EDITORIAL: Hopping Aboard The Solar Bandwagon

Hopping Aboard The Solar Bandwagon

Last week the Overton Power District (OPD) decided to hop aboard the solar bandwagon. With Mayor Susan Holecheck, of Mesquite, and her entourage making a rare appearance at the Overton meeting, the board unanimously voted to install a new, $75,000 solar generation system at the OPD Mesquite offices.

The idea of home-generated solar power is wonderful! The very thought that a home can produce most of the power it uses by collecting the abundant sunlight that shines down onto its roof has tremendous appeal. After all, we are told constantly that the global warming issue has become gravely urgent. The prophets of doom tell us that scarcely a generation will pass before the blue planet will become a scene of apocalyptic destruction due to mankind’s unquenchable thirst for electric power.

Many good intentioned people have listened to this with growing alarm. They want to do their part to save the planet. And many look at solar as a possible way to do that. Of course, no sooner have they looked than they are told of all of the “huge savings”they will see on their power bills. And why not? With the cost of power ever rising, the idea of harvesting all of that cheap, plentiful sunlight is a welcome one. The trouble is, as things currently stand, the idea of solar power bringing economic, or for that matter measurable environmental, benefits are little more than mythology.

Firstly, the economic benefits of home-generated solar power that we hear so much about are simply not there at this point in time.

In our area sunlight is cheap, but generating power from it is not. A rooftop solar generating system equipped to provide power to an average home costs in the range of $15,000 – $30,000; depending on the size of the home and the extent of the system.

For our calculations let’s take the low end – $15,000 – and see how long it takes to conserve enough power to break even on that cost.

First of all, we will assume that the system will not need any maintenance or repairs during the time that we operate it. Any costs in that department would just increase the time it takes before we start to see economic benefit. And we’d really like to see this thing work out. So we’ll cross our fingers and hope that we are extremely lucky on maintenance to the system. We’ll also assume that we can pay for the system in cash. If we had to service a debt on the system it would likewise delay our term.

Of course, the system will only generate power during sunlight hours. So, since we really want this to work, we’ll make some generous estimates on the average sunlight hours per day. During the 92 days of summer we’ll allow 12 hours per day. During the 182 days of the fall and spring months we’ll figure 10 hours of sunlight per day. And during the 91 days of winter, eight hours per day. We’ll also assume a year of cloudless weather, every day is sunny and providing optimal conditions for our solar system to work at maximum capacity. So during all of those daylight hours, day in and day out, we should not have to pull any power from the grid. That should bring some savings on our power bill.

In determining just how much money we will be saving, though, we start with power rates as they are currently found on an OPD power bill. Then, to help matters along, we’ll factor in a 5% rate increase every three years. Those rates, applied to the amount of power our rooftop cells are generating (not buying from OPD) will give us an idea of the savings we will realize.

So plugging all of these numbers into a spreadsheet, what do we find? At what point would we recover our $15,000 investment and start operating in the black? We found that the ‘break-even point’ would be somewhere during the summer of 2042. That is 33 years…just to break even!

But wait! What about the tax incentives available? It is true that the federal government offers a generous 30% tax credit to homeowners as an incentive to install these systems. That is a dollar for dollar credit; not just a deduction. So let’s account for that. Assuming that all $15,000 that we spent on our system qualifies for the credit, we have just reduced its initial cost to only $10,500. Instead of waiting 33 years to break even it is now only 25 years. We’ll be free and clear by January of 2034!

Needless to say, the average American can’t afford an investment like this. Especially in these troubled times. Just for comparison, if we had left that $10,500 sitting in an S&P 500 Index fund over the last 25 years, it would have grown to over $100,000. Or, for the more risk-averse, if we had just kept it in a savings account averaging a 1% return for 25 years, we would now have $13,466. But in our rooftop solar system we have yielded nothing at all during that time. All we are left with is an obsolete 25 year old system that probably needs to be replaced.

Of course, we have had that good, virtuous feeling all those years; the feeling that we have sacrificed dearly for the environment. But just how much has that sacrifice really paid off? That brings up the other myth about solar power: it really doesn’t solve much of the environmental problem at all.

What if everyone got green suddenly and went out purchasing photovoltaic cells for their rooftops? What lasting effect would that have? Could we really just start shutting down all those coal and gas powered plants? One by one, they could be decommissioned and our air would become cleaner and cooler by the day, right?

But, hold on! What happens if we have a nasty batch of cloudy weather? Suddenly we would all need to pull power off of the grid again. For a few cloudy days we would need at least the same amount of fossil fuel-generated power as we are using right now. We’d need those nasty power plants up and running again to provide that to us.

Well, let’s just fire them back up for a day or two! Why not? Trouble is, those things cost quite a bit to build and operate. Utility companies aren’t going to put up all that money for power plants that only need to be fired up on rainy days. So now we come to the core of the issue. The simple fact is that solar energy, no matter how much we want it to, just can’t provide reliable baseload power. It just can’t!

With no economic viability; and with the measurable environmental benefits being rather iffy, rooftop solar systems are little more than feel-good gadgets. They are for folks who have plenty of cash to burn and who want to be able to say that they are doing something for dear old Mother Nature. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned folks labor under the delusion that just because they really, really want it to work, it will. But it doesn’t. Not right now anyway.

If it is any consolation to them, most of the renewable energy and environmental policies being currently proposed in the country by the President and Congress are operating under the same type of delusion. Unfortunately, that includes OPD’s project as well. Yes, an OPD solar power system in Mesquite could be used to educate the public. Yes, it would provide a source of expertise on these systems that the community could draw upon. But the fact remains in the end it is likely to be a money-losing proposition for the ratepayers; and one that provides no measurable benefit to them or the environment.

One can only hope that whatever warm, fuzzy feeling that the OPD ratepayers achieve from thus being a little “greener”will be vividly recalled each time they pay their ever-increasing power bills.