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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. This Thursday is Earth Day and all this week we're doing segments on the show related to climate science and climate policy. We talked about electric vehicles yesterday. Today we focus on rooftop solar panels. According to one chart, New York and New Jersey ranked second and third among the states when it comes to small-scale solar installations, but California almost has more than all the other states combined.

For homeowners, when does installing a solar panel makes sense economically and environmentally, and how does pricing work, and can it work on buildings in the city, not just private homes in the suburbs?

To talk about where rooftop solar energy fits into the overall picture, we are joined by Seth Blumsack, professor of Energy, Policy, Economics, and International Affairs, and director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State University. Professor Blumsack, welcome to WNYC. Hi.

Prof. Seth Blumsack: Hi, Brian. Thank you for having me on and happy earth week to you and to your listeners.

Brian: And to you. A little later, folks, we'll be joined by the president of Con Ed to talk about their NYCHA rooftop solar program. Let me ask you now, Professor Blumsack, where we are as a nation on solar energy? The country has been talking about it and some people have been romanticizing it since the original earth day in 1970. How much of what kinds of energy actually comes from solar today?

Prof. Blumsack: That's a great place to start, Brian. Solar energy right now in the United States is among the fastest growing sources of energy that we use. The market for homeowner rooftop solar may double within the next couple of years. While it's growing really, really fast, there's still a long way to go. At this point, of our total energy and electricity needs, only a couple percent nationally are met at this point by solar.

Brian: Only a couple of percent. How straightforward is the calculation for an individual of when your expenses are met by savings and payments that you're not making to utility companies or any other cost-benefit analysis of installing and then having the solar panels?

Prof. Blumsack: In concept, this cost-benefit analysis should be pretty straightforward. You would look at the cost of the panels and you would look at all of your energy savings over the life of the panels and how much you're not paying to Con Ed or to whatever your local utility, and you would see if those balance out. The reality is that the economics of rooftop solar are a lot more complicated than that.

To really figure it out, most people are going to have to work with a solar installer or some other professional to try to figure out if solar is worthwhile for them. This is because the solar market has a lot of different incentives that homeowners can take advantage of, and figuring out how all of those incentives fit into the overall solar economics picture can sometimes be complicated, because there's a lot of different programs. There are tax credits that come from the state of New York, for example. New Jersey offers property tax exemptions for the value-added with rooftop solar. There are programs for lower zero-cost loans to finance the initial equipment.

Then there are also utility rules that allow homeowners to get paid for any surplus power that their solar panels feed into the grid, which is kind of cool if you think about it. You could not just be offsetting your utility bill, but you could effectively be selling power to Con Ed or to your utility. All of this stuff together makes solar really attractive for a lot of people, but it can take some work and some working with a knowledgeable installation professional to figure out if it's right for you.

Brian: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls. If you've installed solar panels on your roof, or if you're seriously considering it, let us know how it's working out or what cost-benefit stumbling blocks you're finding in your way if you like the idea of solar for your home, but then you come up upon some difficult realities. 646-435-7280.

You've written about the challenge of incorporating consumer-provided solar energy into the overall power grid. Can people produce excess energy in their homes to sell to the local power company? Does that happen?

Prof. Blumsack: They can do it, and this happens very, very, very frequently. If you have solar panels on your roof or on some other part of your building, and you're producing more solar power than you're using at any given time, the excess in many places, not all, but many, can effectively be sold back to the utility. This is a process that sometimes is called net metering.

The rules for net metering and how much you would get paid to sell your electricity back, sell your surplus solar power back to the grid, varies by state to state, and even by utility to utility. If you're considering a solar installation for your home, just make sure you understand what the net metering rules are, if there are any for your particular utility. This is something that happens very, very frequently.

From the utility's perspective, if it happens enough, this can actually cause some problems. If you think about how the grid was designed and run, it was really designed for the utility to feed you electricity, not the reverse. If there's too much homeowner rooftop solar selling back to the utility, and the utility isn't ready for it, then that that kind of rush of energy being put on the grid can cause some problems with overloading certain kinds of pieces of equipment. So substations, transformers, and that kind of stuff.

Also, if there's enough people doing, it presents a kind of financial problem, because if you put solar panels on your roof and you're reducing the amount of power that you buy from the utility or even selling back to the utility, your electric bill is going down because you're purchasing less energy from the utility, but you're still using the grid, and other people are still using the grid. The utility has to figure out how to continue to pay for all the wires and substations that are needed for people who don't have solar panels on their roofs, or for people who do and just use the grid in different ways than they used to.

In some states, this has caused some financial issues for the utility. The state of Maine, for example, had a solar program that was so successful that they are now trying to figure out how they're going to support the utilities in Maine to pay for the upkeep of the grid. As solar becomes cheaper, right? The cost of solar panels has declined by something like 80% or so in the past decade alone.

As solar becomes cheaper and as it becomes more economical for more households to install, there are more and more utilities that are going to have to figure out how to square this circle of being able to maintain all of the wires and all of the infrastructure without throwing barriers up that would keep consumers from installing and using solar panels.

Brian: Let me take a phone call. Kaden, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kaden.

Kaden: Hi. How are you? I work with an affordable housing non-profit, Fifth Avenue Committee. We have been installing solar on our multifamily buildings. We're beginning to work with low-income homeowners. Solar is great, however financed in New York State almost up to 70% from tax credits and property abatement only works if you make money and if you itemize your taxes. If you don't make a lot of money and you don't itemize your taxes, solar is not financed for you and you still have to have a lot of money out of pocket up front. It feels like it is more of a financial product for people who have money, and less cost-saving product for people who need it.

Brian: Professor, we have about a minute before we bring in our next guest. What would you say to Kaden and anyone else facing that same dilemma?

Prof. Blumsack: I think this is a genuine challenge with increasing the deployment of solar. My understanding is that Con Ed has a kind of innovative program to try to facilitate the financing aspects of getting solar into less wealthy areas. Kaden is exactly right, that the way that a lot of the solar programs are set up, they're primarily going to benefit middle to upper-class customers. This is something that we need to figure out how to change.

Brian: That's a perfect setup for our next guest who happens to be the CEO of Con Ed. For now, we thank our first guest, Professor Seth Blumsack from Penn State. He's the director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy there. Professor, thank you so much.

Prof. Blumsack: All right. Thank you very much for having me on.

Brian: With us now is Tim Cawley, president and CEO of Con Edison, the energy provider for much of New York City and Westchester county, as many of you know. Mr. Cawley, welcome to WNYC.

Tim Cawley: Good morning. Thrilled to be here. Happy Earth Week to you.

Brian: And to you. Let me start on this because I know you have a program specifically for NYCHA buildings and residents. It plays right off our last caller who, in the private housing sector, is still running into obstacles using solar for people of, let's say, ordinary means. Tell us about your NYCHA building solar project.

Tim: Sure thing. I would offer that even our non-NYCHA customers, the regular homeowners, the uptake has really been significant here. 36,000 of our customers have installed rooftop projects over the years totaling about 330 megawatts, a really significant sum and we continue to see that growing.

The NYCHA program is particularly unique in that it really ties together three significant benefits. It provides access to clean, renewable energy for everyone, and that includes low and moderate-income customers. I caught the tail end of your last speaker and that issue was raised. It provides workforce development to NYCHA residents in an incredibly growing arena in our economy. Lastly, bill savings for low and moderate-income customers.

I'll click off the three real quickly. Access to clean renewable. If you're a NYCHA resident, you really don't have the roof space or the means to finance these projects upfront. Our program solves that. We've installed solar at the Carver Houses in Manhattan and the Glenwood Houses in Brooklyn. In about a week, we'll head over to Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn to install about one megawatt worth of solar. That's good for 500 or 600 homes.

In terms of the workforce who's installing the solar panels on the roofs of the NYCHA housing complexes, these apprentice installers are residents of NYCHA. They work for Accord Power and we've subsidized the training of these folks. The beauty of this is they're developing really career skills. It's more than a job. This green economy is growing and these NYCHA residents apprentices will have a career path to follow.

I had the really great opportunity to meet with some of them over in Brooklyn, at the Glenwood Houses, and they are thrilled about the opportunity. They see it as a long-term path for economic growth. The work is interesting. It's green. It feels good to them. We feel great about the workforce development. Lastly, bill savings for customers. Low and moderate can sign up and subscribe to the energy generated by these solar panels and save about $120 a year.

Brian: These solar panels on NYCHA buildings, am I understanding you correctly that these are not so much actually for energy within those buildings, but you're renting the rooftops to provide energy to the general grid?

Tim: Effectively, and really it's through accounting that we handle that, but the panels are on the rooftops. A lot of flat roofs with very little shade, which makes the energy production top-notch. Then we meter the energy produced and net it across those subscribers. The electrons aren't actually getting to those particular houses, but the accounting allows them to be credited for the renewable solar power that's generated on those NYCHA rooftops.

Brian: That's interesting. How broadly applicable could rooftop solar energy be in the city? We generally think of it as on private homes and more suburban thing, but there are all these rooftops in New York on all these big buildings.

Tim: Yes, that's right. This was a pilot with the first three NYCHA buildings. I have to tell you, our partners in this were extraordinary, NYCHA. Solar One provides the training, Accord Power hires the apprentices, and then a number of other groups recruit the workers and help subscribe low and moderate-income customers to it. This is a pilot, but there are a lot of flat roofs. You do have to remember though that if you have a 20 story building, you've got one rooftop so its ability to generate power for the 20 stories is not there.

We installed solar on top of our headquarter building in Union Square and again it does not power the building. We did it in large part to understand the customer's experience in installing distributed solar. I learned a lot from that experience. There is a lot of potential. There's a lot of flat roofs and the solar developers, there's a number of companies out there who are installing. They will do flybys and Google searches and determine from a physical capability standpoint, how much capacity could be installed and they'll pick the best roofs to market for that solar generation.

Brian: Interesting. In our last minute or so, I wonder if you have a comment on something Mayor de Blasio announced just this morning, which is that the city has signed a letter of intent in partnership with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority committing the city to pursue a joint purchase of large scale, renewable electricity sources delivered to the city, which could include Canadian Hydropower, to the extent it's elected or it's equivalent. What's really new there from a Con Ed standpoint?

Tim: I would say it's a great announcement and very, very consistent directionally with where we are headed as a company. We have a clean energy commitment. New York City and New York state have very aggressive goals around the environment. We are incredibly supportive of them at Con Edison and we think we can play a leadership role in that. 100% electricity by 2040, tripling energy efficiency. We will be installing $350 million worth of make-ready EV chargers. I know you had a segment yesterday about range anxiety. We're going to help with that.

We are all in on the clean energy commitment. This contract to bring in renewables into the city is one major step. It will take many people and authorities doing many things to achieve the clean energy future that our customers certainly want and that we want to deliver to them. We're thrilled for the city and it's very consistent with directionally where we're headed.

Brian: Right. Well, it sounds like it's a step because electricity may be cleaner than gasoline, let's say, for cars, but electricity often comes from coal. If we can get renewables more into the pipeline to make the electricity, so much the better, but you're saying it's a very gradual process. 10 seconds.

Tim: Yes. I think this is a big step and 70% renewable by 2030, New York state. That's the governor's goal and that's where we're headed. More and more clean energy for us to plug our cars into and heat our homes with.

Brian: Tim Cawley, the president and CEO of Con Ed. Thanks so much for jumping on with us.

Tim: Thank you. Be well.

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