California Solar Initiative 2011 Highlights
Founder's Blog
The latest newsletter from the California Solar Initiative (CSI) highlights some of the precedent shattering developments in solar this past year. Here’s our summary of the most notable developments this year:
- In October, California reached a major milestone:
1,000 Megawatts – 1 Gigawatt – of solar power has now been installed throughout the state in more than 100,000 installations. More than 60% of those installations are a result of the CSI program, with the remainder due to municipal utility programs.
- In just 2011 alone (with the year not quite complete!) more than 20,000 PV systems were installed with a capacity of 241 MW. CSI paid out some $283 million in rebates.
- Of those 20,000 systems installed so far this year, more than 19,000 were residential systems, accounting for 94 MW installed capacity at an average system size of just under 5 kW. Residential system owners received a total of $67 million in rebates.
- The remaining non-residential systems accounted for 149 MW of capacity for an average system size of 172 kW. Those systems qualified for an anticipated $267 million in performance-based incentive payments over the next five years.
- SCE alone authorized nearly 9,000 projects to go online so far this year – a 40% increase over the 2010 total.
We will be writing more about the details of all of this growth in the New Year. What oddities and outliers will we discover then? Stay tuned!
Original Article on Founder’s Blog
Jim Jenal is the Founder & CEO of Run on Sun, Pasadena's premier installer and integrator of top-of-the-line solar power installations for commercial and residential customers. Jim is a NABCEP Certified Solar PV Installer – as are the other two principals in the business.In addition, Run on Sun offers solar consulting services, working with consumers, utilities and municipalities to help them make solar power affordable and reliable. Articles l Homepage