California Is Set to Require Solar Power for New Homes
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LOS
ANGELES — Solar panels have become an increasingly familiar sight on
California rooftops as the state moves toward a clean-energy future. For
new homes, they are about to become a requirement.
The
California Energy Commission is expected to approve changes to the
building code on Wednesday to require solar panels on all new homes,
putting the state even farther in the forefront in the use of solar
power.
The mandate, to take effect in
2020, is expected to add $8,000 to $12,000 to the cost of a house — no
small sum in a state where housing affordability is already a major
issue.
The construction industry is
prepared to live with the requirement, however, as the solar capability
may become a selling point: It will help homeowners keep their
electricity bills down under a new rate structure that favors renewable
sources.
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“Our
druthers would have been to have this delayed another two or three
years,” said Bob Raymer, senior engineer for the California Building
Industry Association. But he was not surprised. “We’ve known this was
coming,” he said. “The writing was on the wall.”
Several
California cities have adopted ordinances mandating that some new
buildings include solar power, or have made commitments to 100 percent
clean energy through various sources. New Jersey, Massachusetts and
Washington, D.C., have also considered legislation to require that new
buildings be solar-ready, according to the National Conference of State
Legislatures.
But California would be the first to require all new homes to include some form of solar power.
“The
best way to see this code update is as a step, an important step that
we defined over a decade ago, part of an overall suite of reforms to
reduce greenhouse gases,” said Andrew McAllister, an Energy Commission
member who led the panel’s review of the building code, undertaken every
three years.
California law requires
at least 50 percent of the state’s electricity to come from
noncarbon-producing sources by 2030. Solar power has increasingly become
a driver in the growth of the state’s alternative energy production.
And
a new rate structure coming next year will charge California customers
based on the time of day they use electricity. So those with solar power
— and a battery in particular, allowing energy to be stored for when it
is most efficiently used — will avoid higher costs.
“Any
additional amount in the mortgage is more than offset,” Mr. McAllister
said. “It’s good for the customer; it’s good for the homeowner.”
The
commission’s move is seen as another big step in the transition from
centralized power to one where consumers have more control over their
electricity, with solar, energy storage and smart technology leading the
way.
At the end of 2017, California
was by far the nation’s leader in installed solar capacity. Solar power
provides almost 16 percent of the state’s electricity, and the industry
employs more than 86,000 workers.
Under
the new requirements, builders must take one of two steps: make
individual homes available with solar panels, or build a shared
solar-power system serving a group of homes. In the case of rooftop
panels, they can either be owned outright and rolled into the home
price, or made available for lease on a monthly basis.
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For
residential homeowners, based on a 30-year mortgage, the Energy
Commission estimates that the standards will add about $40 to an average
monthly payment, but save consumers $80 on monthly heating, cooling and
lighting bills.
Separately, the
revised code counts the installation of electricity-storage systems
toward the overall energy-efficiency requirements for new homes, as it
already does for solar hot-water heaters.
The solar mandate will also apply to new health-care facilities. But the biggest growth area is residential construction.
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California
averages about 80,000 new homes a year, with about 15,000 currently
including solar installations. Over all, at the current rate of home
building, the new requirement will increase the annual number of rooftop
solar installations by 44 percent.
The approved requirement is expected to give a strong lift to California’s already hot solar market.
“This
is a very large market expansion for solar,” said Lynn Jurich,
co-founder and co-chief executive of Sunrun, a leading solar
installation company. “It’s very cost effective to do it this way, and
customers want it.”
“There’s also this
real American sense of freedom of producing electricity on my rooftop,”
Ms. Jurich said. “And it’s another example of California leading the
way.”
A strategic plan drafted by the
California Public Utilities Commission in 2008 called for all new
construction by 2020 to have net-zero energy needs — that is, to produce
enough electricity on their own to avoid having to buy it from the
power grid.
The Energy Commission’s
plan is less ambitious. It requires new homes to have a solar-power
system of a minimum 2 to 3 kilowatts, depending mostly on the size of
the home. Residential solar arrays are typically two to three times that
size, often enough to put power into the grid.
In
fact, the state itself generates so much solar and wind power that it
must sometimes halt production at some facilities or give the
electricity away to other states to avoid overloading the electric grid.
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The
utility industry has been preparing for the proliferation of
energy-producing homes by studying its impact on the electric grid with
tests like a net-zero community developed in Fontana, east of Los
Angeles. The utilities are trying to determine how to manage a system
where homes are putting electricity onto the grid during the day and
consuming it at night.
“We’ve been
working towards it,” said Ram Narayanamurthy, technical executive at the
Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group that does research
for the nation’s power companies. “What we think we will see is greater
and greater efficiency.”
The Fontana
research has shown that with a combination of energy-efficiency measures
and solar power, the overall cost of owning a home is reduced, he said.
“In
every single climate zone, from the mountains to the coast, solar is
cost effective,” said Kelly Knutsen, director of technology advancement
for the California Solar and Storage Association, which promotes solar
use. “It will pay for itself.”
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