Solar Panel Installation at High Ranch Nursery
by John Nitta
This week we are totally jazzed that we’re getting solar. The outfit that's doing the installation is Yes! Solar Solutions. They also did our home, back in May or so. For our home we got private financing, which Yes! Solar helped get us in contact with. We had a great salesperson named Jimmy Hodges. We started working on both applications at the same time, but there were many more hurdles to jump with the commercial install at the nursery.
For the nursery, we received financing thru the Placer County mPower program, which uses property tax assessments as a vehicle for financing, so you don't need to go after private financing. It’s a brand new program for the county, designed to help finance energy saving projects and retrofits. Other counties and cities had similar programs – such as very successful ones in Sonoma County and the city of Oakland.
But we've had our ups and downs. Several months into the applications process, our business bank, had to give us lender consent, which after a month or so we finally received. But right after getting the consent, like a day after, the Federal Housing Financing Agency put a stop to the mPower program, because it put Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (the 2 big federal mortgage lenders) in a subordinate position behind the counties, cities, or other local jurisdictions using the property tax assessment as a vehicle for lending. Then. lo and behold, they came back two weeks after that and said commercial installations are still OK, since the primary mortgagee is usually a private bank, not Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. So we were back on track.
So, after nearly 9 months of initially talking to our solar guy in January, we’re getting it installed this week. The sales office install took only one day. Already the meter’s running backwards. We figure we would save up to $600/month in electricity. But that savings will surely increase as the electricity rates increase. We’re happy and proud to go “green” when it comes to electricity consumption at High Ranch!
Update 12/13/11: John Nitta has been featured in a promotional video by mPOWER Placer. Read more here.
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