Going solar at cut-rate cost

By Tony Castro, DailyNews.com

“I seriously started doing the calculations,” said Dickinson, “and it finally financially made sense, especially with the tax changes.”

In the San Fernando Valley, homeowners like Dickinson and his wife, Sara, a jewelry designer, have become the unwitting faces of the solar energy movement – residents who didn’t set out to be green activists but for whom going green makes sense now more than ever.

The Dickinsons are getting a 23 percent discount on solar panel installation arranged by One Block Off the Grid, an Internet-driven group that in a year has become the nation’s largest solar-buying collective. In its short organizing campaign in Los Angeles, the firm has already assisted 102 clients.

“They were able to negotiate a much better price than anything I found on my own,” Dickinson said.

With David Dickinson’s exorbitant monthly electric bill to chill two wine cellars, run two refrigerator-freezers and heat a pool at his 2,000-square-foot ranch house, it long made sense to go solar.

“But the upfront cost was just too high,” said Dickinson, 57, a Canoga Park manufacturer’s controller.

That was even with a 30 percent federal tax credit offered this year, a California state rebate of 10 percent and additional city incentives.

Then Dickinson heard about a San Francisco-based firm that pools homeowners who want energy-saving solar panels on their roofs into large communities that can get better rates by buying in bulk. The company then brokers significantly lower prices from local installers. Substantially lower cost

This past week, workers began installing 34 photovoltaic panels to the roof of the Dickinsons’ 1960s style four-bedroom ranch house – and put the Dickinsons on the solar energy grid.

Dickinson said the deal negotiated with regionally based SolarCity by One Block Off the Grid will cost him about $6 per watt of power capacity. According to the California Energy Commission, the average total cost of a solar photovoltaic system is almost $8 per watt.

Even after customers like Dickinson pay for an inverter to convert the DC power the panels generate into the AC power appliances use, the deal negotiated by One Block Off the Grid is substantially lower than the average in Los Angeles.

“We wanted to create a group purchase program that makes it easier for people to get into solar energy – one that makes them more comfortable with the process,” said Dave Llorens, co-founder of One Block Off the Grid.

The group’s name comes from its goal of removing one average block’s worth of electrical usage each time it runs a community solar purchase campaign in a city.

One Block Off the Grid, according to a spokeswoman, makes its profit through finder’s fees paid by local installers.

Since its founding in June 2008, the company has mounted campaigns in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, New Orleans, Phoenix and Denver.

In its Los Angeles campaign, which began last week and runs into next year, the solar-buying collaborative has been assisting potential clients through its Internet site, www.solarlosangeles.1bog.org. The Web site uses an online tool allowing homeowners to call up a satellite-generated image of their roof and find an estimate of solar rates and costs.

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