise for the reader to determine exactly what outrageous lies they use to claim that this is a money-saving purchase: http://www.sunrunhome.com/sunrun_home_solar/sunrun_power_plan/
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I agree, but let’s not forget how profitable it is for such distributed generation companies. They get all federal, state and regional incentives (cash grants, tax rebates, etc.) plus the value of all RECs, plus the $1,000 and all fees they charge, plus the homeowner’s payment for electricity. Solar is now cheap enough, from chip to panel, that homeowners are almost better taking out a loan and keeping the credits and RECs for themselves.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit