January 19, 2016
We’ve had solar power energizing our house in Sag Harbor on Long Island for six years now—and it’s a bonanza!
Once the photovoltaic panels are up on your roof, nothing more needs to be done. They harvest electricity from the sun even on cloudy days. Never in the half-dozen years have the 38 panels on our roof needed any care. And frequently, looking at the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) meter attached to the house, I see the numbers going backwards — we’re producing electricity for which LIPA reimburses us.
Then there are the two thermal solar panels heating up water and sending it — very well-heated — into the house. The other day, it was 64°F outside but the thermometer on the hot water tank in the basement showed water from the thermal panels coming down at 130°F. Amazing! And these panels are also care-free.
Meanwhile, the price of solar panels has plummeted since the panels were installed at our house in 2009 — and efficiencies have gone up, Dean Hapshe of Harvest Power was saying the other day on a visit to check our installation.
Hapshe is the dean of solar energy installers on Long Island. He got into the solar energy field in 1980 and with his decades of experience has served as a teacher of others in the industry.
When he and his crew put our system in, the cost of the photovoltaic panels, which produce 7,500 watts — an average-size system — was $6 a watt. “Now it’s down to $3.65,” Hapshe was saying. The efficiency rate has risen to 21 percent — getting close to the 25 percent efficiency of solar panels on space systems such as satellites and the International Space Station. That means more electricity is generated for every ray of sunlight.
The thing about solar power is that once it’s installed, the sun sends no bill.
And that has been vexing for electric utilities around the nation.
Indeed, the motto of Harvest Power, based in Bay Shore, Long Island, is: “Let The Sun Pay Your Electric Bill.”
“Utilities wage campaign against rooftop solar” was the headline of an article in March 2015 in The Washington Post. The story by Joby Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who often writes about energy issues, begins: “Three years ago, the nation’s top utility executives gathered at a Colorado resort to hear warnings about a grave new threat to operators of America’s electric grid: not superstorms or cyberattacks, but rooftop solar panels.
“If demand for residential solar continued to rise, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems from ‘declining retail sales’ and a ‘loss of customers’ to ‘potential obsolescence,’ according to a presentation prepared for the group. ‘Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,’ it said.
“The warning, delivered to a private meeting of the utility industry’s main trade association, became a call to arms for electricity providers in nearly every corner of the nation.” The article continued. “Three years later, the industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency...”
The New York Times, in an April 2014 editorial, “The Koch Attack on Solar Energy,” spoke of how “the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have found a new tax they can support. Naturally it’s a tax on something the country needs: solar energy panels.”
The Times noted how the Koch brothers, their Koch Industries based on oil refining, “have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.”
“Oklahoma lawmakers,” the editorial said, “recently approved such a surcharge at the behest of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative group that often dictates bills to Republican statehouses and receives financing from the utility industry and fossil-fuel producers, including the Kochs.”
On Long Island, support for solar power by LIPA — created with a mission to encourage the development of solar and other forms of renewable energy on the island — has gone down and down. The once hefty rebate LIPA provided for solar installations has now descended to a paltry 20 cents a watt.
But New York State still provides up to $5,000 in support, and the federal government offers a tax credit of 30 percent of the cost of a system.
The capacity and economics of renewable energy are wonderful. The New York Times ran a front-page story last November headlined: “In Texas, Night Winds Blow in Free Electricity.” It told of how in Texas “wind farms are generating so much electricity” that it is being “given away.”
There are those who seek to make money from expensive electricity generated by gas, coal, oil, and nuclear power — and they would try to quash the renewable energy revolution now underway. They need to be stopped, and the bonanza of safe, green, inexpensive electricity be allowed to flow.
Journalist and Sierran Karl Grossman is a member of the Long Island Group and professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is the author of six books and his investigative reporting appears regularly online at CounterPunch, the Huffington Post and other sites. For nearly 25 years, he has hosted a nationally aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up.