Solar Power Compliant Houses Shall Soon The Legitimate Standard

Solar Power Compliant Houses Shall Soon The Legitimate Standard. USA; California has shown the emerging world building standard.

Obviously, those that have taken the wise decision to handover their building construction to modern solar-literate architects and engineers are smart. As there won't be need for any defacing or future partial demolition of their houses by the time is has become mandatory for all houses to be upgraded for solar electrification. The California Energy Commission (CEC) recently voted 5-0 to add some new provisions to the state’s building code. Among them is the requirement that , all new house and multi-family residences of three stories or fewer, along with all major renovations, must be built with solar panels.

Where solar is not suitable, homeowners must have access to a community solar project or receive efficiency upgrades that compensate. (There are some exceptions for buildings in highly shaded areas.)

California is currently adding 113,000 housing units a year, and that number is rising. Right now only about 15 percent of them are built with solar, so this is a big boost to the residential solar industry. 

The CEC also boosted standards for insulation, air conditioning, water heaters, and much more. It’s all part of California’s mandate for new homes to be “net-zero energy” — to produce as much energy as they consume — by 2020, with all commercial construction to follow by 2030.

Solar on most new houses! This might seem like an obviously good thing. Solar is great; solar panels are cool; California is leading the climate resistance. 

But among energy nerds, the mandate has caused much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth. They’ve been debating it all week on Twitter — on one hand, on the other; by now there are so many hands that I must confess to paralyzing ambivalence.

So let’s walk through some of the pros and cons and see if we can draw some kind of conclusion.

Germany still holds the aces as the worldwide leader of solar power innovation and implementations. 

Germany already fast going full-fledged solar roofing.

The case for the mandate

Solar-powered home owners, solar-literate architects/engineers, energy wonks and practitioners have also offered a variety of arguments in support of the mandate.

1) Political will is not fungible.

It is an eternal verity of politics that any new policy is met by wonks explaining why other policies would have been better. But California advocates and policymakers do not get to pick and choose policies like they’re shopping at a supermarket. There was a coalition for this.

As the Washington Examiner writes, “the change had broad support from home builders, state political leaders, and solar advocates.” Also, the CEC was able to make the change without legislative approval. And the costs are concentrated on builders and homeowners rather than the broad public.

2) The CEC probably overestimated costs.

The CEC drew its cost estimates from a comprehensive, top-down report on global clean energy trends from BNEF. But there are many reasons to believe that it is substantially overstating what rooftop solar will cost Californians. BNEF’s report includes the solar rooftop retrofit market, but costs are much lower for new construction, especially as it scales up.

When building solar into new construction, there are no customer acquisition costs and no sales commissions, permitting costs are much lower, financing costs are much lower, there’s already an electrician on site, there are no interconnection applications, etc. Plus, solar panels are cheaper when bought in bulk, and California builders frequently build subdivisions all at once.

“With all these categories added up,” Arizona State University researcher Wesley Herche and John Weaver write in a close analysis in PV Magazine, “this eliminates more than half the cost of a residential system, bringing down the total to $1.12 per watt. From there, the elusive $1/watt is only a few years away in terms of system cost declines.”

3) Scale will bring innovation.

Tesla’s solar roof tiles look expensive now, but when the choice is between building a roof with a rooftop solar system on top of it or building a roof with a solar system built in, the cost calculus will look different. Increasing demand for building-integrated solar products will allow that industry to scale up and bring costs down as well.  

4) Cost reductions bleed over.

All of these cost and operational improvements in the solar rooftop industry will bleed over into areas outside the mandate — into the retrofit market, and into other states — making rooftop solar more attractive even in places it isn’t required.

5) Time-of-use rates mean new rooftop solar could drive new storage and demand shifting.

California’s three big utilities are shifting to time-of-use rates for residential customers — meaning ratepayers will be charged more for electricity when it is more valuable. This will also affect net metering; if retail rates are lower during the midday solar surge, net metering compensation will be lower too.

That will give homeowners incentive to shift some of their solar energy around, which they can do with home energy storage — and helpfully, under the new building code, storage counts as compliance with efficiency mandates. That should get a lot of storage, and with it a lot of responsive demand, into California homes, which should help stabilize the grid. 

6) Jamming new distributed solar onto the grid forces utilities to make needed changes.

This effect is difficult to quantify or fully predict, but by forcing so much rooftop solar into the market, the mandate could have the effect of forcing changes that need to be made anyway, like standardizing the use of smart inverters that give utilities visibility into home solar systems and properly incentivizing demand response.

Utilities are often loath to make life easier for distributed energy (they don’t like what they don’t own), but this mandate could force the issue, taking power out of utilities’ hands and putting it into consumers’. 

7) Solar will become more visible, familiar, and contagious.

Also difficult to quantify: By making rooftop solar so much more common and familiar, like just another home appliance, the mandate will help answer consumer questions and ease consumer fears. As Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, told GTM, “I can’t overstate how strongly I feel about normalizing the solar experience so it feels less risky to the consumer.”

Researchers have already shown that solar panels are contagious — when people see them, they want them. And that effect could redound beyond solar, helping normalize renewable energy (and carbon policy) more generally. (Though, if we’re being honest, it’s already pretty normal in California.)

8) Rooftop solar and efficiency could help displace natural gas.

California now burns as much natural gas in buildings as it does in power plants. Reducing that means increasing efficiency and electrifying heating and cooling. (The state has a natural gas utility that is opposing electrification efforts; it remains very difficult for the average California homeowner to fully electrify.) Solar on every new home, plus mandates for highly efficient appliances, could drive electrification and displace natural gas.