Duke Energy to Rent Rooftops (install solar panels)

[underpants]

Source: NY Times

Putting solar panels on the roof can cost a homeowner tens of thousands of dollars up front. That’s a lot of cash in a tight market, even if the goal is clean, renewable energy.

A few utilities are trying another tack: renting the rooftops of homeowners or businesses, and handling the installation and maintenance of the solar panels themselves.

Duke Energy, a major utility serving the Carolinas and parts of the Midwest, aims to rent roof or land space from 425 sites in North Carolina. Final permission from the regulator is forthcoming, but Duke hopes that they will all start producing solar power by 2010.

The 425 sites represents about half of Duke’s original plan to install panels at some 850 sites, at a cost of about $100 million. The state’s Utilities Commission, it seems, considered that plan too ambitious — and too expensive.

Read more: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/duke-energy-to-rent-rooftops/?hp

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According to Dave Scanzoni, a Duke spokesman, all customers, whether they have panels or not, will pay a surcharge on their monthly bills for the project: 8 cents per month for residential customers, and 42 cents for commercial customers. Factories will pay even more.

Duke’s motivations include a requirement in North Carolina that it get 12.5 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2021.

[DemoTex]

1. Duke Energy .. I am dubious of their motives.

Duke would not even come out to clear kudzu vines off their lines and their transformer behind my house earlier this year. I called them early in the summer and predicted, accurately, that the transformer would overheat and blow if the vines got any thicker and inhibited cooling. Duke told me that they would rather take a chance and perhaps have to replace a blown transformer than to send a crew out to clear the vines. The transformer blew in mid-August, sounding like a 122mm Katyusha rocket exploding in my back yard. Duke came out and hung a brand-new transformer.

And then there was the ice storm of early December 2005. That ended up being another Duke Power fiasco.

[underpants]

2. I am too

but it is a good first step

even if they were forced to

[ensho]

3. agree, a first step - first steps have to be taken

and maybe later amended to we can take a stride.