Thoughts on Solar

Yesterday we wrote about our most recent foray into the California Solar Initiative (CSI) data and how that data revealed trends regarding the costs of solar in SCE’s service area during the first half of 2011. We continue today with a look into the equipment that was specified for these projects and explore who’s hot and who’s not.

CSI Data Generally and Equipment Specifically

As a reminder, our data set for this analysis consists of an extract from the CSI Working Data from 8-24-2011 that includes data for SCE installs where major status activity took place during the first half of 2011.  That data set consists of a total of 6,306 projects of which 698 are “delisted” (meaning the project’s rebate reservation has been cancelled for some reason), 3,131 are “installed” (completed or in some stage of rebate payment) and 2,477 are “pending” (in some stage of the process from initial rebate application filed but no rebate claim yet filed).  For today’s analysis, we will exclude the “delisted” projects from our data, leaving a total of 5,608 projects to analyze.

CSI tracks data about equipment used on projects in great detail.  In particular, for every project, CSI allows for up to seven different panel manufacturers and ten different inverter manufacturers!  So how many of our projects use multiple panels or inverters by different manufacturers?  We would expect not many, and the data supports that surmise.  Only 11 projects reflect two different solar panel manufacturers on the same project and in most of those cases the installer has substituted one solar panel for the one originally designated.  (Indeed, one project reflects four different panels being identified to CSI for the same project, finally settling on what appears to be two 180 Watt panels plus six 175 Watt panels feeding a single string inverter - curious design, that!)  Similarly for inverters, only 24 projects have two different inverter manufacturers specified and no project reflects more than two.  Given that, our analysis will only look at the first specified panel and inverter manufacturer.

Solar Panel Trends

So what is happening with solar panels?

Overall, there are 85 different panel manufacturers included in the data; however, most of them account for very few projects.  If we apply a reasonable filter to this data and only look at solar panels that appear in 50 or more projects, the number of represented manufacturers drops from 85 to 14, and the total number of represented projects falls from 5,608 to 5,079.  In other words, those fourteen manufacturers account for 90.6% of all of our projects, as demonstrated in this first graph. In fact, the distribution is even tighter with only five manufacturers exceeding 10% of the total: Suntech Power (18.7%), Sharp (14.8%), SunPower (14.3%), Kyocera (12.8%) and Yingli Green Energy (10.8%).

Solar Inverter Trends

There are twenty-three different inverter manufacturers represented in the CSI data, reflecting the greater complexity of inverters and the more rigorous path required to bring an inverter to market in the U.S.  Filtering for manufacturers represented by ten or more systems cuts the list from 23 down to just 13.

SMA America is the runaway winner in this competition.  Under their own label, they account for 35.4% of all of these projects.  Moreover, the majority, if not all, of the “SunPower” inverters are actually re-branded SMA inverters.  When the SunPower inverters are added in, SMA accounts for a whopping 48.2%.  That leaves only six other manufacturers to exceed even 1% of the total: Fronius USA (19.8%), Enphase Energy (15.2%), PV Powered (5.5%), Kaco New Energy (3.1%), Power-One (3%) and SatCon Technology (3%).

Two things of interest in those last numbers - the inroads of relative newcomer Enphase Energy (which was only founded in 2006), and the inclusion of SatCon, since alone among that list, it only sells central inverters for the commercial market (where it is dominant).

Popular Pairings

That is how the different manufacturers stack up head-to-head, but what about combinations?  Are there pairings of  panels and inverters that are most commonly preferred?  The data reveals five combinations that account for more than 5% of the total: Suntech panels with SMA inverters (13.5%); SunPower panels with “SunPower” (i.e., SMA) inverters (12.4%); Sharp panels with Enphase micro-inverters (10.3%); Yingli panels with Fronius inverters (8.2%); and Kyocera panels with Fronius inverters (8.2%).

Winners and Losers

While certain pairings are popular - are they cost-effective and how well do they perform together?  We decided to look at system combinations from an average $/Watt perspective and from an average CEC efficiency perspective to see what jumps out of the data.

Here’s the first thing that struck us - picking a system with lower-tier panels does not guarantee a lower installation cost.  In fact, many of the bottom-tier panels (none of which made the cut in our discussion of panel manufacturers above) had install costs well above our overall average for the data set ($6.37/Watt).  For example, we found a handful of systems using solar panels from such luminaries as Apollo Solar Energy, SET-Solar, and REC ScanModule where the average installation cost was more than $10/Watt!

Who was on the very low end of the install cost curve?  Gloria Solar, Suniva, Kaneka, Silray and Solaria each had a handful of installations that were below $4.50/Watt.

More significantly, how did our most popular pairings perform?  Here’s the data:

What is up with the Sharp & Enphase combination?  While Enphase installations are known to cost a bit more than a comparable string inverter installation (confirmed by our own experience), they certainly don’t cost $5/Watt more!  Rather, it turns out that the overall average for all Sharp-based systems is $8.53/Watt (nearly $2.00/Watt above the average) with prices ranging from a low of $6.17/Watt (when paired with a Solectria inverter) to a breath-taking high of - are you sitting down? - $19.30/Watt when paired with a Sharp inverter.  So who installed that system, you ask?  You’ll learn all about it (or at least all that we can tease out of the data) later in this series.

Shifting our attention to efficiency, thin-film module maker First Solar gets the highest overall ranking, 91.7%, thanks to its extremely high STC to PTC ratio.  On the more embarrassing end of the scale, Sunlan solar brings up the rear, averaging only 80.7%.  From our list of the most popular solar panels, Sanyo (long a Run on Sun favorite) does the best, averaging 89.3% across a variety of inverter combinations.  The rest of the top five are: Canadian Solar (87.6%), SunPower (87.5%), Suntech (87.2%), and Schuco (87.0%).  The bottom-five of our best selling panels?  That dubious honor belongs to: Sharp (86.0%), BP Solar (85.8%), ET Solar Industry (85.6%), Trina Solar (85.5%), and REC Solar (85.1%).

As for our five most popular pairings, here is the data:

That is a pretty tight grouping, with a total range of just 2%.  To break out of that mold with a conventional panel/inverter pairing, the Sanyo & SMA combination is your best bet, weighing in at 89.5%.

Who Uses What?

Finally, we decided to see what equipment combinations are preferred by the biggest installers in the market.  The following table lists the top-five installers and reports the number of projects in the data, their most frequently chosen solar panel (and % of times used) and their most frequently chosen inverter (and % of times used).

Collectively, these 5 installation companies accounted for 42.8% of the projects in the CSI data.  Certainly companies this large must have some real clout when it comes to negotiating prices, thereby allowing them to pass along those savings to their many customers. 
Or do they?

Find out in our next installment!

The California Solar Initiative (CSI) is responsible for overseeing solar rebates for California’s three Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs): PG&E, SCE and SDG&E, and in that role the CSI program collects some very interesting data.  As we have in the past, we decided to dip into the data from the first half of this year to gain some insights into the State of Solar in California.  Over the next several days we will be reporting on what we have learned - and there are some very surprising things in here to be sure!

Overview & Methodology

A word first about how we processed the CSI data.  We downloaded the most recent active data set as of this writing (the August 24, 2011 data set to be precise) and parsed it into Excel.  Since we were only concerned about systems in our service area, we excerpted out just the data from SCE.  To narrow our focus more, we wanted to only look at applications that had significant status during the first half of this year.  The CSI data has a host of date fields - we took the latest of the fields ranging from First Reservation Date to First Completed Date as our Status Date and excerpted those that fell between 1/1/2011 and 6/30/2011 - a total of 6,306 data points.

That’s a fair amount of data but it necessarily omits any data at all from the municipal utilities such as Pasadena Water & Power (where we do much of our work) or LADWP.  Unfortunately, none of the munis make their program data generally available - which is particularly odd given that the local residents actually own those utilities (and thus, their data) - but that is a topic for another day.

Finally, for the purpose of these posts, all system sizes are reported in CSI Rating AC Watts (to account for differences in equipment choice and system design) as opposed to DC (or nameplate) Watts.

What can we say about those 6,306 projects?  Collectively they account for 164.7 MW of new solar power at a total installed cost of just over $1 billion - with incentive amounts totaling $219 million - roughly 21% of the installed cost.  Unfortunately, not all of those are built - or even ever will be.  Fully 11% (698) of those projects have the status ‘Delisted’ - meaning that they have been cancelled for one reason or another.  Those delisted projects account for 37.8 MW of potential solar power that presumably will never see the sun.  (Do some installation companies have a significantly higher rate of “delisted” systems?  We will answer that question in a subsequent post - stay tuned!)

The remaining 5,608 are split between “Installed” and “Pending” with 55.8% (3,131) installed and 44.2% (2,477) pending.  Breaking that down a little more, the installed projects account for  33.8 MW worth $240.1 million with incentive amounts totaling $57.1 million.  In contrast, the pending projects account for almost three times as much capacity at 93 MW worth $575.8 million with incentive amounts totaling $120.6 million.  (That is, nearly three times the to-be-installed solar cpacity for roughly twice the rebate dollars.)  On average, installed projects cost $7.09/Watt whereas pending projects cost $6.19/Watt - a positive trend for consumers since it shows the cost of solar power systems declining over time.

Does Bigger = Lower Cost?

Finally, for today, let’s examine whether the data supports the notion of solar economy of scale - that is, as system size increases does the installed cost/Watt decline?  To get a handle on that, we took two different cuts through our data set - “small” installed or pending systems <10 kW, and “large” systems ranging between 10 kW and 1MW.

First, here’s the graph for the “small” systems (consisting of 4,992 installed or pending systems - click on the graph to view full size).  As the trend line makes clear, larger systems really do drive down costs - decreasing from over $10/Watt at the small end of the range to just above $6/Watt for systems around 10 kW.

Another interesting observation from this graph are the outliers - with some data points below $3.00/Watt (mostly from self-installed system) all the way up to nearly $18/Watt!!! (We will have way more to say about those data points - and who is responsible for them - later in this series.)

If we now look at larger systems - those between 10 kW and 1MW - our data set has 587 such systems and again, the trend line shows the decline in system costs as system size increases.  (Note, because there is such a huge range in system sizes on this graph, we plotted the system size on a log scale.)  Some of these outliers are also pretty curious - a 200 kW system coming in at over $14/Watt?

Of course, this data is showing what happens when an individual project gets larger and there the trend is clear.  One might well ask, does the same trend apply to larger installation companies?  In other words, as a company has more and more installs, does that economy of scale translate into lower costs for the end consumer?  That’s a very interesting question and the answer - coming in our next post - just might surprise, or maybe even disturb you.

If there are some other cuts of this data that you would like to see, just let us know in the comments.  Trust me, we are just getting started!

(Editor’s Note: Part 1 of this series - Understanding Your Bill can be found here.)

Commercial solar power systems are economical now - and in the first part of our series we explained how understanding your bill is the key to understanding what is currently driving your costs and how much you will be able to save.

Now we turn to the next step in preparing to install a commercial solar power system - understanding the applicable rebates and tax incentives.  We have written at great length before about these topics, including a blog post summarizing the year-end state of all solar power rebates in the Run on Sun service area and our solar tax incentives page provides great detail into this topic for all types of system owners - commercial, residential and non-profit.  In this post we will analyze just those rebates and incentives that are applicable to commercial solar power installations.

PBI vs EPBB Rebates for Commercial Solar Power Systems

Rebates for commercial solar power systems come in two flavors - Performance Based Incentives (PBI) and Expected Performance-Based Buydown (EPBB) - but PBI rebates are by far the more common for commercial systems above 30 kW.  EPBB rebates are lump-sum payments made based on the expected performance of the system.  The rebate rate is denoted in dollars per Watt based on the calculated AC Watts for the system.  EPBB rebates are nice for the consumer as the money is paid as soon as the system is approved, but for larger systems, they represent too much upfront risk for the utility.  Since there is usually no requirement to monitor the performance of the system, the utility ends up putting out its money with little guarantee of reaping the expected benefit.

PBI rebates, on the other hand, are paid out over five years based on the actual performance of the solar power system as verified by monitoring devices attached to the system inverter(s).  PBI rebates are denoted in cents per kilowatt hour generated.  Since the utility only pays for power actually provided, rebate dollars are guaranteed of providing the bargained for benefit. However, because of the need to provide the utility with verified performance data, PBI rebates increase the Operations & Maintenance expense of a commercial solar power system - at least for the five years of the rebate.  On the other hand, if your system is well maintained and conservatively designed, you may actually receive more in rebate payments than originally projected.

Each utility will have a threshold system size beyond which the system owner must take a PBI rebate.

Regional Rebate Amounts for Commercial Solar Power Systems

Of late there has been a great deal of turmoil among the local municipal utilities regarding their rebates.  This has lead to uncertainty and delays.  As of this writing, here is the landscape for commercial solar rebates in the Run on Sun service area:

This means that as of this writing, only SCE and PWP are paying rebates on commercial solar power systems greater than 30 kW. While LADWP is expected to come back online this summer, in what form remains to be seen.

We believe that these suspensions have come about because the lobby for commercial solar rebates is small and too often silent.  Of course, when no public discussion occurs before the decision is made to suspend rebates - as happened in both Glendale and Burbank - it is pretty hard to organize solar supporters.  Indeed, in Los Angeles, where the plans to severely limit solar rebates were publicly debated, the solar community came out in numbers to argue for those rebates - which resulted in LADWP only suspending their program for a comparatively short time.

The conclusion in inescapable - until there is a statewide feed-in tariff at a reasonable rate that offers predictability along with economic viability, the market for commercial solar in this state will continue to be subject to the caprice of unaccountable bureaucrats.

Tax Incentives for Commercial Solar Power Systems

While the news regarding rebates remains murky, the news on the tax front is - at least for this year - very good.

One caveat before we begin - while we believe this information to be accurate as of the date that it is written, you must always consult with your tax professional as to the applicability of these incentives to your tax situation.  Accountants shouldn’t design solar power systems and we don’t give tax advice.

Commercial solar power systems qualify for a federal Investment Tax Credit of a full 30% on the direct cost of the system.  (By “direct cost” we mean those costs directly associated with installing the solar power system.  The applicability of the Credit to indirect costs - such as deciding to re-roof your building before adding solar - must be decided on a case-by-case basis - see why that tax pro gets paid the big bucks?)  That Credit can be taken over two years and is a substantial incentive if you have the tax liability to offset.  Fortunately for systems that are put in service in 2011, commercial solar power system owners can elect to receive a Grant directly from the Treasury for the full 30%, regardless of their tax appetite.  Moreover, that Grant is paid out typically within 60 days of project completion, as opposed to being credited in the next tax payment cycle.  This provision in the tax code is subject to expiration at the end of this year, and there is no telling whether a more conservative Congress will renew it.  (The tax Credit, however, continues through 2016.)

Commercial solar power systems also qualify for accelerated depreciation.  For the past several years, that was a five year period with 50% in Year 1 and the remaining 50% divided evenly over the next four years.  (California offers a similar depreciation schedule.)  However, once again 2011 is special.  This year alone, that depreciation is 100% in Year 1, meaning that system owners may realize more of their savings sooner.

Collectively, rebates and tax incentives can reduce the cost of a commercial solar power system by 50% or more.  When combined with the savings from the energy generated, it is easy to see why a commercial solar power system is one of the best investments a building or business owner can make.

Up Next - Part 3 of Our Series: Understanding Your Bid for a Commercial Solar Power System

While many companies sit on the sidelines with accumulated capital, we have argued before that spending some of that capital on a commercial solar power system makes great economic sense.  But for some companies (and their facility managers and accountants and Board Members, and so on), commercial solar is still a mysterious concept, filled with confusing jargon and competing claims.  Can a commercial solar power system really be as economically beneficial as the proponents (like this blog) claim?

Rather than answer that question directly (well, ok, the answer is YES but please read on), we thought it would be useful to actually layout the case for commercial solar power in some detail.  Although no blog post (or series of blog posts) can take the place of a face-to-face conversation that takes into consideration all of the relevant  elements of a specific company’s situation, there are enough common elements that can and should be explained to demystify the overall process.  That is the task of this series - to teach you, the business/building owner everything you need to know in preparation for installing a commercial solar power system on your building.

First things first - before you ever even call a solar power company - and we will explain how to find the good ones in Part 3 - you need to start with something more mundane: your electric bill.  When was the last time that you really looked at your electric bill?  For many business or building owners the answer is never.  Oh sure, you certainly know how much you are paying - but do you know why you are paying so much?  What horrors are hiding in your bills?

The Shocking Facts Hiding in Your Electric Bill

The Basics - Usage & Demand

There is probably a very good reason why neither you, nor anyone else at your company has ever looked closely at your electric bill - it is terribly confusing.  Let’s start with some basics.  Almost every commercial user pays for at least two major components on their electric bill: usage and demand.

Usage is the more familiar component as it is the basis for your residential electric bill.  It is based on the total amount of energy that you used over the course of the billing cycle (usually one month for commercial customers).  Usage is measured in total kilowatt hours (kWh). Usage charges are based on some specific cost per kWh which is defined in the rate schedule that applies to your utility account (more on rate schedules in a minute).

Demand is a bit more complicated - it is usually defined as the greatest amount of power that the utility has to provide to you over a measured period of time during the billing cycle.  For SCE customers, demand is the peak power required during any 15 minute period over the month.  That means that if your building has multiple HVAC units and they all come online during the same 15-minute window, your demand will spike much higher than it would if those units came on in a staggered fashion (since the power demand of an HVAC unit is highest when the compressors are running as they will be when the unit is first started.)  Demand charges are billed per kilowatt (kW) of power.

Rate Schedules

Every utility has a variety of rate schedules that might apply to a commercial building and you could pay vastly different amounts - that is to say you could save a lot of money - by switching to the most economical rate schedule for which you qualify.

SCE’s GS-2 Rate Schedule Model (click for larger)

Case in point - SCE has two rate structures that commonly apply to small to medium size commercial buildings: GS-1 and GS-2.  (For those ready to get into the details, here is a link to the GS-1 rate schedule and here is a link to the GS-2 rate schedule.)  The beauty of the GS-1 rate schedule is that it has no demand component.  But here’s the catch - your peak demand must not exceed 20 kW in any three of the past twelve months.

We had one potential customer who was paying under GS-2.  When we analyzed their bills - the first step in preparing a proposal for installing a commercial solar power system - it was apparent to us that based on their bills, they were entitled to actually be billed under GS-1.  When we met with their facilities manager to discuss our proposal, we pointed out that they could have saved over $2,000 the past year if they had been on the right rate schedule and we encouraged them to contact SCE about getting switched to GS-1.  (No, SCE had not suggested that to them.)  Strangely, none of the other solar companies that they had talked to had explained that to them, yet once they called SCE, they were switched over immediately.  (Oh, and they hired us to handle their commercial solar installation!)

Here’s another example.  PWP generally has low rates, but their mid-level commercial rate schedule (M-1)  has one of the most significant “gotchas” we have seen anywhere - and we are yet to speak to a single customer who was aware of this before we pointed it out.  The M-1 rate structure includes a demand component (labeled “distribution"), but unlike SCE’s demand component described above, PWP charges you for the peak demand in any 15-minute window for the past 12 months! That means that if on one unlucky day, everything in your building comes online all at once during the same 15 minutes, not only will you pay for that peak demand that month, you will pay for that peak demand for every month for the next year (unless a higher demand comes along to take its place)!  For one of our customers, they had a peak demand one month that spiked at 82 kW, yet their average for the next 12 months was only 36 kW.  Under the M-1 rate schedule, they paid $5,300 more than they would have if they only paid for their monthly peak demand.

Models Matter

At Run on Sun we have devoted a lot of time to mastering the intricacies of the various rate schedules used by the utilities in our service area.  We have turned that understanding into a series of rate schedule models that allow us to accurately model your prior utilities bills and then make accurate predictions regarding your potential savings from a host of measures - changing rate schedules, reducing your usage or peak demand, or installing a solar power system. Some companies simply assign a fixed amount of savings per kWh that their proposed solar power system will produce and call that your potential savings.  Such an approach ignores the complexities of how your electric bill is actually calculated and can mask other steps that you could take to save money.

We firmly believe that energy efficiency is way more cost effective than energy generation and we will share with you our ideas and observations on how you can save money long before you throw the switch of (or even sign the contract for) your commercial solar power system.  So before you pick up the phone, pick up your electric bills and check out what is hiding there - it is the first step in getting the greatest value from your commercial solar power system.

Up Next: Part 2 of Our Series - Understanding Solar Rebates and Tax Incentives as they apply to a Commercial Solar Power System.