Remember when your mother told you that money doesn’t grow on trees? Well, she was right, but in New Jersey it does grow on solar panels.
In fact, if every one of our One Block Off the Grid members in New Jersey were to install solar, they’d cumulatively earn $168,750,000 over the next fifteen years in Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC) payments alone!
The exponential growth curve (green) shows the growth rate of Facebook (since 2004) applied to the global solar industry. The y-axis depicts the additional terawatts (TW) of solar energy generating capacity that would be added over the next 10 years (broken out into months on the x-axis).
Facebook recently passed 500 million users. If the growth rate of the world’s largest and fastest growing social network could be applied to solar, it would only take 4.7 years to power the entire world with solar energy.
While home solar is no social network, it’s picking up speed. We recently found that if you have a neighbor who installed solar panels you’re twice as likely to install them yourself. On a national scale, more solar power was installed in the United States last year than conventional power sources like coal, gas, and nuclear.
You heard it Pittsburgh residents, One Block Off the Grid is launching its first solar campaign in what Forbes has named America’s most livable city! Once known for its industrial steel factories, Pittsburgh has gone through an urban resurgence combining modern skyscrapers with close-knit neighborhoods, vibrant cultural life, and over 70 miles of urban riverfront.
In addition to being very hospitable, Pennsylvania solar power rebates, tax credits, and incentives are transforming Pittsburgh into a Green City leader. One Block Off the Grid hopes to accelerate Pittsburgh’s green revolution by offering a 15 percent discount on residential solar panel installations.
Stay tuned for more details or sign up to learn more about the upcoming One Block Off the Grid Pittsburgh group purchase campaign launching soon!
Solar panels are undeniably hot in the celebrity world; Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, and Will Ferrell are just a few of the celebs to go solar. With so many stars owning unbelievably gigantic homes in extra-sunny places like LA, it’s surprising that even more people haven’t followed suit. We’ve rounded up ten of the biggest celebrity homes, and calculated just how much solar power they’d be able to generate by redecorating their spacious roofs.
Hayden lives in this $2.6 million mansion in the Hollywood Hills (shown on the right in the pic above), with floor-to-ceiling views of LA all the way to the ocean. Panatierre is known for her activism– she’s spoken for Greenpeace and traveled to Japan to help fight dolphin hunting. We think she’s in a perfect place to take action at home and make use of the abundant SoCal sunshine.
Jessica Alba and Cash Warren bought this $4 million Beverly Hills villa in 2008 to welcome their baby girl. Jessica’s gotten attention for being green at home, with eco-friendly paints, used furniture, a synthetic lawn (plastic, but it requires no water) and a saltwater pool. Time to take the next step and go solar.
Tom and Katie have a couple of places– this one is north of LA in posh Montecito. With seven bedrooms, it’s definitely big enough for some solar panels on the roof. A little renewable energy could help offset their emissions from their fleet of private planes and SUVs.
So, we hold informational events for homeowners all the time, but it isn’t every day that we get to host one in a location like this. The space belongs to Chris Paine, director of Who Killed the Electric Car? and as you can see from the photos, it brings together a lush, Moroccan sensibility with green living and high tech. If you’re a homeowner in Los Angeles and you’ve been thinking about going solar, you really should come.
Our first-ever Solar for Women webinar was a big hit on July 29th. We covered a bunch of stuff: the practical benefits of going solar, how to decide if solar is right for your home, the basics of how solar energy works, common solar myths, solar rebates & incentives, newer, more attractive styles of solar panels, and answers to specific questions. Check it out!
Solar for Women Webinar from One Block Off the Grid on Vimeo.
A lot has been written about the so-called “Prius Effect“– the fact that the Prius helps save gas not just because of its hybrid technology, but also because people drive much more efficiently when they see their performance on the display screen in the car. The same idea inspired energy monitors inside the home, so you can easily track your energy use and try to beat your own records (or upload your data and compete with friends online). Solar panels, as it turns out, seem to inspire energy efficiency as well. On a recent NPR show, Sungevity founder Danny Kennedy summed it up well: solar power, he said, is “the gateway drug to energy efficiency.” Read the rest of this entry »
In the past, solar PV was more expensive than other alternatives to oil like nuclear power. But as the New York Times recently reported, that’s no longer true. The cost of solar power has been going down, while nuclear power costs are rising.
Based on a the report by John O. Blackburn, a professor of economics at Duke University, a “historic crossover” has taken place, where solar (trending down) and nuclear (trending up) have crossed each other at about $0.16 / kWh.
Report: Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy
The estimated cost of a new nuclear reactor is about $10 billion, and costs are likely to continue to keep going up. The costs of new reactors are staggeringly high in part because they can take over a decade to build, while construction and financing costs continually rise. The design of each reactor is complex, site-specific, and non-standardized. There are also few suppliers for the specialized products needed to build the plants, leading to high costs.
Analysts have warned that new proposals in Congress to develop more nuclear power could end up costing U.S. taxpayers (and energy users) hundreds of billions– or even trillions– of dollars more than necessary.
Hey neat: One Block Off the Grid is featured in the Huffington Post’s Innovators Series today! This series profiles entrepreneurs, start-ups, and established companies that are (you guessed it) particularly innovative. HuffPo highlights One Block Off the Grid’s ability to harness entire communities to go solar as well as our unique status as a trustworthy, sales-free source of solar information.
It’s intuitive, but now there’s proof that having solar nearby makes it more likely that you’ll install panels yourself.
Our company began with this very notion, right after original founders Sylvia Ventura and Dan Barahona had solar panels installed on their own San Francisco home and discovered that their neighbors were hungry for advice on the process. Sylvia and Dan decided the solar industry itself needed a mechanism to produce this kind of neighborly advice, so they started One Block Off the Grid.
Fast forward a few years, and we were curious whether a more quantitative, analytical approach would back up our grassroots foundation, so we did a little in-house research to find out what effect, if any, the presence of solar systems have on neighborhoods. What we found is eye-opening: if you have a neighbor with solar panels on his or her house, you’re more than twice as likely to go solar yourself than if none of your neighbors have solar. We determined this by surveying an area block by block area and examining the distribution of home solar systems.
