In mid-September of 2009, Sharon and I were within 48 hours of finalizing a contract with Celestial Power of Austin to install solar panels on our home. I was eager to get this done. I'd spent two months researching and get the financing together. Then Celestial told us that the City of Austin was retroactively downgrading their residential solar rebate incentive because the city had already run through it's program funds. Anyone who had not already gotten their application in as of Sept. 1 would have to re-apply and would be subject to new rebate figures. Needless to say, the lowered rebate knocked us out of the game.
Our experience with solar, and Celestial Power's as well, was the national story with renewables, writ small. The cheapest electric generation source is and has been coal. Coal is also heavily subsidized by the federal government. Without these subsidies, large wind generation would be less expensive per K/w hour. But, the subsidies remain. And, in the absence of price stability brought about by a Renewable Energy Standard, small green energy businesses have been at the mercy of these state and federal boom and bust cycles for green power, depending on the political winds. It's been murderous to small companies like Celestial, though they're in it for the long haul and the future isn't coals (though it almost certainly isn't going to be fixed flat panel solar's either. The technology is evolving fast).
For the home owner, the upfront capital costs of wind or solar are often prohibitive. For instance, Dad and I looked last month at a wind turbine for his home in rural Central Texas. He could order just the turbine off the internet for about 8.5k and have it delivered to his door, but it takes the expertise and equipment to get the thing up on a tall poll and that is a little less than double the price. At current electric rates, that's not viable. In our case, here in Austin's burbs, wind is out. Solar, however, is not. Celestial offered us three systems ranked in price and efficiency. I wanted the most efficient system, also the most expensive, because it would pay back the quickest in energy savings (we did a spread sheet that showed a payoff period of seven to eight years), and, once paid, would run our meter backwards when the system was at peak. [On another day, I might post the figures]. The Austin Energy rebate was origianlly going to knock roughly 60 percent of the up-font costs. The was a 30 percent federal tax credit, part of the 2009 recovery/stimulus bill, that also brought down the costs, though we would get this back at tax time. Roughly, we were going to get a $35,000 solar rooftop array for 1/3 of the cost.
So, when that project went pooof, I set more modest goals for home efficiency. In the fall of 2009 I replaced all the incandescent lighting in the house that I could with CFLs (The exception is the bank of vanity lighting in the master bathroom which I knew Sharon did not want to replace with the softer more pleasing-to-the-eyes glow of the CFL. Even though you can now get bright white CFLs, not the gas station bathroom vapor lighting which really was an impediment, for some those little coils just aren't aesthetically pleasing in certain old fixtures.) I put the big screen tv, the VCR, the DVD player, and Wii system on a power strip which we turn off when not in use to cut down on the vampire power consumption. We had Green Collar Operations, another Austin native company, test our home for energy efficiency. It passed with flying colors, but they did weatherize our three doors downstairs as well as blow in another 8 inches of insulation into the attic. Here again, there were three energy rebate programs that kicked in (two local and one federal). Green Collar did all the paperwork. Again we were out of pocket something like $350 on a total bill roughly three times our outlay (I'll update the figures when I track down the paperwork, my filing system is shoebox these days). There have been other little changes also that I won't continue to itemize. All this is story and preface to the graphs above.
Has any of this made a difference? With most of the summer months behind us, it looks like the changes are paying off.
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