Every year, approximately 2 million new houses are built in the U.S. Should these homes be built so as to generate their own electricity cleanly and renewably? Or should these homes require new grid and dirty-power plant investments, paid for by all ratepayers?
Installing solar systems when homes are built makes sense for several reasons:
- Installation is cheaper when building a new home than retrofitting an old one;
- the cost can be wrapped into the mortgage -- the best kind of financing;
- it's easier to integrate into building components -- with the potential for better aesthetics;
- if solar were incorporated at a large scale, utilities could make the appropriate adjustments to the grid, saving all ratepayers some money.
Which is why the announcement that the City of Roseville is requiring solar on 10-20% of new housing starts is such good news.
Environment California has a list of other similar home developments here.
Unfortunately, like many things born innocent and beautiful, inevitably someone comes along to exploit it for ugly purposes.
Some homebuilders -- shockingly -- have tried to leverage solar's popularity to allow development on protected open space.
The money quote:
"The bottom line is they want to build 2,450 homes outside the city on sensitive lands," said David Reid of the Greenbelt Alliance. "All the solar panels in the world don't make that environmentally friendly."
And the voters evidently agreed.
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ES Posted 8:11 am
16 Nov 2005
People in the smallish suburb of Livermore have been working for 30 years to protect rural land north of town that is home to much of the last remaining habitat for an endangered plant species. The city adopted an urban growth boundary three years ago to define where growth could and couldn't go, putting the land north of town off-limits to development. The city in recent years has also been working hard to revitalize its downtown and concentrate growth within the city.
Pardee Homes, a subsidiary of Weyerhauser, a giant housing developer, decided to try to break right through the urban growth boundary and build on protected land. To do that, the company moved a PR person to live in Livermore (where apparently she drove around in a gold Lexus) and spent the unprecedented amount of over $3 million (about $500 per yes vote) to try to pass an initiative allowing Pardee to build outside the line. Pardee also attempted to buy votes by offering to build a sports park. The independent fiscal analysis found that it would still be a drain on the city because of the park's maintenance as well as the need for infrastructure outside the city and the major impacts on traffic.
Fortunately, the voters of Livermore saw through Pardee's blandishments and overwhelmingly voted against it (it received only 28% of the votes).
Because Pardee had succeeded in selling the story to an AP reporter as being about a new giant solar development (in spite of all 3 local environmental groups opposing it), subsequent stories in distant papers said voters had rejected solar. That was not the case, and it was not the issue.
The defeat of this development was overwhelmingly an environmental victory.
Elizabeth Stampe, Communications Director,
Greenbelt Alliance,
San Francisco
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