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SACRAMENTO, California, US, June 7, 2006
(Refocus Weekly)
The California Energy Commission will decide if
its monetary incentive for new solar homes should be based on
installed capacity or on performance.
Its Renewables Committee has scheduled a workshop to discuss the
design of the ‘New Solar Homes Partnership’ and to solicit comments
on its draft staff proposal which describes the goals of the
partnership and proposed elements, including eligible participants,
eligible systems and specifications, geographical scope and
incentives. The draft report also describes builder and market
support activities and program transition and coordination issues.
The incentive structure could be an ‘expected’ performance-based
incentive for home builders, although the home purchaser could also
be eligible to receive the incentive or they could direct the
incentive to the equipment seller or system installer. An additional
incremental incentive will be provided for affordable housing,
similar to the Emerging Renewables Program.
“Incentives will decline over the life of the program, eventual
dropping to zero by the end of the program,” the report notes.
“Applications and payments will be based upon a first-come
first-served basis.”
“Monetary incentives for solar systems may be, among other forms,
capacity-based incentives or performance-based incentives,” it
continues. “Capacity-based incentives approaches have been viewed as
advantageous because payments are made upon system installation,
whereas a performance-based incentive approach based on actual
performance would spread payments over a period of time as the
system output is measured and reported.”
The state provides a capacity-based incentive under its Emerging
Renewables Program and Self-Generation Incentive Program, based on
rated output of a complete system and currently paying US$2.80 per
watt for solar PV only. The CEC also allows the option of an
‘actual’ performance-based incentive at $0.50 per kWh, and there are
40 applications in that option, ranging from 4 kW to 220 kW in size
and reserving the entire $10 million available.
The New Solar Homes Partnership is an incentive program for new
residential construction, and its primary goal is to create a
self-sustaining market for energy efficient solar homes. The CEC
recently adopted the California Solar Initiative with the goal of
creating a sustainable solar market in California, and it may
include solar thermal water heating systems, solar thermal electric
generating systems, and solar heating and cooling systems as
eligible technologies.
A number of questions (relating only to solar PV) will be addressed
during the workshop, including who should be eligible to receive
incentives, what level of energy efficiency should be required to be
eligible for a solar incentive, and if certification of system
components would promote high-performance systems. The CEC also
wants to determine what level of certification and warranty should
be required of eligible solar systems for use in this solar program,
what system size limits or other program parameters should be
included, how should areas that experience hot summers and areas
with high population growth rates be targeted, and how the CEC could
encourage customer-owned utilities to participate in the design of a
solar program that they would want to implement.
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