 
Connecticut might have jumped the gun last year in setting up a financing program for solar panel installations in light of funding now being provided by the private market.
In partnerships with a San Francisco company, Alteris Renewables Inc. has begun marketing a service that allows owners to pay a monthly charge for solar panels on their home, covering the cost of installation, maintenance and insurance.
Wilton-based Alteris is marketing the program initially in Massachusetts in partnership with SunRun Inc., which offers its customers a money-back performance guarantee on the solar energy systems it installs.
Bill Kanzer, director of marketing for Alteris, said the companies are unlikely to offer a mirror program in Connecticut largely due to the establishment last August of a similar financing program overseen by the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund.
Kanzer hinted the company is on the brink of establishing a financing vehicle in New York state, without providing details.
Backed by Boston-based Riverside Partners, Alteris has been growing rapidly since its formation last year from the merger of Solar Works and SolarWrights. Alteris recently amplified its presence in upstate New York by acquiring Renewable Power Systems L.L.C., which has installed more than 170 solar energy systems in the Albany area since its launch in 2002.
For its part, Alteris and its predecessor companies take credit for more than 2,200 installations in the Northeast over a 30-year period, which it says makes it the area”™s largest integrator. The company now lists 16 locations in the Northeast, including its Wilton headquarters and another in Stamford.
“Before, you had to be a dyed-in-the-wool technologist to have one of these systems,” Kanzer said. “Now it”™s easy.”
SunRun charges customers a down payment of at least $1,000, and says monthly bills work out to be equal to what they would pay getting electricity from their utility. The contract runs 18 years, at the end of which customers have the choice of renewing at a 10 percent discount of whatever utilities are charging at that point in time; buy the system outright (today”™s solar panel systems lose their power after 25 years); or allowing SunRun to repossess the system at no charge to either party.
Connecticut already claims credit for becoming the first state in the nation to create a solar-lease financing program for residents who make no more than 200 percent of the median income in their area ”“ for instance, $235,000 for a family of four in Stamford.
Under the CT Solar Leasing program, residents and businesses can lease a photovoltaic system for 15 years, with the cost for an average 5-kilowatt system coming out to $120 monthly over that period, versus an upfront cost of $43,000. At the end of the contract, the lessee can extend another five years at a lower rate ($36 in the previous example); buy the system outright at its appraised value at that point; or pay to have it removed.
The Connecticut program was one of several included in a March study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, whose researchers concluded that interest in solar leasing programs may ebb after President Bush signed the Energy Improvement and Extension Act last October, which eliminated a $2,000 cap on a 30 percent tax credit for solar panels.
Kanzer said that the tax credit is also being priced into leasing programs like SunRun”™s, however, eliminating any advantage one could obtain by buying a system up front.
To date in Connecticut, businesses have installed solar panels that can generate 2.6 megawatts of electricity on a cumulative basis, according to the Solar Connecticut Web site, while homeowners generate 2 megawatts of solar energy in the aggregate.
As funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act trickles in, the state is already planning to use some of its ARRA funding to introduce a solar hot water incentive program by August, with the goal of 600 residential installations and 100 commercial sites.
The program would award a $200 incentive for every 1-million British thermal units of energy capacity, capped at $3,600 for a four-person household and adjusted upward or downward depending on the size of a family.
