HOMEBUILDERS ACCEPTING OF NEW SOLAR REQUIREMENT
a battery in particular, allowing energy to be stored for when it is most efficiently used — will avoid higher costs.
“Any additional amount in the mortgage is more than offset,” said Andrew Mcallister, an Energy Commission member who led a building-code review that produced the proposal. “It’s good for the customer.”
The building-code change is one dimension of a broader transition away from centralized power. As with the breakup of the phone monopoly, which allowed customers to choose providers and shop for rates, changes in the way energy is delivered put more control into consumers’ hands.
Those goals have been furthered with smart meters that help control consumption, along with a choice of electricity retailers in many places. And with a combination of residential solar power and battery storage, homeowners can minimize their resort to the grid altogether.
At the end of 2017, California was by far the nation’s leader in installed solar capacity. Solar power provides almost 16 percent of the state’s electricity, and the industry employs more than 86,000 people.
Under the new requirements, builders must take one of two steps: make individual homes available with solar panels or build a shared solar-power system serving a group of homes. In the case of rooftop panels, they can either be owned outright and rolled into the home price, or be made available for lease on a monthly basis.
The requirement is expected to add $8,000 to $12,000 to the cost of a home.
“Our druthers would have been to have this delayed another two or three years,” said Raymer of the building-industry group. But he was not surprised. “We’ve known this was coming,” he said. “The writing was on the wall.”
For residential homeowners, based on a 30-year mortgage, the Energy Commission estimates that the standards will add about $40 to an average monthly payment but save consumers $80 on monthly heating, cooling and lighting bills.
Separately, the revised code counts the installation of electricity-storage systems toward the overall energy-efficiency requirements for new homes, as it already does for solar hot-water heaters.
The solar mandate will also apply to new health care facilities. But the biggest growth area is residential construction.
California averages about 80,000 new homes a year, with about 15,000 currently including solar installations. Overall, at the current rate of home building, the new requirement will increase the annual number of rooftop solar installations by 44 percent.
The utility industry has been preparing for the proliferation of energy-producing homes by studying its impact on the electric grid with tests like a netzero community developed in Fontana, an area east of Los Angeles. The utilities are trying to determine how to manage a system where homes are putting electricity onto the grid during the day and consuming it at night.
“We’ve been working toward it,” said Ram Narayanamurthy, technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group that does research for the nation’s power companies. “What we think we will see is greater and greater efficiency.”
The Fontana research has shown that with a combination of energy-efficiency measures and solar power, the overall cost of owning a home is reduced, he said.
The commission members saw their vote as advancing that vision of the future.
“I’m really happy to get this to the finish line,” Mcallister said. “One big step for mankind.”