CORVALLIS, Ore. – Wolfgang Dilson is an evangelist for solar power.
Dilson’s company, Akro Construction, is building the first subdivision in Oregon’s Benton County that features solar electric systems in every home. The 11 units in Hummingbird Meadows also come with solar water heaters, lots of extra insulation, water-saving toilets and other “sustainable” amenities.
The 2- and 3-kilowatt systems he’s putting in won’t generate huge amounts of juice, but will be enough to lower the monthly electric bill a bit. And when the lights, heat pump and major appliances aren’t going, excess power will be transmitted to the electric company through a “net metering” system that generates a credit on the homeowner’s account.
“When this house is not using electricity … it goes into the grid for the common good,” Dilson said. “Every house in America should have that. Every house should be a power plant.”
Dilson also is building “solar-ready” homes in his Suncrest subdivision near Martin Luther King Jr. Park, but his next project will be his most ambitious foray yet into solar power and “green living.”
All 23 homes in the development on SW Brooklane Drive, dubbed Brooklane Solar Village, will be built with grid-tied solar electric systems. Dilson is working with the Oregon Department of Energy on design standards to make the development a showcase for energy-efficient construction.
“Somebody has to blaze the trail,” Dilson said. “I’m impatient.”
Christopher Dymond, a senior analyst for the Energy Department, is enthusiastic.
“His project is stepping out in front of everybody in the area,” Dymond said. “It’s an aggressive move.”
Since Oregon passed its net-metering law in 1999, Dymond said, only about 300 grid-tied residential solar power systems have been installed statewide. The vast majority, he said, have been individual retrofits of older homes.
“New construction is the endgame,” he said. “The full, widescale, everybody-has-it market is still a long way off.”
Still, with solar power systems getting cheaper and other sources of energy getting more expensive, Dymond says, solar power will eventually become more affordable than electricity in Oregon.
“Some places in California, it’s already happened,” he said.
That could explain why California leads the nation in residential solar power systems with about 13,000. Even though 38 states allow net metering, Dymond said, only a handful are approaching their first 1,000 residential installations.
Meanwhile, Japan has more than 250,000 such systems, while Dilson’s native Germany is adding about 60,000 a year.
Dilson estimates the solar power systems he’s installing at Hummingbird Meadows add about $32,000 to the cost of construction for each home. Financial incentives from the government and utility companies, however, can help homeowners recover a big chunk of that expense.
Oregon offers tax credits of up to $1,500 for a solar water heater and up to $6,000 over four years for a solar electric system, depending on how much power it produces. The federal government offers up to $2,000 in credits for a water heater and the same for a solar electric set-up.
Pacific Power and Portland General Electric offer about $800 in incentives for a solar water heater and up to $10,000 for a solar electric system, according to Dymond. Consumers Power also has an incentive program.
Even so, green living doesn’t come cheap. The homes at Hummingbird Meadows will go for $370,000 and up. Prices at Brooklane Solar Village will probably average about $500,000, Dilson said, though nothing’s set in stone yet.
If price is the main consideration, you have to be patient, said Steve Adams of Mor-Sun Construction, a local general contractor who installs solar electric systems as a sideline.
“You’re probably generating less than $200 a year worth of electricity,” Adams said, but he added that today’s solar power systems typically come with a 25-year warranty. “That’s kind of the long-term view, but it’s definitely going to pay back.”
Dilson is hoping an increasing number of home buyers will see the value in being energy-efficient, especially in a city such as Corvallis, recently recognized by Pacific Power for buying large amounts of the utility’s Blue Sky wind power.
At his Hummingbird Meadows model home, Dilson points to the inverter that converts the direct current from the rooftop solar panels into alternating current for household use. A meter displays how many watts the array is generating at any given moment, then calculates how many tons of greenhouse gases that’s keeping out of the atmosphere.
“That’s what I’m proud of,” Dilson said, “to live in a sustainable world, or at least delay our ultimate downfall.”
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