Making Sense of SunSense

Photo by Gray Watson

I called up Southern Energy Management (SEM) yesterday to learn more about the incentives offered by the State of North Carolina and the new SunSense rebates offered by Progress Energy.

In what might be considered too much of a good thing, incentives abound with many agencies pitching in – so many that it gets confusing quickly. What’s easy to forget is that a photovoltaic installation is essentially a power plant. There are many variables, like which incentives apply, the size of the installation, what equipment to buy, how much of the power might be sold to the power company, and other things. It’s not as easy as just calling up the power company and having them drop a cable to your house. Fortunately, solar vendors like Southern Energy can help guide its customers through the process.

Progress Energy’s incentives provide an up-front rebate up to $10,000. I was wondering how Progress could front this kind of money until I read this article by Southern Energy Management. Progress offers this money in exchange for the rights to your Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) for the first five years. Those credits allow a PV installation to sell its electricity at the rate of 11 cents per kilowatt hour. By leasing those SRECs, that’s green energy Progress gets credit for generating, bringing it under compliance with the state’s green energy law.

Southern Energy will be surveying our home on Wednesday to give us a quote on solar panels. Look for more posts as this process progresses.

Here’s SunSense as explained by Southern Energy:

Incentives are a critical part of the solar industry right now, and different programs are being started all over the country with various strategies for helping people go solar. Here in North Carolina, a new incentive program from Progress Energy has already gotten a lot of attention, and we’ve been getting a lot of questions — so we decided to explain what it means for people who might want to try to take advantage of it.

The new incentive is being called the SunSense Solar PV program, and it is only being offered to Progress Energy customers in North Carolina. Basically, it is unique because it aims to help people invest in solar with less of a down payment than usual.

via Making Sense of SunSense « The Smart Energy Exchange.