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| Oil prices mean sunny days for solar power |
| By Sarah Trent (published: July 17, 2008) |
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| These
solar thermal panels were installed on Paul Weiss’s Cumberland home in
May by Integrated Energy Systems of Falmouth. Weiss hopes that these
panels will help save him more than $2,000 in oil costs this year.
Contributed photo
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CUMBERLAND – When Paul Weiss put electricity-generating solar panels on
his house last year, he thought it would be an interesting experiment
in reducing his electrical consumption.
He’d already seen a 20 percent drop in his Central Maine
Power Co. bill after switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. He’d
installed solar-powered motion sensor lights, which eliminated the need
to leave outside lights on when he went out or was expecting company.
And he’d installed an attic fan powered by the same photovoltaic cells,
which made a big reduction in his need for air conditioning.
The solar panels on his house, which would power his electric
lawnmower and serve as emergency backup power at a time when he was
having power outages on a weekly basis, he said, were just “the next
step of what I could do.”
While a year ago Weiss would have considered himself “a freak,
fringe person,” more concerned than most with the environment and
becoming more self-sustaining, he said that now people like him are
“leaders in energy independence.”
At a time when fuel oil prices are between $4 and $5 a gallon,
and in a region facing the highest electricity prices in the nation,
interest in becoming independent from cash-guzzling power sources is no
longer limited to society’s fringe.
Years ago, Weiss said, he used to support his case from an
environmentalist stance. “Now I just talk about economics,” he said.
“People don’t really care about becoming environmentalists, but
environmentalism and economics have merged, so I don’t need to argue
for the environment anymore.”
From space to your place
When silicon photovoltaic cells were developed in the 1950s,
they were impractical for most uses, costing nearly $300 per watt of
electricity that they produced. But NASA was interested anyway, and
over the next 20 years, the cells had become the standard power supply
for satellites.
As prices continued to decrease, solar power began to see
terrestrial use at remote, off-the-grid sites like off-shore oil rigs
and navigational buoys. The 1973 oil crisis – which quadrupled the
price of oil to $12 per barrel – prompted a rise in production and
technological improvements that brought the cost of solar power down to
$7 per watt in 1985.
But when oil prices dropped off again, so did the interest in alternative energy.
Today, facing record crude oil prices near $150 per barrel and
a gas price average of more than $4 per gallon, interest has spiked
again.
As Maine municipalities this year are looking more into
alternative energy, especially wind power, thanks to grant
opportunities through Efficiency Maine, households like Weiss’ are also
desperately seeking to lower their utilities costs as winter
approaches.
This May, concerned that his oil bills for the upcoming year
would approach $5,500, Weiss installed solar thermal panels – which
directly heat water – on the side of his house. With the panels heating
about a third of his hot water, and a wood stove helping heat his
house, he’s hoping that the bill will stay below $3,000.
“We’ve had a tsunami of interest,” said Phil Coupe of ReVision
Energy, a Portland- and Liberty-based company that designs and installs
photovoltaic and solar thermal panels, along with other renewable and
efficient energy systems.
He says that these days, “most people are very interested to reduce oil (consumption) and their carbon footprint.”
And those solar thermal panels, he said, have been especially
popular. “We install 10 solar hot waters for every solar electric
(photovoltaic),” Coupe said. And that makes sense, he added, because 80
percent of Maine homes are using oil boilers for both heat and hot
water.
“In summer, it’s extremely inefficient to use an oil boiler to
heat water,” he said. “The oil boiler is dumb – it doesn’t know if it’s
January or July, so it stays hot all the time.”
While that set-up is fine in January, a boiler doesn’t need to
run round-the-clock in July, when it’s only used for hot showers and
dish washing a few times a day.
By installing solar thermal panels and modifying a home’s oil
boiler so that it operates in a “cold-start” mode instead of staying
hot all the time, Coupe says the average savings would be about 300
gallons of oil per year. At today’s prices, that’s around $1,300, and
rising.
To set that system up, Coupe said, his company would charge
around $10,000. Minus a federal tax credit of $2,000, a household could
expect the system to pay off in around six years.
Until this year, there was also a state rebate available, he
said, but the fund “dried up” in June, so until more money is
allocated, households can only get money from the federal government.
Regardless of the state rebate’s disappearance, Coupe says his
company is still getting plenty of calls from across the state.
Scarborough, he said, “has been quite a hotbed of activity,” but
“basically all of Cumberland County” has shown interest.
Weiss has seen the same – he knows of several other homes in
his Blanchard Road area neighborhood that have recently added solar
panels to their homes’ decor, and said that more and more, people are
inquiring about them and his other energy-saving additions in their
frenzy before this winter.
Like Weiss, Coupe knows that the craze doesn’t stem from an environmentalist trend.
While Coupe said that many of his customers are “equally
concerned” about the environmental issues stemming from reducing their
carbon footprints, “they’re calling more often because the economics
are getting more painful.”
Sarah Trent can be reached at 781-3661 ext. 108 or strent@theforecaster.net.
•FYI: Check the Efficiency Maine website, efficiencymaine.com,
to find contractors who are state-certified to install solar panels.
The site also lists other easy ways to reduce oil and electricity
costs. |
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