When the 1973 OPEC oil embargo sent Americans scrambling to find the energy source of the future, interest in solar heating systems for homes soared.
Spurred by federal tax incentives for alternative energies, solar panels popped up on houses around the country. But the crunch ended, the tax credits program died and enthusiasm faded.
But in the even more energy-conscious 21st century, solar power is back. And this is not your Carter-era technology, and it’s not just for heating water anymore.
“People are surprised to learn that solar electricity is different from solar hot water,” said Mark Farber, president and CEO of Evergreen Solar in Marlborough. Evergreen makes photovoltaic (PV) modules that are at the heart of Sun Power for New Homes, an initiative partially funded by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative through its Renewable Energy Trust.
The solar electric system uses an array of panels on a homeowner’s roof that convert sunlight to DC electricity, collect it through wires leading to a DC disconnect and then convert it to AC. That electricity can power everything in the home (there’s a traditional grid connection to supply the juice when the sun’s not out) and at peak production levels the system will feed excess electricity back to the grid. That’s right — “the electric meter actually turns backward,” says builder Tom DiPlacido of DiPlacido Development Corp.
Sun Power for New Homes officially debuted earlier this month with a model home in Wrentham built by DiPlacido in partnership with Conservation Services Group (CSG) and using Evergreen modules. The Wrentham development, Wampanoag Estates, consists entirely of homes with an Energy Star rating, an Environmental Protection Agency designation for buildings that are at least 30 percent more energy-efficient than those built to the national energy code.
“Combining Energy Star with photovoltaics is a first, and this is the first one in the United States,” says Rex D’Agostino, vice president of marketing and sales at Evergreen and president of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England (SEBANE). As an added bonus, the DiPlacido-built homes also feature heat recovery ventilation for reusing waste heat.
“I think it’s going to be a real growth industry, particularly in that area in Wrentham because you have the combination of new construction and energy-efficient new construction,” said Paul Gromer, executive director of SEBANE, which along with the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association last week sponsored tours of model homes across the state in developments funded by the Renewable Energy Trust through CSG. “Lots of companies are incorporating these technologies into new homes, so I think you could see it as a very common feature.”
The MTC grants “cover some of our time to administer the program and produce marketing materials for it, then do training for the builders and electricians to get them up to speed,” said John Livermore, Energy Star Homes program manager at CSG, which secures the Renewable Energy Trust grants for the builders. “With the model home it gives the buyers the opportunity to choose a photovoltaic array for their home if they choose.”
Buyers who choose PVs can expect to pay between $6,000 and $8,000 to retrofit an existing home, but that’s not much more than the cost of installing it with new construction. Figure it in over the life of a mortgage and it’s barely noticeable.
“When you crunch the numbers you can see a positive cash flow right from day one,” Livermore said.
In California, for example, if a homeowner’s bill is $200, once you put photovoltaics in, it drops to $85, D’Agostino said. “We want to take what works in California and New York and demonstrate it in Massachusetts.”
Of course, California looms large in images of solar power and alternative energy technologies. Indeed, much of the product from the handful of solar companies in New England goes elsewhere. Evergreen, for example, makes two-thirds of its sales overseas, in such countries as Japan, Italy, Honduras and Morocco.
“Our first sale was a solar panel with light bulbs in a one-room schoolhouse in Bolivia,” Farber says.
That may be the best example of Evergreen’s off-grid customers, those in places where electricity traditionally doesn’t go, such as vacation homes, rural areas abroad and recreational vehicles. On the other extreme, Farber says, is a project for the Kawasaki Building in Tokyo. “So we went from as rural as it gets to as crowded as it gets.”
Evergreen started in Waltham in 1994 with Farber, vice president-CFO Richard Chleboski and vice president-CTO Jack Hanoka — “three guys in a kitchen” — who had worked in the solar energy division of Mobil Oil in Billerica.
Having licensed a crystalline silicon technology from MIT professor Emanuel Sachs, a former colleague of Hanoka, Evergreen developed its own enhancements along the way to produce the patented String Ribbon technology employed in its panels now.
The company completed a $29.5 million private equity financing in the spring, is building a second manufacturing plant, also in Marlborough, and plans to increase from 140 to 200 employees by the end of next year. And with so much institutional support from government, nonprofits and builders, why not?
“We’ve sold 500 megawatts worldwide,” Farber said. “It’s a small piece of the energy picture, but the growth has been impressive and I believe it will continue.”
