Green Jobs

Published on July 22nd, 2010 | by Susan Kraemer

5

Cheaper Option for Coal Country with 1BOG Solar

July 22nd, 2010 by Susan Kraemer 

Virtually every state has rising energy costs. California, for example, has seen a 7% per year average hike ever since the ’70s. But in Pennsylvania; caps on rate hikes expire next year, and there will certainly be at least a 10% rise, and there could even be as much as a 30% jump in electricity rates.

Pennsylvania has been a leading coal-producing state for the last hundred years or more, and gets half its energy from coal. So not only will electricity bills there be up to 30% higher next year, they will be 30% higher for dirty energy. The prospect of paying a lot more next year to use dirty AND expensive energy makes this year a great year to go solar in Pennsylvania.

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And even more so, because our own 1BOG has just launched a Philadelphia solar campaign to help ease both the cost barrier and the education barrier to going solar. 1BOG campaigns typically negotiate a discount of 15% off retail. Combined with state and other incentives (like SRECs), and solar financing, solar is a financial no-brainer.One of the many advantages of buying solar in any state is that you lock in your rates for energy till you pay it off, then you lock in a new rate of $0 for the rest of the life of the panels. And since solar panels last 40 or 50 years (see How long do solar panels last?), that means many years of savings.

Although begun in CEO Dave Lloren’s own native San Francisco, the 1BOG home solar campaigns are launching all across the country. All over the US people are now beginning to consider solar, and getting alarmed about the steep learning curve of all that they think they need to know to do it right. How to know which installer is the best? How to know that you chose the right panels? How to know if you got the best price?

Llorens founded 1BOG to take care of all those issues and make the process of going solar simple, by doing that homework for you.

A former electrical engineer in the solar industry, Llorens first scouts out the installers in a region and vets them to find the top few. Then, by gathering together group installs and offering them a whole neighborhood’s-worth of installs at the same time, he makes it a good deal for the installers so they in turn can then compete to offer the best group discount.

By making it efficient to almost mass-produce a neighborhoods-worth of systems at a time, 1BOG is able to fairly negotiate a reduced rate with the installation company they pick.

1BOG will explain all the local and state rebates and incentives and even options for earning money with clean energy to wean the City of Brotherly Love off of dirty coal power. Then artists won’t need to hand-tint charming clean skies like these over Pennsylvania’s ancient (and we know now: dangerous and dirty) energy source.

Image: Flikr user j3net

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Tags: 1BOG, Philadelphia

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times.    Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

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