Summer is just around the corner, and that means long days and lots of direct sunlight beating down on rooftops across the nation. But, hey, we want to help everyone offset the rising cost of blasting the AC so from now through May 18  we’re offering a $25 Amazon gift card for every qualified referral you send our way.

Know someone with high energy bills? Or someone who only turns on the AC for an hour a day to save money? Maybe someone with a pool? (Those things are total energy hogs!) If you do, and you think they might be ready to start talking about solar, then send ‘em our way.

Of course, solar isn’t for just anyone – yet – so here are some tips to help you figure out if your neighbor/cousin/sister’s friend’s uncle would be a good fit:

• They have high electric bills, like $100 a month or more
• Their home has large, ample roof space
• There is minimal shading surrounding their home
• They have or are planning to install appliances that will increase energy usage – stuff like hot tubs, an electric vehicle, massive TVs in several rooms
• They live in an area that supports solar

If they qualify for and receive an online presentation from one of our solar consultants, you get a $25 Amazon gift card to do with as you please. To get that referral, simply share your referral link or send your referrals to our sign up page and ask them to let our solar consultants know you sent ‘em.

We’ll begin tallying referrals on May 19 and will be in touch with your results by May 31. You can also track your referrals live on your member profile page if you need immediate gratification. Good luck, and get those gift cards!

Courtesy David Hockney

Last month, EcoOutfitters asked 1BOG to participate in one of their Solar Chats on Twitter. Now, most Twitter gatherings involve a lot of hubbub, a troll or two, and not a whole lot of substance. Fortunately, though, the EcoOutfitters team has refined these events into well-oiled machines that are not only fun and informative, but attract a fairly massive audience. At about halfway through our chat, we peaked as the top trend on Twitter. Pretty remarkable.

All that aside, it got me thinking about the various ways we use social channels to tell stories and convey information. We’ve become so accustomed to social broadcasting that we can easily convey strong storylines, messages, and ideas in as little as 140 characters. Find an inspiring article about something you care about? Blast it out on Twitter. Somebody fracking in your town and you don’t like it? Share it on Facebook. Big news you want to shout from the mountaintops? Post it on your blog and enable sharing options, then watch it gain audience. These are all linear ways of storytelling, and they’re great – even par for the course at this point. But there is a whole other breed of social media that might be even more valuable than current incumbents, and that is the visual.

One of the most refreshing points in the Solar Chat was the discussion about how visual elements have become so surprisingly valuable beyond just friend-to-friend. A picture is worth a thousand words, and everybody’s got a camera in their pocket these days that empowers them to capture whatever inspires them, whether it’s a delicious sandwich or oil sludge drifting down a residential street. And you can take it beyond photos on the fly. For example, we here at 1BOG like to explore the possibilities of visual vs. linear storytelling with our infographics, many of which continue to circulate months after we initially posted them.

There are studies that show how long it takes a book, article, or any other piece of writing to keep or lose its audience, and the amount of time is usually measured in mere seconds. If you don’t like the opening sentence of an article, chances are you’ve already disengaged. The beauty of visual storytelling is that it provides multiple points of entry and allows people the room to find one that suits them. When someone is greeted with an image – be it graphic, hand drawn, or a photograph – they can let their eyes wander, form opinions, look for details, absorb, and share the message. They are not required to embrace or agree with someone’s words, but rather they are simply required to react to what they see.

So far this has been a good thing for solar. People regularly send us photos of their solar experience, whether it’s the panels on their roof or their meter dropping into the negatives. More importantly though, they blog about it or post it on their Facebook pages so their friends and family can applaud and encourage them. But the single most valuable thing when it comes to all this sharing is that tiny shift in someone’s mind when they realize that solar is not only possible, but something to brag about. And that happens more frequently when they see a picture of solar on their friend’s roof than when they read about it in an article.

Linear storytelling via articles and blog posts is essential in dispelling mythic boundaries and educating people about going solar. But we can’t underestimate the value of non-linear mediums – infographics, photos, even word clouds – as ways of inspiring incremental or wholehearted shifts in popular thought. Social channels are perfectly created to empower that, and we need to use it to full advantage.

Ashley is the Director of Communications at 1BOG and oversees media relations, social channels, blog content, and about half a dozen other fun things. She’s into telling stories about the importance of renewable energy and engaging in conversations that lead us all to a healthier planet. You can reach her at ashley (at) 1bog (dot) org, or follow her on Twitter at @aseashore.

Pretty exciting day here at 1BOG, and for solar in general. Our amazing parent company, Pure Energies Group, has secured $6M in funding led by heavyweight VCs NEA and NGEN. Greentech Media has a great write up about the news, “Solar Deal Maker and Lead Generator Pure Energies Wins $6M in VC.”

1BOG has been helping individual homeowners go solar for five years now, and we’ve weathered the ups and downs of the market. Now, we are beyond thrilled to be part of Pure’s vision for the future of energy.

We have more exciting news coming up that will directly impact homeowners looking to go solar in what we think is the best way possible. So, keep your eyes and ears peeled – the solar game is changing.

At One Block Off the Grid, we fundamentally understand why it’s important to educate our members about the never-ending list of why going solar simply makes sense. While we know that it will be one of the easiest decisions for a homeowner to make, we realize that it takes some of us more time to come around than others. Hey, even I’m a late bloomer about this stuff.

Lots of folks rely on a myriad of excuses not to go solar – and they are all malarkey. Naysayers gonna naysay, but after our initial post, we were inspired to take another swipe at the hilarious reasons we still hear from solar unfriendlies.

Reason #4: It’s prohibitively expensive with a significant out-of-pocket expense.

Thriving nationwide solar providers offer low upfront options with minimal capital outlay if you don’t have money to use as solar for an investment. Meaning, the homeowner would pay significantly less per month to the solar company than to the utility provider. Aw, how adorable… what an ideal utopia that would be!

Reason #5: Solar companies only provide rough estimates, then real people get screwed with the real costs.

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April 22 is a lot like February 14. All of a sudden, the things we’re supposed to be doing for ourselves and for each other are forced into an unforgiving spotlight. A lot of us balk at both holidays, claiming that we already shower our loved ones every other day of the year and, hey, we recycle all the time. Earth Day is every day, darnit.

Right. If that were the case, we wouldn’t still be debating whether or not climate change is real, or reading about the plights of everything from polar bears to bumblebees, or wrestling with the merits of solar over, say, fracking.

So, on this April 22, we invite you to do nothing short of contemplate your carbon footprint. We’ll be carpooling, walking, or biking to work, recycling our trash, composting our leftovers, debating which apex predator we’d rather save (polar bears are winning with a slight margin over tigers), and getting as many people as possible to go solar. (Incidentally, if you haven’t heard, we’re upping the game today: If you go solar by 7pm PST, we’ll give you $500. That’s green everybody can use.)

Of course, we’d love to hear what you’re doing as well! Drop us a line in the comments or email me at ashley (at) 1bog (dot) org. We even have a nifty survey you can take about what you’re doing on this greenest of holidays.

Happy Earth Day, from all of us here at 1BOG. (This is us, by the way.)

L-R: Peter, Hunter, Todd, Thomas, Marcus, Kevin, Andrew, Rafael, Oz, Keith, Tiffany, Cecil, Tibet, Cayden, Joseph (hiding), Rachael, Kai, Heather, Ashley, George, Paul, Tom, Matt, Tim, Joey. Photograph by Aaron the Awesome.

In 2012, there were 783 lobbyists representing the interests of 200 oil and gas companies. They spent just shy of $140 million, with nearly a quarter of that coming from three companies: Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and Koch Industries. By comparison, the solar industry spent approximately half a million dollars in 2011 on lobbying.

It’s beyond David and Goliath, isn’t it? A fairly nascent industry is going up against heavyweights that can clobber us into next week with sheer spending power and the influence that money can buy. On top of that, we’re challenging well-ingrained habits among ordinary folks accustomed to paying their good ol’ utilities companies for energy. It’s tough to wrap your head around another way of doing things.

But as much money as the oil and gas industry have spent, they do have a crucial Achilles heel: public opinion. No matter how spectacularly humanistic their marketing campaigns are, all it takes is one photo of a duck covered in oil or a black stream of goo drifting down a suburban street in Arkansas to remind people that the real cost of oil reliance is that it is ultimately destructive to our planet.

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One question a homeowner considering solar might ask is, “how much of an impact will putting panels on my roof really have when I’m just one person?” The average home installation generates about 6 kilowatts of energy, whereas the average power plant generates about 667,000 kilowatts. It’s pretty easy to think that the power plant dwarfs the average house, right? But think about this: as more systems are installed, their cumulative effect creates a number of benefits for both the individual homeowner and society as a whole.

To get a better understanding of the big picture, let’s take a few steps back.

Created by 1BOG. Source: EIA

First, some facts. In 2011, energy generated in the U.S. was distributed fairly evenly among residential, industrial, and commercial categories, at roughly one-third each with residential having a slight edge over both commercial and industrial. So, although power plants generate a whole lot more power, when put in the perspective of consumption, the playing field evens out quite a bit.

But then we have that slight edge that residential has over commercial and industrial categories, and here’s where it gets really interesting. Since residential is the largest consumer of electric power, its size allows solar to make more of an impact than if we focused solely on the other sectors which makes it a natural target for reductions. However, the size of the consumption is not the only reason to focus there.

If we take a look at the three categories in another way, this time looking more granularly at their demand in monthly increments, in the “Historical peakiness” graphic below you can see that residential power consumption is also the “peakiest” on both a daily and monthly scale. Peakiness basically means the points at which demand is highest. Residential power dominates this, which means that it rules the demand sector for power as well, especially in the winter and summer months when there is a direct need for heating and cooling in the home. Why does this matter? Because “peaky” power is the most expensive power.

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Even in this day and age, we hear a lot of pushback against solar. Apparently people still don’t think the sun can produce a lot of energy or that in 2013 we still can’t power homes with anything other than dirty energy.

Whatever.

But, we like to have a little fun here at One Block Off the Grid, so we thought it would be a hoot to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence (the dark, withering, nothing-grows-here side of the fence where sun is bad). So here we go. Enjoy all the excuses for not going solar, and behold the reasons that they’re bunk. We’ll be doing this on a regular basis, so feel free to contribute in the comments.

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Solar Impulse: Powered by Sun, Flies at Night

New developments in solar energy are occurring almost daily that both figuratively and literally will light the future of our nation and the world. There’s the Solar Impulse, a long-range solar-powered aircraft that just flew an entire diurnal cycle, including nearly nine hours of night-time flight. If that doesn’t capture your imagination, India just announced that they’re experimenting with solar in a whole new way: solar-powered roofs over highways. Of course, there’s also the practical innovation happening in Lancaster, California, which will require all new single-family homes to have solar panels beginning in January 2014.

The point is that whether it’s a solar-powered plane or community, the opportunities that solar brings to the world can tickle the imagination.

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Post provided by Ryan McNeill, president of Renewable Energy Corporation, a Maryland solar solutions firm serving the Mid-Atlantic.

You already know that installing solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on your home can dramatically reduce your monthly electricity bills. And with each successive year, those savings only grow with time. As utility rates rise, clean energy from the sun remains consistently free.

But as with any investment, there are start-up costs with solar energy. Even with the impressive savings potential, can you really afford paying for a new system upfront? The answer may surprise you.

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