One Ray at a Time: going solar, but taking it slow.

by Milly Theale

People are sometimes discouraged by the cost of going solar, but as one homeowner learned, you don’t have to replace all your grid electricity at once.

The Lewis Family

The Lewis household is a family of four. While Ellen goes to an office most weekdays, Jim runs his own one-man design firm, and works from home. This means a powerful Macintosh computer with multiple monitors, as well as a scanner-printer combo and other office machines. “I have to keep my phone charged, I have to have my GPS charged, too, for when a client wants me on site. A lot of the things are small but it adds up, it’s a lot of juice.” So much juice that he thought it would be impossible for his family ever to go solar.

After all, his two school-aged children also have computers and phones, and then of course there is the refrigerator, the dishwasher, and the washing machine. “We really wanted to switch to renewable energy, but getting the kind of wattage we used just wasn’t possible for us, financially speaking. We felt sure there must be ways around the problem, but after we started drying our clothes on a line and got a smaller fridge, it wasn’t clear where more energy savings were going to come from. I wrote my school papers with a ballpoint back in the stone ages, but that’s not done these days – the kids have to be digital. Meanwhile, I have a tech-heavy business to run, and then we want to vacuum occasionally.”

Doing the Research

Using six months of old electric bills, Jim and Ellen estimated that they would need approximately 920 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per month to keep their house running in its current state. “The thing is,” Ellen explains, “you can save a lot by installing new appliances, but that doesn’t really help when what you are worried about is initial costs.” They shopped around, but learned at the time that they would need to spend about $49,000 to get their home off the grid, plus installation costs. “That’s way out of our league,” Jim admits.

With a little more research, however, they discovered some interesting things. First they learned that between federal, state and local incentives to buy solar, there was a lot of help available. In Oregon, for example, the Lewis family would be able to get about 50% of the cost of conversion paid for through incentives. That still left them with too much cash to spend, however.

“One day someone pointed out to us that some of the energy we use might already be solar. After all, there are solar plants in California. We might be getting some energy from wind, too, and waves. That’s when we understood: it didn’t have to be all or nothing.”

A New Plan

The family hatched a new plan: rather than budget for solar, they would buy solar for their budget. They installed only what they could reasonably afford and built up slowly from that. As they learned, there are several “plug and play” systems available that are easy to install and offer up to 1 kilowatt per day, most selling for $3,000 or less. Many are even specifically designed to be expandable, so that solar energy systems can be built over time, as and when finances allow.

The Lewis family still aren’t off the grid, but they estimate they are now getting about a third of their energy from the sun. They don’t mind going slowly, either, says Jim. “Every year the technology gets better and the parts become cheaper. Our system gets more efficient each time we expand.” The dream of running an electric car for free on sunlight is still a ways off, but Jim and Ellen are already doing a lot to reduce their emissions. They hope to be off the grid well before they retire. “Then we can relax and not have to worry about quite as many bills every month,” Jim explains.

For further reference

We recommend the United States Department of Energy website resources as well as Wikipedia's fine article about The Generation of Electricity Using Solar Energy. You may also be interesting in downloading The Solar Panels of the Future by Lewis Lambert Strether, One Ray at a Time by Milly Theale, or the complete guide to PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) Legislation.