LiveGreen Blog

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Clean Power Finance - Making Solar as Easy as Buying a Car

Question: WHY AREN'T MORE PEOPLE GOING SOLAR?

Well, other than the many hoops you have to jump through (from finding the right installer, rebate applications, net metering ....) I can attest to one big hurdle: MONEY! Even getting a large rebate to cut the cost, trying to finance $20-30 thousand dollars is not very easy or appealing.

Clean Power Finance is a new company started in Silicon Valley that wants to make buying solar as easy as buying a car. When you show up at the dealership, do you expect to refinance your home before you can get the keys? Well, with Solar Dollars, CPF wants to make realizing clean power for you own home a simple and attainable reality. More often than not, you can just divert that monthly check to your power company over to a loan payment.

Labels: buy a car, clean power finance, easy, loan, save money, solar, solar calculator

2 Comments:

AGreenerColorado said...

Thats a great graph. On Saturday I get to go to a solar demo at a McStain home development here in CO. Should be exciting

July 12, 2007 11:15 PM

Anonymous said...

We went solar in April and have been very happy with both the process during the sale and installation as well as the result. We live in North San Diego County inland, an ideal corridor for solar energy. I talked with several companies before settling on Silverwood Energy (Google the name for info) I recommend them highly. While all the companies we talked with were good, Silverwood was a no pressure operation. I dealt with the owners at every level, not a salesperson. Their commitment to their products, their references and workmanship were all outstanding.

We had initially, planned on a bigger system, but then decided to scale back our consumprion and see what that did to our energy needs. We took out our pool (a HUGE energy savings, went flourescent almost everywhere, changed our our furnace and AC system (which seldom gets used) and try to be conscientious aboutturning on and turning off lights. I recommend and Silverwood did too, that you first do everything reasonable to scale back your consumption (lighting etc.) before you figure out your solar needs. This will get you the most appropriate size system for your home.

I told Robert from Silverwood that we wanted to see what difference these changes made. He said great since our license to install solar had a 6 month window to activate. We watched our bills for the next 6 months and saw an enormous reduction in usage. We then had Robert design a new system based on our new consumption. We settled on a system about 1kW smaller than the original plan. That reduced the cost of the system.

The installation was swift and problem free. Robert handled the permits and rebate paperwork. All we did was sign on the dotted lines where needed. It couldn't have nbeen easier. I think most Solar companies offer this service.

As I said, most companies I dealt with were solid. We just decided to go with a company where the owners were very actively involved.

July 16, 2007 1:07 PM