Lease Your Roof for the Solar Energy Revolution
Solar power, always a popular subject but a tiny piece of America's energy puzzle, could be looking up -- literally -- as power drawn from America's roofs could provide juice without the carbon, trade balance and security concerns of fossil fuels and the huge upfront costs and land-use hassles of bigger solar projects.
Permitting delays for large photovoltaic projects (where sunlight hits silicon chips and creates electricity) are likely to disrupt an industry endeavoring to grow at 50 percent a year. Meanwhile, electricity from large solar thermal farms (in which sunlight heats water to turn electrical-generating turbines) need a vastly upgraded power grid to deliver the power they produce in remote areas to the nation's cities. A solar acreage land rush is now in full swing in the Southwest.
But there's a partial way around such regulatory and infrastructure bottlenecks. Rooftop solar installations -- putting photovoltaic systems on the roof of your workplace or even your home -- have few regulatory impediments and drip into the grid from a lot of points instead of gushing in from one massive operation.
Lots of small feeds could result in a big gain: In a 2005 study, Navigant Consulting estimated up to 710,000 megawatts of solar electricity generation capacity in the U.S. (or 75 percent of the nation's consumption) if every viable residential and commercial rooftop was utilized. (One megawatt is roughly the amount of juice needed for 1,000 U.S. homes.)
