By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
On the cloudy Oregon coast, the Central Lincoln People’s Utility District just discovered that well-priced solar power can still be popular.
On Tuesday, Oct. 22, the utility offered customers a chance to purchase panels in its first community solar system. It expected the 215 solar panels atop its office and shop in Florence to take weeks to sell.
Not close.
A little more than two days after offering the solar investment to its 33,000 accounts – alerting them by postcard and online — it sold out. Some 59 customers bought up to the five-panel limit at $330 per panel.
“We honestly thought, based on conversations and experiences of other regional utilities, that it would take two weeks to sell out,” said Wade Carey, the CLPUD manager who oversaw the project. “It went fast.”
Community solar works like this: a utility, local government or group of people constructs a large solar project, sells shares to investors, connects to the local grid, and then gets credit for generating electricity. The builder, or in this case Central Lincoln, provides upkeep and maintenance.
Central Lincoln started looking at a project 2½ years ago, first considering a larger installation near Toledo, but eventually rejecting it because the payback was too long.
Instead, it put three arrays of solar panels on its customer service building and shop in Florence during a remodel this year.
Boosted by $50,000 from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and a $60,000 state grant, the utility was able to make the $170,000 project financially feasible for customers.
“Without the grant funding there’s no way we do this program,” Carey said. “It just wouldn’t pencil out.”
Central Lincoln residential customers use an average of 12,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, Carey said. Each 79-inch by 40-inch panel should generate an estimated 400 kilowatt hours a year of electricity, creating a per-panel yearly credit of about $30 at current rates.
Carey estimates it will take participants 8-9 years to recover their costs. The system’s life expectancy is about 20 years, he said, after which the efficiency of the panels drops significantly.
Solar systems at the Oregon coast are challenging. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranks the coast the second worst in the continental United States for solar access, Carey said, with 70 percent of the year under 80 percent cloud cover.
And there are other barriers: rooftop systems can be spendy, the customer may not own the building, or it may not be situated just right. The result, Carey said, is a payback period of 12-16 years for most residential systems.
And with fewer incentives these days – a state tax credit expired two years ago — just 100 CLPUD customers have rooftop solar systems.
“Not everybody can do their own,” Carey said. “This offer allows customers to participate in solar power at a good price and offset a little of their electric bill.”
Which brings up the question – will Central Lincoln do another community solar project?
Hopefully, yes, Carey said.
The state is ending grants for community solar projects, he said, opting to get back into a form of tax credits for residential systems if they include storage capacity. The key for Central Lincoln is finding other grants or outside sources of money.
“We are going to look for ways to possibly make it happen again,” Carey said. “But we need outside grant funding to make it work.
“There’s a lot of interest,” he said. “We know that.”
