we have to drive demand for this,” says Huegel. In fact, in some cities such as San Francisco it’s possible to apply for government rebates that cut the cost of a residential solar installation in half, he says. “As we drive the price down and as the competition grows, we make it viable.”
But finding out what incentive programs are in place, and how to participate in them, can be complicated.
“There’s a general awareness of solar, especially on the West Coast and especially in the Bay Area, yet people are still hearing the wrong messages,” says Gary Gerber, the president of Sun Light & Power. “They’re hearing ‘Oh, someday solar will be affordable,’ or, ‘It’s out in the future somewhere,’ but here we are having oil spills in the Gulf that are costing untold billions in environmental damage, and meanwhile we have a massive solar spill every day across the United States. If we could only harvest a slight fraction of that, we would have all the energy we need.”
In California, Gerber says, residents can get a 30 percent tax credit for solar installations, and can apply for 20-year financing packages. Together, he says, those arrangements can make solar “cash flow positive from the beginning.”
Gerber says solar water heating systems, like the one his company installed at Dosa, are good investments because they can reduce utility bills drastically. “Restaurants are really ideal for that,” he says. “They’re using hot water all day, and we’re producing it all day. We don’t try to provide 100 percent of the energy for any facility, because you’re not going to get very much hot water on a cloudy day, but we shoot for somewhere between 40 and 80 percent of the load.”
Huegel and Gerber both say they expect SolarDay to pick up momentum gradually, in the same way awareness of Earth Day spread gradually in the 1970s and 1980s. “We got started a little late this year, just a couple of months before SolarDay, but a lot of cities have said they will have an event next year,” Huegel says. “I wouldn’t expect less than 100 cities to participate in 2011.”
SolarDay will always be planned for the last Saturday before the summer solstice, he says. In 2011, that will be June 18.
