It’s that time of year in New England – beautiful fall foliage, frosty mornings, vistas that take ones breath away. It’s also the time to put the gardens to bed and hope that we have enough food stored to last us through the winter. Who am I kidding? I, unfortunately, am not that good of a farmer. We’d surely starve if we had to live off my garden. Luckily, we can rely on local farmers to keep my family fed through the winter.
But there is one type of farming our family has excelled at – growing electrical energy at our home. Speaking as someone who works full time, this type of farming can’t be beat. I don’t need to put it away for the winter, I don’t need to mulch it, I don’t need to build a barn to shelter it from the winter winds. With the generation of solar electricity, you plant once and enjoy the harvest day after day, year after year. There is nothing we have found quite as satisfying as watching the electric meter spin backwards. We have managed, over the years, to conserve enough and “plant” enough to generate all the electricity we use each year.
We even grow some forms of heating energy too, the passive solar and solar hot water panel forms of heating. We have yet to fell and split our own fire wood – we get help from our neighbor with that. We stick to and recommend highly the no maintenance energy garden. It is an investment in the next quarter century of energy, with a great return on the investment both from price stability and environmental perspective. I sleep better at night knowing I am doing what I can to leave this planet a little greener for the next generations. 

As I wrote in the children’s song “What’s a Watt?”:
What’s a Watt? It’s what I’ve got, growing in the open air.
Out on a pole, or on the roof, raising them without a care.
They’re incredible, hardly edible; Watt’s don’t do any harm.
What’s a Watt? It’s what I’ve got, growing out on the farm.

We started out small, just a panel that’s all, added some more when we could.
They don’t need watering, no messy stalls. They don’t need any food at all.
What do you need to raise a Watt? Sunshine certainly helps.
They don’t pollute the environment. Energy that heaven sent….

What can you do with a bunch of these Watts? You might be curious to know.
Light up the night, keep computers bright, they can actually run the whole show.
We watch our Watts and how we use them. Conserving certainly helps.
No matter where you live or work, you can be an energy farmer too…

So if you care about keeping the New England landscape pristine and the maple trees beautiful, take action, small or large, but do something to reduce your use of fossil fuels. Become a farmer of energy. Whether you start with simple conservation measures – buying food locally, making a home-cooked meal using minimal packaging, weatherizing your home or whether you take the plunge into a renewable energy system or an electric vehicle, positive actions heal in more ways than one.
Now a word of warning – farming energy, while clean, quiet and non-polluting, is addicting. I confess – I am happily addicted to growing my own energy and then using as little of it as I can. There are a lot of addictive habits out there to lure us and ensnare us. Getting hooked on energy conservation and renewable energy production is the best. I encourage one and all to joining the quickly growing ranks of energy farmers. You won’t regret it.

Dori Wolfe
Co-Founder and Treasurer, groSolar
Strafford, VT Resident

We love our customers! One of our customers made this great video of their installation:

We recently completed a 4 kW ground mount solar installation in upstate NY. The homeowners came back to groSolar after a successful roof mount PV installation 2 years ago.

I had the pleasure of participating in the Edison Electric Institute Annual Conference in San Francisco earlier this summer. I spoke on the panel on Solar Power which was the platform for some interesting quotes including my quote from the title of this post. You can see some of the other conference quotes here.

On March 25, 2009, Sonoma County became the first county in  California to pursue public financing of distributed solar energy and energy efficiency improvements under AB 811.

Sonoma County established the Sonoma County Energy Independence Program (SCEIP) to provide homeowners with access to long-term loans at below market interest rates to install solar panels or make energy efficiency improvements to their homes. With no up-front costs, the loans are paid back via an additional assessment on the homeowner’s property taxes. The term of the loan depends on the amount borrowed (5 – 10 years for loans less than $5,000, 10 – 20 years for loans greater than $5,000).

grosolar has put together an enthusiastic campaign to get the word out to the Sonoma residents, particularly in Santa Rosa and Petaluma- if at least 50 residents of Santa Rosa and Petaluma  sign up to go solar before December 31, groSolar will cover 33% of the solar-loan payment of the first year of the taxes for each homeowner who signed up. For an average-size solar power system , that means about $700 off of their property-tax bill in the first year!

groSolar wants to give the community an incentive to work together toward a greener world!

Look for our street team in Sonoma County! We will have our groSolar Sonoma County Scion and Street Team out and about in Sonoma County spreading the word on how to plug into solar power!

Click here to see incentives in your area!

groSolar has been working with SunRun solar financing in MA and CA since earlier this year and during that time we have been trying to get the word out about this program because of the amazing benefits for homeowners. However, it seems like we always run into the following when we try to explain this program.

1. It’s too good to be true.
2. I just don’t believe it.

What people are having a hard time believing is that they can get solar electricity installed on their home for as little as $1,000 down. $1K versus the $25K or $30K it would otherwise cost out of pocket. The homeowner then has a flat monthly solar electricity payment that they are making to SunRun which doesn’t change for 18 years. Yep, fixed for 18 years, can your electric company do that? What happens at the end of the 18 years? You can purchase the system at a deep discount (you’ll be told what the system cost will be when you sign up at the very beginning), you can extend the agreement with SunRun or (gasp!) you could remove the system.  But hey, your system will be still be making clean electricity so why would you want to remove it?

Here is a link to a blog post from SunRun that explains this whole program pretty well and also provides a real world example of a couple in Needham, MA. Check it out here.