Solar House Panels – The Energy Wave of the Future

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

The desire to go green has caused many people to look toward the future and solar energy. Although solar technology has been around for quite some time, including the growing use of solar house panels, most average people don’t know much about it. The price has been rather steep to purchase the necessary equipment to obtain free use of the sun.

Solar energy is wonderful and plentiful. This has been the selling point for twenty years. If you have the right situation to catch those rays, you may be in a position to reduce your electrical service fees by using the sun’s energy.

Where you live is very important in the scheme of things. Some areas have limited sun, leaving little reason to consider solar power. If you are in an area where mountains shadow your home for a large part of the day, it doesn’t work. If you live in Alaska, you may as well consider other alternatives. Perhaps your home sits under spreading trees that you do not want to have removed. This is not going to work, either.

Now, what does work? If your home is in a wide open space, and you have sunlight for the majority of the daylight hours, you have what you need. It is even better to have a roof that faces the southwestern sky. Of course, even under perfect conditions, you must be allowed by the covenants of your neighborhood to have panels on your house.

How exactly does the whole solar panel process work? The answer to that is the question of where do you live? There are many different deals available that change from year to year, and from one power company to another.

In the simplest form of solar energy, the customer buys the solar panels and pays to have them installed. There is a special type of switch installed that allows the user to switch back to the power company feed any time that the solar power wanes. The savings come when the solar panels are doing their job, and no power is being purchased from the utility company. Under this scenario, the customer pays big money up front, and hopes to live long enough to see the savings.

In some areas, a utility company will foot part of the cost of the installation. Then you get a reduction in your kilowatt hour price. Some of these situations offer a long term lease, and some specify a time period after which the panels belong to the customer, commonly known as a lease purchase plan. But even under this setup, the end user is hedging against savings later.

Now, you may like this one. Citizenre, in Colorado, has another angle. They will put the solar panels on your house at no cost, but they own them. You sign up for 25 years of service, and they become your electric company. You never own the panels, but you get locked in rates. You pay the average cost of energy the year that you have the panel installed.

Some experts predict this will be the coming wave for other utility companies as they try to phase out dirty energy. Solar panels take up so much space, it makes more sense for the utility companies to have them at the point of use rather than storing them.

Solar house panels are the wave of coming generations, and new developments will continue to surface, offering more choices for those interested in green energy.