Small-scale home solar has a bright future

The future of small-scale renewable energy is likely to be less about feeding the grid and more about offsetting household energy use, says Jeff Williams of Gravity Sun Power.

The market is trending toward a program that encourages people to install small-scale renewable energy systems at their homes or farms and collect energy, which can be saved in the existing grid, instead of using expensive batteries for storage.

“That is where the long term energy plan is heading and we’re almost there. Within a couple of years the feed-in tariff program, that a lot of people know about, will probably come to an end,” said Williams. “It all depends on what the program is doing. There’s more and more people getting involved in net metering.”

Net metering allows people ato use their own energy to offset their hydro bill and it can be stored in the grid and then used in the months with fewer daylight hours.

“In the summertime when there are a lot of sun hours, you store credit that is put toward bills in the wintertime.”

The amount of hydro that is offset by the solar panels depends on how big the system is.

Williams said it could cost only a few thousand dollars for a two- to four-kilowatt system on a household roof and depending on daily usage it can offset the hydro bill if a system generates more electricity than is consumed.

He said he has seen an uptake in people’s interest in solar even though it is not a cheaper source. He finds people are getting into it because of a desire to be greener and more self-sufficient. It’s not cheaper but it is an alternative for people who want to get out from under the hydro companies.

“We will eventually reach so-called grid parity”, says Williams, “when the cost of renewable energy will be equal to using a hydro company. Over the years, as the subsidy is reduced, the cost of installing the panels comes down and hydro is always going to be going up.”

Opening the grid as a public storage space has helped to increase interest.

“It is still too expensive to use batteries to store the energy and that is the weak link in the whole chain. The grid is an unlimited battery bank that you don’t have to pay for so that’s why net metering works.”

The panels are warrantied for 25 years but the lifespan should be 35-50 years and the equipment is improving all the time, says Williams.

“There will probably come a time in the not-too-distant future where every new home would have a few panels on the roof,” he said.

Other provinces are starting to come on board and Williams said he wouldn’t be surprised if a national building standard for solar is implemented in the future.

“There’s no way we can keep going forward with what everyone requires for energy without finding it somewhere else because nobody wants coal and nobody wants nuclear and nobody wants wind and nobody wants the big solar farms but everybody wants heat and power and lights and computers and TVs and phones and everything else so it has to come from somewhere,” said Williams.

How it works

Once you’re connected to the distribution system, your local distribution company will continue to read your meter just as they do now and then subtract the value of electricity you supply to the grid from the value of what you take from the grid. What you’ll see on your bill is the “net” difference between these two amounts. If you supply more power than what you take from the grid over the billing cycle, you’ll receive a credit toward future energy bills. The credit can be carried forward for up to 12 months. To qualify, you must generate electricity primarily for your own use; the electricity must be generated solely from a renewable resource (wind, water, solar energy or biomass) and the maximum capacity of the generation facility can’t be more than 500 kilowatts.

– Ontario Energy Board