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Ginsberg, 61, a subway motorman, was one of the first
Long Beach residents to take advantage of a new city
program that waives building permit fees - $348 in his
case - for solar energy installations.
"By buying my own electric system for less than the
price of a new automobile, I will never pay an
electric bill again," Ginsberg said.
There have been only a handful of applicants since the
new policy promoting clean energy went into effect on
June 15, said City Manager Edwin Eaton.
"It's a modest saving for the homeowner," Eaton said,
noting the overall cost of installation runs into the
tens of thousands of dollars.
Ginsberg said his system cost $44,000, but he got an
immediate cash credit from LIPA of $21,000, a $5,000
tax credit from New York State, and a $2,000 federal
credit - leaving him with a net cost of $16,000.
"Both my wife and me are near retirement age, so what
we really wanted to do was fix our overhead. We own
our house, but you want to make sure your pension,
Social Security, is enough to cover you," he said.
The Ginsberg home is on East Beech Street, facing
south toward the ocean four blocks away. Instead of
putting the panels on the southern exposure - the
usual location - he had them installed on the eastern
and western parts of the roof so they would not be
visible from the street.
At 9:30 a.m. Friday, the control box next to his
meters indicated he had 4.42 kilowatts of credit so
far that day - the second day the system was in
operation.
"Basically, all day I'm making more electricity than
I'm using. At night, what happens? Then I have to take
the electricity back from LIPA," he said.
His annual electric bill is about $1,200 a year now,
and he expects that will go down to zero - although he
will have to pay a modest monthly fee for his
connection to the power grid.
Selling electricity back to the grid was made possible
by a 1997 state law creating "net metering," a system
in use in about 35 states, sometimes for solar energy
and sometimes for wind-generated energy, according to
the U.S. Department of Energy.
Ginsberg said he envisions a day when users of
electricity around the world can share power over a
grid, much like people share information over the
Internet. "The sun is always shining someplace on the
Earth, so theoretically everybody in the world could
have free electricity, if we were all civilized enough
to have an interconnection," he said.
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