Sunny side of new housing
Atrailblazing solar panel mandate for new homes will add wattage to California’s clean energy supply and leadership. But the impact of this latest government directive on how exactly we build homes — a Golden State specialty — could be dwarfed by the environmental and other benefits of simply allowing more California homes to be built.
The California Energy Commission unanimously approved the requirement last week for singlefamily homes and low-rise apartment buildings starting in 2020, echoing a San Francisco mandate that took effect in 2016. With only about 15 percent of such new construction currently being equipped with photovoltaic systems, the commission expects the dramatic increase in clean energy capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 700,000 metric tons over three years.
The mandate will add about $10,000 to the price of a new home, the commission estimates, a concern in a state beset by a dire housing shortage, sluggish construction and soaring prices. But the commission expects homeowners to save twice as much in electricity costs over the course of a 30-year mortgage, which could mitigate much of the effect on the market.
The California Building Industry Association supported the measure, expressing confidence that buyers would be able to recover the additional cost.
While the state’s building costs are high, most experts attribute the housing shortage to zoning and other barriers that block construction altogether. Just meeting the state’s current demand for housing — let alone cutting into a deficit of millions of dwellings — would mean doubling the number of units being built every year.
Much more than rooftops that have yet to be swathed in solar cells, it’s those millions of missing homes and residents that are California’s greatest missed opportunity to combat climate change. Because Californians contribute less to air pollution per capita than most Americans, adding capacity for more of the people who want to move here would reduce emissions overall. Furthermore, because mass transit and other factors make city dwellers more efficient than others, building dense housing in California’s cities, where employment and productivity are highest, would allow more people to relocate from suburbs and exurbs, where long commutes and less dense housing contribute more pollution.
With a few exceptions, however, the environmental, economic, and humanitarian reasons to allow more residential development, particularly of the dense, urban variety, have yet to persuade Californians to do so. We can only hope that the prospect of houses and apartment buildings doing double duty as power plants helps make the case for building a lot more of them.