Plainfield
Right from the start, when they retired from their teaching jobs in Long Island, the Taylors knew they wanted to do everything they could to build this home to be as energy-efficient as possible. They paid a little more up front for the super-insulated walls, the low-energy appliances, and the woodstove to help keep them warm all winter.
Taylor took a break from raking leaves and walked over to the garage, lifting his face to the sunshine and squinting as he pointed out one of the biggest expenses in their effort to go green: An array of 10 gleaming solar panels studding the south-facing garage roof.
The sticker price was about $15,000, Taylor said, but with state and federal credits, their out-of-pocket cost was more like $10,000. It cuts their monthly electric bill in half, to about $60 — at that rate, it will take them about 14 years to make back the original investment on a system that’s only built to last between 15 and 20 years.
From a purely financial perspective, that’s not a great return on one’s investment, but for Taylor, that’s not the point. He said the panels make him feel good about himself, and happier on a day like Saturday, when he sees the sun light up the panels and run his electricity meter backwards.
In fact, Taylor said, he and his wife are thinking about adding another 10 panels to the roof, which would require another outlay of cash, but boost production so that their home would use the same amount of electricity it produces.
Having net-zero electricity usage is a dream shared by many, but if the Taylors do raid their bank account for another 10 solar panels, they’re likely to find it a much better deal than they did just seven years ago: both town and state officials are making it easier than ever to break even — or even profit — from a residential solar system.
The Taylors were one of 10 homeowners in Plainfield and Cornish who held open houses on Saturday so that friends and neighbors could see, touch, and ask questions about the value of a residential solar system.
The event was organized by the Plainfield Energy Committee, a six-member group that Co-Chairman Steve Ladd says has helped to focus the community’s enthusiasm and energy for renewable energy and transform it into actual working solar power.
Just a few years ago, Ladd estimates, roughly 30 of the Plainfield and Cornish’s roughly 1,500 households had solar power. In 2014, the committee worked with a vendor to give residents thinking about solar a bulk buy option that brought the per-unit installation costs down. That effort was wildly successful, doubling the number of solar-powered households to a little more than 60.
One house that added solar as a result of that push is owned by Rick and Jeannie Hines on Stage Road.
On Saturday, Rick Hines proudly described his experiences to Cornish residents Paul and Krista Dunne, who were making the rounds to solar-powered homeowners to see if solar panels might make sense for them as well.
“I really wanted a good deal,” said Hines, who works in information technology and has kept careful track of the numbers. In 2014, he didn’t accept the bid offered by the vendor identified by the town at face value, instead asking two other companies to provide bids and going with one of those alternative offers, from a firm called ReVision Energy.
The 20-panel system cost $18,000, but he only paid $6,250 after collecting rebates from the federal government, the state government, and the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative. His electricity bills now run between $27 to $157 a month, but he explained the high-end figures are because he’s using an energy-intensive kiln to make pottery. He estimated the system would pay itself off in eight to 10 years.
The Dunnes said they were exploring putting in a 12- or 14-panel system, and leaving room to expand in the future.
They assumed they would be priced out of the market, but Paul Dunne said they’d been “pleasantly surprised” to hear about their neighbors’ experiences.
The subsidies for solar power also helped Anne Yates, who owns Anne’s Plainfield Country Convenience Store on Route 12A, to install 38 solar panels on the roof of her business in December.
The total cost was $38,000, but she said she recouped $8,500 from the state and got a $9,000 federal income tax credit. She hopes it will save her roughly $400 off the store’s current monthly electric bill of $1,500.
“It would pay off in six or seven years,” she said. “I don’t think that would be too bad.”
Yates said she took the plunge after the town helped her install an electric car charger at the store.
“I wanted to have those cars have renewable energy powering them,” she said.
Lee Rybeck-Lynd, a Dartmouth College professor who has three different solar systems providing all of the power he needs for his home, said he has only a vague sense of the payoff period, because to him, it’s not about the money.
“We’re not contributing to climate change to power our home,” he said.
Those who want to add solar arrays to their New Hampshire homes breathed a sigh of relief on April 7, when the state Legislature took action to extend an electricity-sharing system known as net metering.
The Taylors, the Hines, and others in town all have their solar-energy systems hooked up to the large power grid. That hookup allows them to draw from the public utility on a cloudy day, and it also allows them to feed energy back into the grid on days when their ability to reap the sun’s bounty outstrips their personal consumption needs.
“Net metering really makes (photovoltaic) solar in New Hampshire cost effective,” Ladd, the energy committee co-chairman, said.
Usually, when that happens, homeowners receive a net metering credit from the utility company, but last year, the state hit 50 megawatts, the maximum cap of credits allowable under the law.
For solar enthusiasts, hitting the cap was good in that it showed real growth in the solar market, Ladd said.
“We were at 10 megawatts in 2014 and then, by the middle of 2015, it just shot up and we hit the cap,” Ladd said. “Some of it had to do with the bigger commercial solar farms, but most of it was residential.”
Hitting the cap was bad news for those who wanted to invest in new residential solar installations and found they couldn’t take advantage of the net metering system, dramatically undercutting their ability to recoup their investment.
On April 7, a group of sponsors including Sen. Jerry Little, R-Weare, helped to pass a bill expanding the cap to 100 megawatts.
Ladd said he hopes the move will help to make others in Plainfield and Cornish be more receptive to the message spread by the energy committee.
He said that the price has come down, even since the committee’s first big push in 2014. Because that push tapped most of the area residents who were on the fence, he doesn’t expect to get as much of a response this time around.
Still, he said, “we’re hoping we can get another dozen or so. Plainfield is a pretty green town, and people here are conscientious about renewable energy.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com.