If you live in California and have wondered how you could afford to install photovoltaics but have been stopped by either a scanty bank account or fear of re-mortgaging your home, you might have just run out of excuses. The state has just enacted legislation that now makes it possible for homeowners to obtain low-interest loans from local government for the express purpose of installing renewable energy or energy efficiency measures. What is really innovative about this, though, is how you pay for it: you can pay the loan back through your property taxes over time.
One question we often hear at Getsolar.com is, “What happens to my solar system if I decide to sell my house?” You can’t take it with you, of course. The idea is that the system adds so much value to your home that you recoup your investment with a much higher sale price than you could otherwise ask. Under California’s new law, though, the solution is simpler–you just pass the outstanding balance on the loan over to the next homeowner. Technically it amounts to the same thing for the person buying your home (whether it’s an additional $15k built into their new mortgage or attached as separate state loan, they’re still taking on that money), but for you, it means you’re pretty much installing solar with no strings attached. Your home will still look competitively priced on the market if you ever need to sell, and you don’t have to quietly seethe about how you didn’t get your “money’s worth” out of your system before you moved. It’s like pro-rating your system for the time you’ve actually used it. How cool is that?
Perhaps I jumped the gun in saying “if you live in California…” While I have no doubt that other municipalities will follow suit, the two that are blazing this trail are San Francisco and Palm Desert, two very different communities (demographically and politically). The bill that the Governator just signed into law simply allows local governments to make this sort of funding available, rather than mandating them to do so. I hope the trail being blazed is less of a Route 1 and more of a Route 66 phenomenon–that is, nation-wide. This sort of loan is exactly what many homeowners need to make the jump to solar energy: it lowers the risk of the investment and makes something that seems, for some people, desperately out of range, suddenly a lot closer than they thought.
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