Sungevity, a California-based company that bankrolls the option to lease solar panels for an increasing number of Americans, is coming to five northeastern states — in an ice pop truck.

As part of the company’s Rooftop Revolution campaign, Sungevity representatives will pile into a bio-diesel-powerd ice pop truck equipped with solar panels and tour New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and Delaware. Destinations along the route include events like music festivals, county fairs, farmers markets and minor league baseball games.

Two other solar lease providers, SunRun and SolarCity, are already active in parts of New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

Patrick Crane, Sungevity’s Chief Marketing Officer, had the following to say about his company’s summer initiative:

[w]ith our ‘Rooftop Revolution’ campaign, we are taking the leadership position in breaking through the last major barrier to adoption – raising awareness around the ease, accessibility and most of all, the affordability of solar energy.

Why ice pops? Well, if you couldn’t tell, the campaign is ripe with symbolism, as explained in the press release:

[The ice pops] symbolize solar energy as the refreshing alternative to fossil fuel.  Quarters on Sungevity-branded seeded paper also will be distributed to symbolize the cost savings homeowners’ typically experience through the company’s $0down solar lease.

As hokey as the campaign may sound, who in their right mind is going to turn down a free ice pop in 100-degree heat?

All joking aside, it’s great news that Sungevity is moving into the northeast. While the region doesn’t get as much annual sunshine as some other parts of the country — like the southwest — its residents tolerate some of the highest electricity rates in the country. It is exactly here, where the price for conventional electricity is the highest, that solar power often makes the most financial sense.

Related: Lowe’s Teams with Sungevity to Offer Solar Lease Option, Starting in California

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As a result, more and more U.S. homebuilders are actively building out their solar-powered home offerings. Big-name builders like Pulte Homes, Meritage Homes and KB Home have all been jockeying for top spot as the provider solar-powered, energy-efficient homes.

KB Home is the latest to notch a success.

The Los Angeles-based homebuilder yesterday announced the grand opening of a solar home community in Lancaster, California. Situated in Antelope Valley, KB Home’s Arroyo community is the first in the area to offer solar energy systems as a standard feature on all new homes.

To be sure, the standard systems on offer aren’t particularly large. A single-story, three- to four- bedroom home is designed to accommodate a 1.35 kilowatt (kW) system, according to the press release, and carries an estimated monthly energy bill of $94. Homebuyers can upgrade to a 3.15-kW system to cut their estimated bill to $46 a month. Both sizes are well shy of the national average for residential solar arrays, which is closer to 5.5 kilowatts.

Regardless, with southern California’s abundant sunshine and high electricity prices — and the homes’ energy-efficient construction — buyers may see meaningful savings. A 2008 U.S. Census Bureau study found that Lancaster residents pay on average about $210 on gas and electric bills.

If these 1.35-kW and 3.15-kW systems aren’t doing it for you, don’t worry: an infinitely larger solar power project may soon be coming to Antelope Valley…

Photo courtesy of KB Home.

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His latest report, U.S. Solar Market Trends 2010, was released just a couple of days ago.

In it, you’ll read about the phenomenal growth witnessed by the solar industry in 2010. Main highlights include:

• The capacity of photovoltaic (PV) installations completed in 2010 doubled compared to the similar figure in 2009.
• Much of this gain was due to growth in utility-scale solar PV projects, the capacity of which doubled in 2010, nationwide. But there was strong growth as well in residential and non-residential solar installation, where capacity increased by 60 percent.
• New Jersey, Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Texas all saw a doubling of solar growth; California, the biggest market of all, saw its share of new solar capacity slide to 28 percent from 49 percent in 2009.

But what really caught my eye was this:

Clearly, the average size of residential solar PV systems in the U.S. is increasing. We’ve known this for a while, but for some reason this chart jumped out at me. Several years ago, when we started GetSolar, we would tell homeowners that the average system size was between 3 and 5 kilowatts (kW). In 2010, the average was approaching to six.

As the cost of solar panels has come down in the past 18 months or so, homeowners are opting for larger systems. A rough rule of thumb: the bigger the system, the smaller the monthly electricity bill.

If you’re curious, you can get an idea how much would a 6-kW solar array save you by tinkering around with our solar cost calculator.

Photo (above) of a residential photovoltaic installation in Plymouth, Wisconsin via IREC.

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Last week, Google announced a plan to invest $280 million in SolarCity, a California-based company that offers solar leases in ten states across the U.S.

Hours after, news broke that Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd — a large China-based manufacturer of solar panels — was working on plans to offer a solar home energy lease option of its own. Both developments are likely to increase the availability of solar leases to qualifying homeowners in select states.

Speaking at the Reuters Global Energy and Climate Summit in San Francisco last Wednesday, Suntech America President Steven Chan said the company plans to launch four or five financing programs in the U.S. market in the coming six to nine months. Beyond solar home leases, plans are also in the works for a power purchase agreement (PPA) option for commercial projects and a financing initiative for utility-scale projects.

Suntech’s residential solar lease option is somewhat unique in that it will be spearheaded by a manufacturer. By contrast, the core business of SolarCity — and other solar lease providers like Sunrun and Sungevity — is to provide financing and arrange for solar installation, maintenance and other services.

Why should you care?

Solar leases have become popular in recent years mainly because they enable homeowners to pay a recurring fee for solar panels instead of a large amount upfront. That fee is typically more than offset by savings on monthly electricity bills.

Solar leases aren’t without their limitations, however. Sunrun and SolarCity, for instance, currently only operate in ten or so states. And, just like any kind of financing, standard solar lease offers require homeowners meet minimum credit requirements in order to participate.

Nevertheless, Suntech’s residential solar lease option should help make solar power an affordable, accessible option for more American homeowners. This is especially true because Suntech solar panels are among the most competitively priced on the market today.

Image of Suntech’s building in China (above) via Suntech America.

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To help things along further, Boston last week launched a program to encourage residents to install solar photovoltaic (PV) systems.

“Solar panels provide up to 90 percent of the annual electric usage and in days like today, with the longest period of daylight, the meter is running backwards, selling power back to the grid and to me that’s incredible,” said Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

The Boston Herald has more:

The mayor joined Katharine Kilbourn and Scott Shear who recently installed 22 solar panels on the south-facing roof of their 1860s farm house in Jamaica Plain. A comparable system costs about $25,000. But with the federal tax credit of $7,500, the state clean energy credit of $5,000 and the city’s rebate of $3,000, the initial costs can be cut by as much as 62 percent. In addition, the excess electricity is sold back to the power company.

“We are taking what has been a five-and-one-half year payback and reducing it to less than four years,” said James Hunt, the city’s chief of environment and energy. “This is one of the most cost-effective things that all residents can do.”

Boston’s program is being made possible thanks to a $140,000 grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which authorized the creation of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant for small residential solar PV installations. Assuming each Boston applicant gets the maximum allowable solar rebate of $3,000, the program will have enough funding for about 45 projects. Don’t expect the funds to last too long, in other words…

For more information on the Boston solar rebate program, visit www.renewboston.org.

Photo credit: Renew Boston

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SolarCity is a big provider of solar home energy leases in ten states across the country. Google is, well, Google. The news today is that the two companies are about to get a bit closer.

The Internet search giant made clear its intention to invest $280 million to create a fund that will enable SolarCity to finance more residential solar energy projects.

“We’re excited to be making our first investment in distributed residential solar,” said Rick Needham, director of green business operations at Google.

To date, SolarCity has to its name over 15,000 solar power projects, having financed about 80 percent of them through lease options. Solar leases work from a financial standpoint when the homeowner’s electricity usage profile is such that their post-solar electricity bill and the lease payment sum to an amount that is less than their original, pre-solar electricity bill. State and federal incentives, too, help to make solar leasing a viable options for a growing number of homeowners.

Google, for its part, has invested a total of $680 million in clean-energy technologies. A focus of the company has been large, centralized distribution, like BrightSource Energy’s huge solar energy project in California’s Mojave Desert. Google’s investment in SolarCity marks a noteworthy win for smaller-scale renewable energy projects, collectively referred to as “distributed generation.”

Via Todd Woddy of Forbes Blogs,

“We’ve made several investments in centralized large-scale renewable energy projects so the thing that was particularly attractive to us was that this was large-scale deployment of distributed generation,” Rick Needham, Google’s director of green business operations, said in an interview. “By providing more capital into this innovative business market and by being one of first corporates to do this, we hope others will follow.”

For more information about solar panel lease options, feel free to contact GetSolar.

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This may lead some of you to ask, What the heck is a microinverter?

Luckily for everyone involved, GetSolar’s very own Annie Lindseth has already has a concise explanation:

Solar panels need (micro)inverters to convert the electricity they produce to a type that can be used at home. Solar photovoltaic panels produce DC (direct) electrical current, and household appliances use AC (alternating) electrical current. AC and DC refer to the direction that electrons flow when electricity is created. Technical details aside, the key point is that electricity produced by solar panels must be converted from its raw form to a more usable one. Inverters make this conversion possible.

Micro-inverters perform this energy conversion for individual panels or small groups of them, not for the entire system. Traditionally, a solar system would have one inverter for all of the panels, which limits the amount of equipment needed. However, micro-inverters offer adefinite efficiency advantage. Here’s why: With a traditional inverter, the solar system can only reach the efficiency of the least efficient panel. Efficiency can vary because of dirt on the panels, shading, or mechanical malfunctions. If each panel has its own inverter, however, all can operate at their maximum possible efficiencies, optimizing the amount of electricity produced in the whole system.

Ta-da! With this in mind, it’s worth noting that this added efficiency does typically come at a higher cost: solar home energy systems with microinverters generally cost more than systems that have a centralized inverter.

This latest announcement from Enphase is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Among them, the new 215 Microinverter:

• Comes with a 25-year limited warranty (Enphase previously offered a 15-year warranty)
• Offers record efficiency (a weighted power conversion efficiency of 96 percent according to CEC guidelines, for you tech dorks)
• Delivers 13 percent more power (at 215 W AC) than previous generations

Beyond Monday’s news, Enphase’s press team has been active lately. Last week the company released data that it claims show the reliability of microinverters to be 45 to 70 times greater than traditional centralized inverters.

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As of May 1, SRP customers who install a residential solar photovoltaic (PV) energy system will be eligible to receive a rebate worth $1.35 per watt (solar panels are sized in watts). The rebate will be capped at 5 kilowatts (kW), which means that a homeowner who installs a system that’s 5-kilowatts or bigger in size could receive $6,750 in incentives.

Here is SRP’s explanation of how it has restructured the program:

SRP has set aside funding for a total of 4.5 megawatts (MW) of residential solar electric installations through April 30, 2012. The incentive level is offered at $1.35 per watt, up to 5 kilowatts (kW) for the first 2 MW of installations and adjusts to $1.20 per watt for another 1.5 MW of installations, ending at $1 per watt for the remaining 1 MW of installations.

In addition to solar rebates offered by SRP and other utilities, like APS and Tucson Electric Power, Arizona residents can also take advantage of a $1,000 state tax credit, as well as a 30-percent federal tax credit. Together, these various incentives help reduce solar installation costs.

Homeowners who install solar panels enjoy significantly lower electricity bills for many years after first going solar. That 5-kW solar array mentioned above, for example, could reduce monthly electricity costs by about $720 per year, according to SRP.

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Having recently acquired land in West Hills Village in Valencia, the company will build energy-efficient homes on 43 lots. Each home will come with a photovoltaic (PV) solar energy system that will reduce owners’ electricity costs, saving thousands of dollars in the coming years. The PV solar panels will of course also benefit the environment.

Here’s a requisite snippet from the press release:

“KB Home has a strong relationship with Newhall Land and we are pleased to be working with them again in Valencia, one of the most-desirable submarkets in the greater Los Angeles area,” said Steve Ruffner, president of KB Home’s Southern California division. “We look forward to introducing area buyers to our Built to Order™ approach, and to offering some of the most energy-efficient homes on the market today, with solar power systems included in every home as a standard feature at this and many more of our new home communities throughout Southern California.”

This latest news comes after KB Home announced plans to open ten “all solar” communities across southern California. Notably, some of the company’s solar-home offerings are downright luxurious. Potential buyers can selection from “floor plans ranging from 2,941 to 3,646 square feet with up to six bedrooms, four baths, and three-car tandem garages.”

Awesome — now I’ll finally have room to park my three Tesla roadsters. Turns out you don’t have to live in a yurt to be considered green, after all…

Related: KB Home recently announced the launch of its Energy Performance Guide (EPG), which helps buyers understand the likely energy costs of various KB Home models.

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On this topic, EchoFirst may be onto something. In addition to using sunlight to generate electrical power, as conventional PV panels do, the company’s energy system captures the sun’s thermal energy, which may then be used for heating water and home air conditioning.

The result, according to the company, is a system that operates at around 50 percent efficiency. Here’s more on how it works:

Basic PV panels draw energy only from a narrow spectrum of the sun’s energy to create electricity. The remaining energy, which is mostly in the form of heat, remains unused. The simple but powerful idea behind Echo is to capture a much wider spectrum of the sun’s energy — to utilize those same PV panels to generate both electricity and heat. Because Echo uses the same PV panel to generate both electrical and thermal (heat) energy, it’s more efficient.

Sounds pretty cool, huh? Cooler still is the fact that Echo’s product may be added to conventional solar PV panels (though I haven’t been able to determine whether retrofits are feasible).

While EchoFirst is still a relatively new company, several U.S. homebuilders — Meritage Homes, Wathen Castanos Hybrid Homes and ZETA – are intrigued enough to give the systems a try. It was announced today that the solar technology will be powering several new home communities in California, Arizona and Nevada. Mike Nimon, President of Wathen Castanos Hybrid Homes, had the following to say:

A net zero energy home — a home that generates as much energy as it uses —  has long been the dream of homeowners seeking energy independence and financial security. Echo provides the technology to deliver — affordably and efficiently — a zero energy home at a more attractive cost basis than the basic solar electric systems seen in the market.

>> Related: Net-Zero Home to Feature Solar Panels, $0 Electric Bill

Formerly of SunPower Corp., EchoFirst’s CEO, Vikas Desai, offered the following sound bite:

Echo is an affordable, practical solution for homebuilders and homeowners who want a complete solution to their energy problem. With Echo, a net zero energy home is no longer ‘the home of the future’ — it’s a practical available option today. Echo delivers zero energy home performance — and the beautiful roof-integrated aesthetics and curb appeal demanded by builders and homebuyers alike.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that EchoFirst recently changed its name from PVT Solar, which presumably stood for “photovoltaic thermal” solar. I’ll be the first to say that “Echo Solar” has a much nicer ring to it…

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