Calif. OKs residential solar requirement
Starting in 2020, all new homes must meet energy standards
LSACRAMENTO, Calif. ong a leader and trendsetter in its clean-energy goals, California took a giant step Wednesday, becoming the first state to require all new homes to have solar power.
The requirement, to take effect in two years, brings solar power into the mainstream in a way it has never been until now. It will add thousands of dollars to the cost of a home when a shortage of affordable housing is one of California’s most pressing issues.
That made the relative ease of its approval — in a unanimous vote by the five-member California Energy Commission before a standing-room crowd, with little debate — all the more remarkable.
State officials and clean-energy advocates say the extra cost to homebuyers will be more than made up for in lower energy bills. That prospect has won over even the construction industry, which has embraced solar capability as a selling point.
“This adoption of these standards represents a quantum leap,” Bob Raymer, senior engineer for the California Building Industry Association, said during the public comments before the vote. “You can bet every state will be watching to see what happens.”
Several California cities have required that some new buildings include solar power or have made commitments to 100 percent clean energy through various sources. New Jersey, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., have also considered legislation to require that new buildings be solar-ready, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And Hawaii is among the states that have mandated other energy-efficiency measures, like solar water heaters.
But California’s move is by far the boldest and most consequential.
California law requires at least 50 percent of the state’s electricity to come from noncarbon-producing sources by 2030. Solar power has increasingly become a driver in the growth of the state’s alternative energy production.
And a new rate structure next year will charge California customers based on the time of day they use electricity. So homeowners with energy-efficiency features — 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.