PARMA -- Rudi and Barbara Hermes had been talking about putting a solar array on the roof of their home for years. But the cost and the difficulty of finding an installer put the project out of reach.
A new solar discount program launched in the spring by Cleveland's Office of Sustainability has helped them make it happen.
"Solarize Cleveland" aims to make residential solar arrays as common as backyard decks. And not just in Cleveland or Cuyahoga County.
Solarize Cleveland discounts are are automatically available to homeowners throughout Ohio, providing they apply through the Solarize Cleveland web address.
Hermes' 6-kilowatt system has been pushing power into their house and the neighborhood for the past couple of months, lowering their electric bills and giving them a sense that they are helping the environment as well as the Illuminating Co.
By law, the FirstEnergy company must credit Hermes for pumping excess power into the neighborhood grid, and at the end of the month buy excess electricity the couple's system has generated compared to what it used.
Hermes said the array generated 768.8 kilowatt-hours in June, slightly more power than what the home consumed in June or July of last year.
Before the launch of Solarize Cleveland, it was difficult to figure what installer to call, and it was always too expensive, as much as $30,000 for a system of this size less than a decade ago.
Their cost today through this program was $15,000 after steep discounts on the equipment and a 30 percent IRS tax credit, said the couple. They were also offered low-interest loans.
That's still pricy and certainly a lot more expensive than most decks, but it's a price that allows more families to seriously consider home solar.
Across town, Cleveland Heights resident Stuart Greenberg, who is retiring as executive director of Cleveland-based Environmental Health Watch, said the 5-kilowatt system he had installed through the program was designed to generate about 50 percent of the power the home uses.
"Why did I do this?
First, so I could tell my grandchildren I am trying to do something substantive to combat climate change," he said.
"And second, in the summer I can use the air conditioning and not feel so bad. And in the winter I can use room electric heaters and keep my whole house temperature down."
Big Data behind the program
Solarize Cleveland is part of a national program that uses "big data" and cutting edge computer programing to custom design a solar system for each homeowner.
Bulk purchasing of the solar panels, electronics and hardware and competitively chosen local installers knock down prices.
And the support of a global conservation group partnered with two dozen large companies committed to corporate sustainability not only adds credibility but provided the original impetus for the campaign.
But none of it would be possible without a tiny company in West Virginia whose CEO earlier founded a company now called Gamebryo, creator of more than 300 video games.
"We use the same technologies," said David Levine, founder and CEO of Geostellar of Martinsburg, W.Va.
Employing fewer than three dozen people, the five-year-old company markets itself as "the nation's first and largest online solar energy marketplace."
Geostellar's programming software is able to wrestle the enormous amount of publicly available data about any property to custom design the most efficient and lowest cost solar array for that house.
Levine said the company has designed systems for roughly 10,000 homes.
"We actually started out doing utility-scale modeling for companies trying to acquire 20-to-40 to-100-acre parcels for huge solar farms. And then in late 2011, we figured out how to run the same models through whole counties at one-meter resolution," he said.
The technology is called "geomatic modeling," and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office last week agreed that what Geostellar has created is unique and granted the company a patent for it.
Today Geostellar can digitally provide a homeowner with an "Instant Solar Profile" when provided a street address, town and zip code on-line.
Using Google Earth data, Geostellar's programs model the amount and the angle of sunlight falling on a roof, scope out shady areas, and determine whether solar might be economically feasible. This initial analysis takes just a few seconds, all done on-line.
Then, if a homeowner is interested, Geostellar:
- Analyzes the intensity of sunlight on every square foot of the roof, using measurement data taken by lasers on aircraft, accounting for the angle of the roof, the orientation of the house, the seasonal position of the sun in the sky and the impact of nearby trees, buildings and hills.
- Builds a virtual solar array, positions it optimally on the roof to avoid areas that may be shaded at some point during the year.
- Calculates the cost per watt to install the system.
- Compares that cost to local utility rates and finally projects potential savings.
Modeling your roof
Called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), this laser-based measurement from an airplane that adds so much precision enables Geostellar's programs to create a precise three-dimensional model, said Levine.
"Then we run the sun through the sky for every hour for 365 days, a year," said Levine of the modeling program. "And we get the shadows, the orientation of the panels."
If consumers are interested, Geostellar sends out a local installer from a group it has selected through competitive bidding. The installer measures and photographs the roof and sends the information back to Geostellar.
After this double-check of the accuracy of the virtual array's size and position on the roof, Geostellar provides the installer with solar panels, mounting hardware and electronic controllers -- all of which it buys in mass quantities through competitive bidding.
The current discount is about 18 percent below average U.S. prices.
And consumers have a choice of U.S.-made, Canadian-made, and certain foreign panels manufactured here to meet burgeoning U.S. demand.
"A lot of people want American-made panels," said Levine. "They are typically black on black. They look different. They are mono-crystalline. And they are denser in terms of power.
"We talk to homeowners about price and performance. If you have plenty of space to build and don't use ton of energy, we recommend polycrystalline panels which are less expensive panels, but not American-made."
Accuracy at a distance
So how accurate is the Geostellar design?
"It was between 5 and 10 inches (from perfect)," said Myles Murray, founder of the Cleveland-based solar installation company called AATSolar (Appropriately Applied Technologies), which installed the arrays on Hermes' and Greenberg's homes.
"Geostellar can get to a good design without having anybody go out there," he said. The company has done three installations designed by Geostellar.
While the projects have come quickly, AATSolar has made less money than it might have had it designed the systems and bought the equipment on its own.
"You focus on higher volume, lower margin. Instead of making an extra $5 thousand on a job, I would rather have three more jobs. I think this is a market opportunity.
For Murray and his team, Geostellar embodies a mission that matches their own.
'There is a social mission to it, but you cannot have 25 customers, and say oh we've got a mission. You have to force other companies to compete like we are.
"I talk about these systems like they are tiny power plants, basically. Each of them sits on the grid, supplies your house and neighbors' houses," said Murray.
"It's called distributed generation. Distributed generation helps the environment, helps grid reliability," he said, adding that solar will ultimately change the utility industry.
The social mission pairs major corporations global environmental group
Solarize Cleveland in fact has the same mission.
Solarize Cleveland is part of a national campaign launched last fall by the World Wildlife Fund in partnership with the National Geographic Society, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco, 3M and Kimberly Clark, and now backed by 23 corporate sponsors.
The project grew out of World Wildlife Fund's "Renewable it's Doable" campaign aimed at scaling up residential solar to combat power plant emissions and ultimately global climate change.
"We realized we had partnerships with several large corporations, and they were looking for a way to connect their employees to it," said Bryn Baker, manager, renewable energy and climate change, for World Wildlife.
That corporations should be interested in solar is not surprising. Corporate sustainability programs, once rare, are increasingly common as big companies respond to pressure from environmental groups and shareholder concerns that the climate really is changing.
The corporations don't bring money. They contribute by endorsing it to a large number of potential customers -- their employees.
The City of Cleveland is technically not an official sponsor as the corporations are but more of partner to World Wildlife, said Baker.
Key player in Cleveland
One Clevelander in particular gets the credit for making the city aware of the program, said Baker.
Ali Ahmed, Cisco Systems' global energy and sustainability leader and a resident of Tremont, is that man.
Ahmed volunteers on a committee for Sustainable Cleveland 2019, a ten-year city campaign to familiarize local companies and institutions with sustainable business practices and make the concept of sustainability an everyday idea to the public.
That fits very well with Cisco's long-time commitment to build environmental sustainability into its own operations and practices and into the systems it sells to other companies.
Ahmed's three-story home in Tremont was the first Geostellar project here. Built by AATSolar last October, the system is rated at just under 5-kilowatts.
The array has cut Ahmed's summer electric bills in half.
"The array is averaging almost 30 kilowatt-hours per day," he said of the output. "The total since it was installed is now at 2.91 megawatt-hours."
That electricity would have cost about $300 if purchased from the Illuminating Co., said Ahmed.
On average, a coal burning power plant pumps about 2.07 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity it produces, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, meaning Ahmed's solar array has, in theory, eliminated the production of more than 6,000 pounds of carbon dioxide.