AltEnToday

I started looking in to some energy incentives in the post about the SunPower installation at Macy’s stores, so I thought I might do a little more digging and see what actual incentives are available to consumers and companies considering solar and other alternative energy sources for their facilities.

To start with, I decided to look at the GoSolar California website for some information about tangible incentives that exist for California residents and businesses. For California essentially everything starts with Governor Schwarzenegger’s objective to provide 3,000 megawatts of power by distributed solar generation by 2018. To this end, the state has provided $3.3 billion for funding incentive projects. There is a lot of information on the GoSolar California website, and if you’re a homeowner or business owner considering solar, I suggest you take a good hard look. Also be sure to take a look at the 108-page “CSI Handbook” [PDF] which details essentially every nut and bolt of the program (including things like how to get an inspection, how to claim your rebate / incentives, etc).

The incentives have been structured in a tiered manner as new systems come online - so that your incentive to the program changes depending on how the overall program is performing. There is also about $100 million dollars of funding set aside for incentives for non-PV (photovoltaic) solar - primarily for solar-water heating.

The most important part of these incentives can actually be found at the website CSI-Trigger.com, which provides the current “step” (incentive level) that the program is on. As of this post, for instance, PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) residential programs are at Step 4, while non-residential is at Step 5. This means that residential incentives on a PBI (Performance Based Incentives (ie, what you’re actually producing)) are $0.26 per kWh, and non-residential incentives are at $0.22 per kWh.

So there you have it, the most straightforward explanation that I could come up with about CSI. Of course, this only applies to California projects, and each utility has slightly different rules regarding how they move in to each step. This is to account for the fact that the market environments and solar conditions in each area are different (SDG&E, for instance, is a very sunny but much smaller utility region than Southern California Edison).