Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Solar Panel Retrofits

[R.P. Aditya (aditya]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 06:07:07AM -0400, R Philip Dowds wrote:
> Folks —
> 
> After 13 years of occupancy, Cornerstone Cohousing (Cambridge, MA) is looking 
> into “alternative energy” solar panel retrofits to our south-facing shingle 
> roofs.  We are interested in hearing more about any comparable experience at 
> other cohos, like for instance …

At Great Oak Cohousing in Ann Arbor, MI, we just had some solar pv
panels/inverters installed and connected to our CH meter this past
winter after a few tries when our local utility ran out of the subsidy:

  http://gocoho.org/blog/?p=143
 
>   — support from independent engineers, versus relying entirely on vendors?

We relied on a local vendor that had incredible pricing -- $2.90/watt
installed -- who were brought to us by a nonprofit trying to get more
solar pv installed in Michigan.

We financed the installation as a "loan" from our reserve fund which is
paid back at a fixed amount from our operating budget and will be
partially offset by our electricity savings (we hope). Additionally,
because we have non-exempt federally taxable HOA income, we can take
advantage of the 30% installation renewable energy tax credit (it will
take us about 3-5 years of taxes to get that all back).

>   — financing, legal and insurance issues relative to multi-family
>   construction and HOAs / condos?
>
>   — sharing out energy, savings and/or costs among the various units
>   as well as the commons?

Some households used the same deal to install their own arrays, but the
infrastructure is inependent as each HOA unit has it's own utility
electric meter. So unless we had our own electric cooperative we can't
share, unfortunately.

Insurance for the panels for the CH is under our regular master policy,
however no coverage for the individual unit owned arrays from the HOA
policy

we still have to find a good way to record who "owns" the usage to roof
space above a unit, especially if one owner wants to use part of another
unit's space to increase their panel size -- this is still to be worked
out and likely won't be till someone has a situation when they want to
use their roof and a neighbor's panel is impinging...we had a formal
agreement that this would be worked out after installation...so far
nothing yet.

>   — passive solar hot water versus photovoltaics?

we alrady had solar hot water for our CH:

  http://gocoho.org/blog/?p=12

and it works well, but metering it is difficult so quantifying the
savings is even harder and for some reason it isn't as "sexy" even
though it is typically a better bet from a payback perspective.

Hope that helps.

-- 
Adi
Great Oak Cohousing
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
http://www.gocoho.org