The City of San Francisco launched Solar@Work, a new program that offers solar energy systems to businesses in the Bay Area through an innovative group purchase model. The new program makes it possible, for the first time, for small- and mid-sized businesses and commercial property owners to pay less for solar power than they pay for electricity from the grid without local rebates. This can allow some business owners to save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetimes of these solar power systems. As the first major commercial group purchase of solar power in the United States, Solar@Work will bring together interested participants to buy more than 2 Megawatts (MW) of solar power over the next 6 months.
The Solar@Work model was developed by the City and County of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment (SF Environment), in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Optony. SF Environment found that the main barriers keeping San Francisco businesses and commercial property owners from purchasing solar energy were upfront costs and lack of access to affordable financing. With American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar America Cities program and support from U.S. DOE’s SunShot Initiative, SF Environment proposed the Solar@Work “aggregation” approach, which combines multiple participants into one solar purchasing group, along with a standardized solar equipment lease. To help make this a reality, the program’s stakeholder group, led by the World Resources Institute (WRI), negotiated with solar vendors who could address the unique needs of businesses and property owners in San Francisco, and selected winning vendor, SolarCity.
SolarCity, a national solar integrator with more than 15,000 projects completed or underway, is headquartered in the Bay Area, and is an approved installer with the San Francisco GoSolarSF program. SolarCity expects to hire more than 400 new workers in the second half of 2011, including 100 in the Bay Area. “We believe Solar@Work will provide the most affordable solar options available to small and medium-sized businesses in San Francisco,” said Erik Fogelberg, SolarCity’s director of commercial projects. “SolarCity is honored to have been selected for this important project.” “The city has the ambitious goal of meeting its electricity needs with 100 percent renewable energy, so we need to do everything we can to make sure our local and regional building owners have the ability to install renewables with minimal up-front investments,” said Melanie Nutter, Director of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment.” “Programs like Solar@Work will boost our economic competitiveness, create American jobs, and help reach the President’s goal of doubling our clean energy in the next 25 years,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Program Manager, U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative.
Money Comes Together To Fill Solar Funding Gap
