Low-income homeowners get free solar panels thanks to cap & trade | Alternative Energy | Forums

$70,000 is low income?

Despite plunging prices in the last seven years, rooftop solar arrays remain an expensive home improvement, costing $15,000 or more. A 2013 study by the liberal research and advocacy group Center for American Progress found that 67 percent of solar arrays installed in California went to ZIP codes with a median household income between $40,000 and $90,000. Wealthier areas accounted for almost all of the rest.

A new California program, however, aims to make solar power available to lower-income families — using money from the state’s fight against global warming.

Run by Oakland nonprofit Grid Alternatives, the effort will install home solar arrays in disadvantaged neighborhoods, using $14.7 million raised through California’s cap-and-trade system for reining in greenhouse gas emissions. That system forces factories, power plants, oil refineries and other large businesses to buy credits for every ton of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases they pump into the atmosphere.

Kianté London used the program to put panels on his three-bedroom North Richmond home, which he shares with two sons and a daughter.

“It helps me and my family a great deal to have low-cost energy, because these energy prices are really expensive,” said London, 46, whose solar array was installed this week. “And I wanted to do my part. It’s clean, green energy.”

London had wanted a solar array for years, but couldn’t afford it on his income as a merchant seaman — roughly $70,000 per year. Even leasing programs offered by such companies as SolarCity and Sunrun were too expensive, he said. The new program, in contrast, paid the entire up-front cost of his array.

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