Residents of a Prince George’s County neighborhood are tacking solar panels on the roof of a local church and expecting to reap more than $50,000 in the first year from the effort.
The University Park Community has created a limited liability company — University Park Community Solar LLC — for investment purposes and hired Standard Solar Inc. of Gaithersburg to blanket the Church of the Brethren’s south-facing roof with solar panels.
The $130,000 project will help power the church and generate more than two dozen clean energy credits, which investors will sell to utilities at about $250 a pop — or roughly $7,000 in the first year.
“We believe that this is the first financial arrangement of this type in the country,” said Lee Bristol, cofounder of Standard Solar. Plenty of businesses have installed solar panels on “host” buildings, but neighborhood programs typically involve single-panel installation on individual homes, he said.
An army of ancient oak trees bordering University Park’s sidewalks prevents residents from netting rays on their roofs, which prompted resident David Brosch to seek out the church as a host site.
Using a host site means University Park residents won’t see a dime of savings on their utility bills, though the church could save about $450 in the first year. But the community company’s members will enjoy immediate federal tax relief to the tune of $40,000 — or 30 percent of the project’s startup costs — thanks to a government program. And by 2016, the feds will give an additional $38,000 to the company through tax savings, according to University Park’s lawyers.
Brosch, now the company’s president, says the system will pay for itself in five years.
But Howard C. Hayden, author of the Energy Advocate and several renewable energy-related books, said the system will never restore investors’ money.
“Solar panels are not in any way cost effective and there is not one installation in the world that pays for itself,” said Hayden, who is also a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He said the proliferation of solar installations is “completely distorting the marketplace.”
“If you are talking about four customers in a city [installing panels] it doesn’t make a difference to a utility,” he said. “But solar plants have a big effect on utilities’ bottom line and they will rightfully object [to community-funded plants].”
Standard Solar will finish installation on the church by early June and the University Park Community is planning another installation on the roof of University Park Elementary School.
