Community-Owned Solar / Solar Gardens for 4/5 of Americans?

July 6th, 2012 by Zachary Shahan

Not everyone owns a house. And not every house is suitable for solar. In fact, 4/5 American homes aren’t suitable for solar! (That is, based on a 2008 study, which is when solar prices were much higher than today, and technology not nearly as good.) But the point is, how do we get everyone on the solar bandwagon? Well, if you read the title, I think you’ve got an idea — community-owned solar, or solar gardens. I’m a big fan of these things, but I haven’t written about them in awhile, so I was happy to see a recent community-owned solar post up on sister site sustainablog. Here’s that post in full:

Community-Owned Solar Gardens Make Clean Energy Possible for All (via sustainablog)

One of the biggest setbacks for people looking to invest in solar is a lack of a suitable place to put the solar panels. A solar installation both has to be in the right direction and the right angle to extract enough energy from the sun’s trajectory for the system to be financially feasible. When…

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Tags: community owned solar, going solar, solar gardens

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Hope

Yeah I’m struggling to believe 4/5 when grey Germany has qs many installations nationwide as it does. Also what happened to solar mosaic?
- http://www.solarmosaic.com/ Lisa Curtis
  
  Hey Hope,
  
  Solar Mosaic is still here, we’re currently in a quiet period until we launch our new platform at http://www.solarmosaic.com. Folks can sign up to get exclusive early access to our solar projects. We just received $2M from the Department of Energy to scale up our model and are excited to launch something truly unique soon.
Anne

“In fact, 4/5 American homes aren’t suitable for solar!”

That is a bold claim. Is there a source for that?
- Anne
  
  Ok, found the soruce, but I couldn’t find anything supporting that claim. In fact, almost any house is suitable for PV, although not always optimal.
  
  The report that this claim is based on is from 2008, sort-of prehistoric times in the PV sector.
  - http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
    
    hmm.. yeah, maybe that wasn’t a safe study to base that statement on.
    
    i was assuming that it was bcs they were including to multi-family buildings, in which the roof would never support enough solar for everyone in the building.
    - Anne
      
      I did see a number of 20-something percent of roof area is suitable for PV. That is not the same as 20-something percent of the houses is suitable. It may be that was the source of the confusion.
      
      Another thing might have been cost. Perhaps the authors assumed that east and west facing roofs were unsuitable due to lower yield. But PV has gotten incredibly cheap. That’s one point that a report from 2008 definitely paints the wrong picture. Btw, the yield on east and west facing roofs is about 80% of an ideal system, so that is very doable.
      
      Your option that only 1/5 of the houses has enough suitable roof space to generate 100% of consumption is also a possibility. But to me the 4/5 would be in a category called ‘suboptimal’, not ‘unsuitable’.
      
      Just my 2c.
      - Bob_Wallace
        
        ” the yield on east and west facing roofs is about 80% of an ideal system, ”
        
        That is very interesting info. Thanks Anne.
        
        We might estimate that 1/4 of all roofs/slopes face east and 1/4 face south, so deduct 20% of 50% from the total.
        
        Also, 1/4 of all roofs/slopes probably face north, so we loose 25% here.
        That would be a grand total of 35% loss from the “ideal” condition of all roofs facing due south. (Although one could argue that extending the solar day has great value.)
        
        Of course there has to be some adjustment for shading from trees and other buildings. Some adjustment for skylights and dormers.
        
        I’d guess that at least the equivalent of 50% of rooftops are potential power producers.
      - http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
        
        Makes sense to me. Thanks