GOING SOLAR — Solar panels on the roof of this home in a Waynesville neighborhood have good southern exposure plus no tree canopy overhead. Only a handful of the 3,300 customers on Waynesville’s electric grid have gone solar, but a new program will help incentivize homeowners to make the upfront investment in solar panels.
GOING SOLAR — Solar panels on the roof of this home in a Waynesville neighborhood have good southern exposure plus no tree canopy overhead.
GOING SOLAR — William Hite was one of several residents who called on the Waynesville town board to offer a more financially advantageous program to incentivize those on town power to make the switch to solar.
Waynesville Town Manager Rob Hites
GOING SOLAR — Solar panels on the roof of this home in a Waynesville neighborhood have good southern exposure plus no tree canopy overhead. Only a handful of the 3,300 customers on Waynesville’s electric grid have gone solar, but a new program will help incentivize homeowners to make the upfront investment in solar panels.
GOING SOLAR — Solar panels on the roof of this home in a Waynesville neighborhood have good southern exposure plus no tree canopy overhead.
GOING SOLAR — William Hite was one of several residents who called on the Waynesville town board to offer a more financially advantageous program to incentivize those on town power to make the switch to solar.
Waynesville Town Manager Rob Hites
Waynesville has rolled out a new incentive program that makes going solar more financially attractive for homeowners.
The plan was crafted in response to lobbying by solar advocates, who claimed the town’s old program made it difficult to ever recoup the upfront cost of installing solar panels. Under the new program, those who go solar can more easily justify their investment thanks to the town buying back surplus solar power they generate at a more lucrative rate.
“It sends a strong message that we are committed to a clean energy future,” said Alderman Jon Feichter, who championed the more favorable solar program.
The transition to solar, one home at a time, is part of the solution to combat global warming and something the town should do its part to embrace, he said.
“I am proud of this board and this community for recognizing this is a dilemma we all face and we are taking steps to address it,” Feichter said.
The new solar program doesn’t go as far as solar advocates had hoped, but attempts to balance the town’s bottom line. Waynesville has its own electric system, which is something of a cash cow for the town — netting about $1 million in profit annually that pays for things the town couldn’t afford otherwise.
“It is one of the key revenue sources for the entire town,” Town Manager Rob Hites said. “We are trying to minimize the loss to the electric fund.”
At the crux of the solar debate is how long it takes homeowners to break even on the upfront cost of solar panels. Under the town’s old solar program, it could take three decades to break even. The math hinges on how much solar homeowners can make off the surplus power they generate.
When solar panels produce more power than a homeowner needs, the town buys back the surplus power, which goes into the pool to be resold to other customers.
Solar advocates wanted the town to pay a higher rate for the surplus power. But why pay solar homeowners a premium for their surplus power, when the town can get the same power more cheaply at a wholesale rate on the grid?
“The town is losing money compared to what we can buy power for on the grid,” Hites explained.
But that’s something of a red herring to solar advocates.
“I don’t want the board to get caught up in the idea that we are losing something,” Feichter said. “We might be sacrificing a few dollars on the front end, but if we are earning it back on the back end, are we really losing money?”
The town indeed makes a tiny profit on the surplus solar power it buys back, which is resold to other customers.
“When you produce solar and send it out on the grid, and it gets used by your neighbor. The surplus energy just goes out and comes back,” said William Hite, a solar advocate and Waynesville resident. “If you deposit $100 in the bank and a month later you take it out, the bank can’t say it paid you $100.”
But it’s still a net loss to the town, since the town will pay more for the surplus power than it would at its normal wholesale rate, Hites said.
Ultimately, the town came up with a compromise — agreeing to pay more for surplus solar power than it was before, but not as much as the solar advocates wanted.
Solar homeowners won’t actually get a check from the town for their surplus power. Instead, they’ll get a credit toward any power they have to buy during the winter or at night when their solar panels can’t keep up their home’s demand.
One wild card in the equation is how many residents and businesses will actually jump on the solar bandwagon. The more that make the transition, the more it will cost the town to buy back their surplus power.
So for now, the new solar plan is considered a pilot program. It will be capped to the first 70 homeowners and 25 businesses.
The town’s losses would be about $70,000 a year if that many indeed go solar. Feichter questioned if that’s a scenario the town truly needs to be concerned about.
“Hallelujah if it happens, but I don’t think it will happen,” he said.
The cap amounts to 2.8% of the town’s 3,300 power customers. By comparison, only 0.7% of Duke Energy’s customers in the state have gone solar, Feichter pointed out.
When the town hits the cap of 70 homeowners and 25 businesses going solar, it will reassess to determine whether it can afford to keep offering the same buy-back rate. Anyone who gets in under the cap, however, would get to keep the promised buy-back rate in perpetuity — an incentive for those thinking about going solar to do so before the cap is reached.
Meanwhile, the town’s electric system should see a boon in coming years from the electric vehicle trend, and that should more than offset financial impacts of residents going solar, said solar advocate William Hite.
“People are going to have electric vehicles before they have solar panels,” Hite said.
Growth and development coming to town will mean more power customers.
The new solar program was crafted in response to a coalition of solar advocates who appealed to the town earlier this year. The town board held an open-dialog community meeting to drill down on the nitty gritty of the solar rate structure — resulting in the compromise plan that makes going solar more financially viable, while still protecting the town’s own bottom line.
Betsy Wall, a member of the Haywood-based group WNC Climate Action, thanked the town for working collaboratively with citizens and doing its part at the local level to save the plant from dire consequences of global warming.
“There is an enormous push going on across the planet to change away from fossil fuel energy,” Wall said. “It is warming our planet way too much.”
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