Google invests $75M (more) into home solar power.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/taking-in-more-sun-with-clean-power.html

by jeffool • 15 years ago

78 40 15 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

bennesvig• 15 years ago

Why not nuclear power?

littlegiantcap2• 15 years ago

If I had to guess I'd say 3 reasons.

1. Nuclear is unpopular because of the Japanese Earthquake incident. Fair or not theres a lot of baggage that comes with nuclear energy these days.

2. Second, the regulation surronding nuclear is a nightmare. A plant hasn't been built in the US since something like the early 80's because of this reason.

3. The financing approach makes a lot of sense for Google. They can make a lot of money without building any sort of infrastructure.

itswindy3• 15 years ago

The financing approach makes a lot of sense for Google. They can make a lot of money without building any sort of infrastructure.

Solar is more hype than anything, and it's good press. Is anyone making money from solar?

aero142• 15 years ago

"homeowners pay a monthly payment for the system, at a price that’s often less than paying for energy from the grid."

Is Google claiming that this is profitable overall? As in the lifetime costs for installing the solar panels on my house are less than the equivalent cost of electricity from the grid? If so, shouldn't someone be offering to pay me to install this on my house and then selling the electricity back to me directly?

bigethan• 15 years ago

There are many companies doing just this (sunrun, solarcity, etc). There's currently some loophole that as a business they get paid more for their electricity than a homeowner would (due to subsidies to encourage businesses to use solar). So they get a price that you alone could not get. I think that's why it works.

seigenblues3• 15 years ago

bigethan -- that's not necessarily how it works. It does work differently in different state & local markets, so it's possible that there's a market that works that way. I don't know of any, personally.

Usually the deal is something called a PPA -- Power Purchase Agreement. It's usually set up that you agree to pay some fixed price-per-kWh, and that price escalates by some regular way over the life of the contract. That price could be higher, or lower, than the prevailing rates for electricity in that market, and that escalator could be higher or lower than rates at which energy prices increase -- but either way, they're locked in from the start.

joeag2• 15 years ago

There's no "loophole" - but the US tax code doesn't all you as a homeowner to use the accelerated depreciation deduction the way a third party for-profit business can if they own the system and lease it to you or sell you the power it produces.

droithomme7• 15 years ago

It's really well established that home solar PV installations are currently substantially more expensive in dollars per kilowatt hour than grid energy.

I was following through some of Google's references and eventually found a graph without units perhaps explaining their reasoning behind this claim. It shows the cost of grid electricity undergoing massive exponential hockey stick growth from 2020 to 2030. So, if that happens, and you have a fixed percent 20 year mortgage on these panels, then sure, you might end up doing great compared to the suckers paying $100 a kilowatt hour (or whatever their exact number is since the y axis is not labelled) in 2030. On the other hand, an analysis that simply shows such apocalyptic increases in the cost of energy and considers no other factors is overly simplistic since in such an end times scenario mass-starvation, cannibalism, revolution, and the overthrow of the government would be likely accompanied by this situation and those homeowners with PV panels who did not have their own private armies and weapons stash would have long been dispatched and robbed of their valuable panels by those who do.

kokey• 15 years ago

I figure it's a risky bet for them to make an investment based on the cost of electricity going up that much. Someone could just figure out a way to burn coal and capture the carbon and use it as fertilizer and the whole investment falls apart. That's probably why they are not sinking more money into this.

drats• 15 years ago

10,000 homes sounds like a lot but it's tiny compared to the US population, only enough to make a press release make the news really. And very tiny next to the world population now approaching the 7,000,000,000 mark. The simple fact is that no energy that needs subsidies or other fiddling in the west is going to fly with anyone else.

Surely they know enough now about thin-cell solar to invest into more R&D for it. Give the 75 million to 75 professors to have 5 new PhD students each and a bag of money for experiments. Given the history so far[1] I don't think a few percentage points more from 375 PhDs is out of the question. Those few points would have a far more dramatic effect in the long-run than just helping to finance installation of current technology for the equivalent of one small town.

[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/PVeff%28r...

melling• 15 years ago

It sounds like they are trying to create a market. They are providing financing, so they will actually make money. The initial money plus the interest can be applied to the next 12,000 homes, for example, then to 15,000 home, then to 25,000 homes... This can be done indefinitely...or at least for a couple of decades.

The market of suppliers will grow to meet the consumer demand, and suppliers will invest some of their profits into R&D and manufacturing. And I believe Moore's Law applies to the manufacturing of solar cells.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/ph...

Create a market and let private industry handle the rest. Space, robotics, cheap energy, etc.

0x12• 15 years ago

The hard part is not to make higher efficiency solar cells (within limits), the hard part seems to be to make them cheap enough so they're commercially viable.

For instance, these 35+ % efficient cells have been available for two years now:

http://gizmodo.com/5388795/sharp-triple-layer-solar-cell-set...

But you wouldn't be putting them on your roof unless you wanted to achieve a specific number of Watts on a small surface.

The figure to monitor is $/Watt, and that's where any gains will come from. Any decrease in the price per Watt is real, immediate gain. Increases in efficiency are only good if they lead to a lower price per Watt.

Someone• 15 years ago

In a typical installation, the cells aren't the major cost anymore. Because of that, efficiency does decrease $/Watt, even if the $/Watt price of the cells isn't lower.

mark_l_watson2• 15 years ago

Our local utility company just hooked up our new solar setup to their grid yesterday afternoon. In exchange for a hefty rebate on the installation, we had to agree to be hooked up to their grid for 10 years.

What this means is: power we generate goes to a very nearby facility and we buy back power. Our setup allows me in real time see how much power we are generating, how much we are selling back to the utility vs. how much we are using. For most of today, it looked like we were generating about 800 watts more than our house was using. The installer looked at our historic electricity bills and installed enough panels so that we would get paid back some money every year, but not a lot. So, I expect maybe a "negative" electricity bill of about $400 a year, instead of a yearly "positive" bill of about $1000.

With the rebate and state and federal tax savings, our break even point is supposed to be in 5 or 6 years. I think it may be sooner than that because the contractor did not account for rising electricity costs.

Anyway, this is fun - part of the value.

icefox2• 15 years ago

Same here, got my install finished just a month ago. The inverters we used aggregates the data (to warn us of problem) which I have made public http://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public/systems/TTAL25069 We also expect a payback of around five years (in MA). After running the numbers it was pretty clear in MA that solar is a very decent (300% return in ~10 years)* and safe investment. Just too bad that you can only really invest ~15K before you produce more than you need.

Edit:

  *
  100% return in SREC + no electric bill in 3-5 years
  Several more years of SRECS,
    easily 50% of the original investment
  The longer you stick in the house, the no electric
    bill once again pays back (With no tax!) the initial
    investment 100% after ~15-20 years
  100+% back when you sell the house (as they are
    depreciated on the initial 30K+ install cost, not
    your post tax incentive cost and probably still
    worth in the 20's) and solar seems to be causing
    houses to sell quicker to boot.

If I was going to retire soon and needed to start moving investments to a more predictive safe place to put some cash getting panels seems a win all around and removes one more unknown bill from my life. But again it is only ~10-20K of a retirement fund, but hey every bit helps.

ph0rque• 15 years ago

300% ROI for 10 years is about a 11.6% annual ROI... pretty much guaranteed. I have a feeling that companies will be springing up that match up investors who want that kind of a low-risk ROI (almost everybody) with people who want solar power on their roofs for free, with similar electric bills as they're paying now (also almost everybody in much of the continental US).

This is why solar power will quickly dominate soon, IMO.

droithomme7• 15 years ago

Thanks for providing that link, it's been really difficult in the past to find hard data with actual numbers from real installations.

To clarify, as your total cost including everything $15k or $30k, I see both numbers in your post, and was that the actual prices, or were there subsidies as well?

joelhaus• 15 years ago

Is the technology too new or are they able to provide you with estimates for (i) the useful life of the equipment and (ii) recurring maintenance costs?

Barring vast economic collapse, a bet on rising energy prices strikes me as relatively safe compared to many other investment alternatives. It's definitely very interesting and really appreciate you sharing your experience!

mark_l_watson2• 15 years ago

There is a manufacturer's guarantee that the system will still put out 80% power in 20 years, and is guaranteed for 25 years. If, the manufacturer stays in business...

tryitnow• 15 years ago

Has solar reached a point where further price declines are not highly likely? If not, then most people I've talked to would hold off on going this route.

If prices will decline significantly in a year, then it would make sense to wait and deploy solar systems until further price declines are unlikely.

Retric• 15 years ago

It's more a question is the returns this year > decline over this year vs any given gain. AKA I could wait 10 years and buy a beastly computer but I would have to use a 'crappy' PC for those 10 years.

droithomme7• 15 years ago

I feel the title here is misleading as it suggests that Google is investing in developing some sort of solar systems with this specific $75 million. But reading the article, we see they are actually investing in funding a bank (finance company) which will be offering loans with interest for PV rooftop installations, for which they will receive payments with interest from the homeowners purchasing said systems at full cost. So they are investing in the same way that Chase invests in credit card debt by offering people credit cards, or that GM finance invests in cars by offering auto loans.

The claim that the monthly loan payments will be "often less than paying for energy from the grid" is certainly false and I'd be willing to bet money that it will not be established that people are generating solar energy for less than the cost of buying it off the grid.

Finally, if one was really interested in green technology, either installing a roof top solar hot water heater and/or a geothermal heat pump will save more energy than a rooftop residential PV installation will generate, but at a much lower cost.

joshu• 15 years ago

I want to do solar power but I am terrified that as soon as I buy it it will immediately become outdated.

Here's some advice I got earlier: http://www.jig.com/need/solar-power-for-my-house-near-los-al...

Still haven't done anything. Any advice?

droithomme7• 15 years ago

Thanks for posting that link, the numbers they discuss are similar to numbers I am familiar with and thus I don't have to make any claims to use them.

So his system cost $51,000 and produces 7500kWh of energy per year. If he were to have set up with this Google Finance system that offers 20 year 11% financing, and assuming 1.25% property tax where he lives (PV panels will increase the value of his home after all) then his monthly payments will be $579.54, or $139,089.86 in payments through August of 2031, with a total of $75.339.86 in interest paid to the finance company Google is investing in. This is a good, safe investment for Google.

For the homeowner, the 7500kwH per year will cost him $750 to buy from the grid at 10 cents a kWh. Instead he will be paying $579.54 * 12 = $6954.48 for the power, nearly ten times as much.

Google's claim that you save money assumes that the cost of electricity will increase so dramatically in the future that the overall cost will be less with solar, not including your cost of financing, and not including any money you might have made from investing your money elsewhere for 20 years, but considering that the average price of electricity between now and 2030 will be more than 92.7 cents per kilowatt hour.

------

Solar PV is fine and sometimes the only choice if you are living completely off the grid, but it comes at a cost, and works best when you massively reduce consumption, switch all interior lights to 12V, realize you can't run high wattage things like microwave ovens or toasters, you'll need a kerosene powered refrigerator, and you have a costly bank of toxic batteries to maintain and periodically replace. I have done this.

For grid connected living if you are interested in going green I would strongly recommend taking a look at these things:

- rooftop solar heater - free hot water, which otherwise is costly to heat

- dry all clothes on clothesline. Don't even own an electric or gas dryer. These use a lot of energy. If living in an area that prohibits line drying, move to an area that permits it or accept that your community does not support green living and perhaps lobby to change things.

- geothermal heat pump if you need conditioned air. This one depends on climate. Electric fans throughout the house are a better option than air conditioners. (Also do note that many estimates of typical household electric use which are used in calculating recommended solar size installations assume that gas heat is used and electricity is not used for heating during winter. This may be true, but the gas heat is an additional part of the total energy cost. With a properly designed geothermal heatpump you reduce your cost of heating significantly compared to either gas or electric.)

- if building from scratch, do a passive solar design. Properly done (not easy to find those who can do this), you can have zero costs for heating and cooling year round.

Implementing even a few of these changes can save much more than the 7500kWh of energy that is generated by the PV panels year round in the example, and at considerably less cost.

Google invests $75M (more) into home solar power.

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