OnEarth magazine, a publication of the National Resources Defense Council, has put my Spot.us story about making solar power affordable for Bay Area homeowners up on its Web site.

The story took a few months to report after numerous interviews, and due to publishing deadlines, took a few months more to get published online.

Here’s the story on OnEarth’s Web site:

Rent or Own? Making Solar Power Affordable

By Aaron Crowe

The San Francisco Bay area has historically been a leader on emerging technology, yet despite the unprecedented interest in solar power in California and beyond, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., has just 30,530 solar installations in its territory, which stretches from Eureka in the north to Bakersfield in the south. That’s just 1 percent of the total number of residential rooftops that could install solar panels and reap their benefits. How could that be?

According to most in the residential solar business, the problem boils down to money. For most people, installing solar panels comes with a hefty upfront cost. According to PG&E, it costs about $36,000 to install a four-kilowatt photovoltaic system, which is enough to power the average home for a family of four with a monthly electrical bill of $100 to $200. It would reduce carbon emissions equal to driving 12,000 miles in an average passenger car.

Rebates and tax incentives bring the cost of installing solar down by $10,000 or so. Though the money saved on electricity bills is real, a decade is a long time to wait to recover the initial set-up costs. Saving the environment is one way to sell solar power, but even in the ultra-progressive Bay Area, it’s just not enough.

Local entrepreneurs have begun to step in, finding ways to make solar power more palatable to cost-conscious consumers. Some are aggregating buyers to help them find better deals through group purchasing, while others are applying leasing models similar to those used in the commercial power sector [[see Selling the Sun]]. In other cases, local governments are setting up financial arrangements that enable homeowners to install solar power without the hefty price tag.

Lyndon Rive is the CEO of SolarCity, a Foster City-based solar installer that offers an alternative to those who want to use solar power but don’t want to front the cash to purchase photovoltaic panels. Leasing is how SolarCity is trying to solve it, and SolarCity customers who don’t want to buy can choose a 20-year lease. When it expires, they can either renew their lease or buy their system outright. By then the technology may have improved enough to warrant upgrading to a new system, and in that case, they could upgrade to lease a more efficient setup.

Industry experts anticipate that the percentage of homes with solar installations could climb to 10 percent over the next five years. When Solar City started its leasing program in April 2008, customers were quick to get on board. Last year, more than 75 percent of the company’s residential customers chose the leasing option. This year things are changing a bit — purchasing has become more popular thanks to bigger state tax breaks — but Solar City’s leasing program continues to thrive. About half of the company’s residential customers now choose to lease their solar systems.

Monica Sheridan of Walnut Creek was sold on the leasing idea recently for the home she has lived in for 16 years. She has a swimming pool in her back yard that pushes her electricity bill to $300 a month in the summer when the water pump is running.

Heavy electricity users like Sheridan are most likely to benefit from making the switch to solar because of the way PG&E prices electricity: the more you use, the more you pay per unit of energy. While it takes an average of 10 years for typical homeowners to recoup the upfront cost of their solar system, based on electricity bill savings, it can be much less homes that use a lot of electricity, Rive says.

Leasing the solar panels for 20 years will cost Sheridan $1,000 at the time of installation, and a few dollars a month thereafter. If she were to buy the system, it would cost $20,000, even after receiving federal and state tax credits. For her, leasing was a no-brainer. She expects that her solar system will provide enough energy to cover two-thirds of her home energy consumption.

Sheridan expects to see her average $170 monthly electric bill drop to $70 now that her solar system has been installed. While she also says she’s happy about the environmental benefit of her new panels, the immediate financial benefit was the deciding factor. Sheridan’s solar panels will still be cranking out electricity in 20 years, and with California electricity rates going up around 5 percent a year for the last 10 years, they’ll provide her with a nice hedge against future energy price increases. “That’s the primary reason to switch to something that nature is already providing,” she says. “It’s a way to kind of lock in your energy costs,” she says.

1BOG making group purchases

Sheridan got connected to SolarCity through 1BOG.org, or One Block Off the Grid, a San Francisco-based company that gets homeowners together to qualify for a group rate on solar installation. Dave Llorens, general manager and co-founder of 1BOG, says participants can save 17 percent through 1BOG.

SolarCity signed on as the installer for 1BOG’s second neighborhood installation in the Bay Area. 1BOG signed up 100 homes in San Francisco on its first campaign. This time around, the company is aiming for 75 homes.

Llorens, who used to be a salesman for a solar installer, says he heard many myths and excuses for not getting solar: Waiting for technology to change, payback takes 40 years, not enough sunny days in San Francisco, and of course the top hurdle – sticker shock.

“It’s very difficult to look 10, 20 years down the road” and see that the upfront cost will pay off, says Llorens, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Renewable energy is homeland security.”

Solar always loses out to other home improvements, he says. At least with a roof or kitchen remodel, homeowners can ask their neighbor what they paid and get a recommendation. Because fewer people are familiar with solar power and even fewer actually have it on their roofs, it’s difficult to find out what’s a fair price. 1BOG tries to take away that unknown. “That’s our special sauce,” Llorens says. With the group discount, “everybody knows what everyone else is getting.”

Llorens says most people don’t know that solar gets cheaper the more of it they buy — and its not likely individuals could leverage that knowledge on their own. Buy bringing together many buyers, “we take that concept and make it scalable,” he says.

Installers like the plan, too: they save money on sales and marketing costs. In return, 1BOG gets a small profit from the deal — 25 cents per watt installed. (That’s about $100 for an average four-kilowatt system.)

New approaches

In Berkeley, the city itself is experimenting with ways to put solar power within the reach of more homeowners through a public financing program that folds a solar project’s installation bill into the home’s property tax bill. The pilot program, called Berkeley FIRST, launched in the fall of 2007 and is currently full.

The city created a special “Sustainable Energy Financing District,” from which property owners essentially borrow the upfront cost of installing a solar system on their home. The owners then repay that loan over 20 years through an annual tax on their property tax bill. It requires little up-front costs and the tax obligation will move to the new owners if the house is sold.

The program is no longer taking applications, but the 38 households that were accepted are now being monitored by the city and its partners; if successful, the program could be expanded for a second round — and adopted more widely throughout the region.

In the interim, locked-in energy costs, a lighter environmental footprint, and the joy of having the hippest home on the block will have to be enough to entice Bay Area residents to put solar panels on their rooftops.
Aaron Crowe is a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be found at www.AaronCrowe.net.

Editor’s note: This story was produced in conjunction with Spot.Us, a crowd-funded journalistic enterprise based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Spot.Us invites reporters to pitch ideas and allows the public to contribute money to the stories they want to read. In this case, one of Aaron Crowe’s sources contributed funds to the story without Crowe’s knowledge. The contribution amounted to 6 percent of total funds raised. The OnEarth editors share this information in the spirit of full disclosure and journalistic integrity. We welcome your feedback on this matter as we look to support innovative models for nonprofit journalism.

I didn’t watch the IFC Media Project TV show on “Economics and News” on May 24, but found out in an e-mail from a friend that I had a short cameo (a few seconds) on the segment about Spot.us.

That’s not the episode that can be played above, but the one on economics and the news can be bought at iTunes.

I’ve written before about Spot.us, and the segment is about how David Cohn has created a new way to fund journalism, through donors sponsoring stories.

I’ve written for Spot.us about Bay Area journalism, an oil spill, and have a story coming out soon about making solar power affordable for homeowners. It’s a great site and I hope to write for it again. The solar story should be published soon.

Solar Panel – Aaron Crowe Pitch from Digidave on Vimeo.

In the meantime, I came across an interesting tip and wrote a sidebar that appears below and ran on WalletPop, a personal finance Web site run by AOL that I write for daily.

Solar apprenticeship program heats up in California

To someone choosing a career, the solar industry looks like a gold rush. Solar companies are sprouting up left and right, and hiring installers at good pay.

But that’s also the problem with the solar power rush: Businesses that grow overnight may not be around in six months to repair that complicated piece of technology on your roof that fails because a new installer was quickly hired without the proper training.

To deal with that lack of training, the state of California recently approved a solar apprenticeship program at Renewable Power Solutions, a solar energy installer in San Jose, CA, that hopes to make its program an industry standard at a meeting of solar companies in June.

Beyond helping to protect consumers with better installation, the program is a way for workers from the declining construction industry to join a growing field, said Jose Radzinsky, CEO of Renewable Power Solutions.

“The challenge right now is that construction has slowed down” and those skills are needed in solar, Radzinsky told me in an interview.

Apprentices in the program start at $14 an hour and finish at $28 an hour when the two-year program ends. Along with daily work with a journeyman installer, it includes classroom training and homework.

Unlike construction workers who may only have mastered a few skills, such as carpentry or being an electrician, the photovoltaic installer needs a combination of skills. They include, according to Radzinsky, working with conduit, grounding and other skills of an electrician, but much more.

“An electrician most of the time doesn’t work on a roof,” he said, making the job a bit more difficult.

And because the solar panels must be leak-proof and installed on roofs to withstand winds of 110 mph, the installer must also be part roofer, Radzinsky said. They must also learn how to trouble-shoot the system, use different tools and a different industry language, and be able to read a blueprint.

The program costs Radzinsky’s company $50,000 to $60,000 per student for the two-year course. For now, the program is starting small at Renewable Power Solutions, with four apprentices on board within a month, and room for six in the first year.

It’s a small start, but Radzinsky hopes that other solar companies, at least in California, adopt the same standards and help put a lot more people to work.

Aaron Crowe is an unemployed journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read about his job search at www.AaronCrowe.net

Tuesday, March 10, is D-Day for the Seattle Post-Intellegencer, when its owner, Hearst Corp. plans to announce if a buyer has been found. If not, it will close the newspaper and according to a story on the P-I’s Web site,  is planning to start an online publication on the day after the final print newspaper is published.

It will become an online news product only, leaving the print version in the dust.

While an announcement hasn’t been made by Hearst yet, Seattlepi.com reports that the company has made offers to some staff to stay on and work for the online edition.

Hearst also owns the San Francisco Chronicle and could make the same move there. It is seeking  job cuts from its union, and without them and the savings the cuts could bring, would either sell the paper or close it.

The story I’m working on for Spot.us about the future of Bay Area journalism, specifically online journalism, is looking at the possibility of online-only news from Bay Area papers. I’ve been trying for about a month to reach someone at the Chronicle for this story, but so far haven’t had any callbacks or replies, other than queries from Phil Bronstein about whether anyone is getting back to me.

The executive editor at the Contra Costa Times, Kevin Keane, has told me that he expects print to stay around at his newspapers because there’s a market for it that is served best by print.

Unless a company is starting from scratch, I expect that newspapers would only be exclusively on the Web as a last resort before closing their doors.  If a buyer can’t be found for the Chronicle, it’s a viable option. It is in Seattle.

My reporting continues on a story for Spot.us about the future of the Bay Area’s newspapers in an online world. As you’ve probably already read many times, the San Francisco Chronicle’s owner is looking to cut enough staff, and if it doesn’t it plans to either sell it or close the newspaper. The Rocky Mountain News couldn’t find a buyer and printed its last edition today, leaving open the possibility that the Chronicle won’t find a buyer either.

The news about the Chronicle won’t change my story for Spot.us, but it does add a timely, huge piece of information to it that makes it that much better of a story, I think.

Thursday I interviewed Alan Mutter, a former top editor at the Chronicle who has his own views on it and other newspaper matters. He had some interesting things to tell me about newspapers going online. While newspapers are becoming less and less of a place where people get their news, Mutter said, they or whoever else delivers the news online must figure out a way to make it pay.

One way is to charge for unique content, such as movie or restaurant reviews, he said. From the start of when newspapers gave their content away on the Web, it was a bad idea that wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

While a bit harsh, I’ve always likened it to a prostitute always asks to be paid first before providing her services. Somehow, newspapers have to get paid first for their content.

If the Chron, Rocky Mountain News and other major newspapers continue closing, or threaten to close, it will only send more journalists out into the street, where they’ll look for jobs elsewhere. The news that you now find online for free will either disappear or be replaced by untrained “citizen journalists.” While untrained reporters might find just as much news as a professional, readers might not be able to trust it as much for fairness, accuracy and everything else they get from their daily paper.

Online news sites will pick up some of the slack, such as The Public Press, but there won’t be enough paid reporters to pick up all of the news available in a newspaper.

One way newspapers can get some readers back is to be more interactive and meaningful in readers’ lives, Mutter said, through such sites as Yelp. However they do it, they’ve got to start trying more and better ways to get there. That’s what I’m trying to get at in this story for Spot.us.

As part of the story I’m working on for Spot.us about the future of Bay Area newspapers in a digital age, I offer this update on my reporting so far this week.

I’m trying to talk with online editors at newspapers this week, and two have been especially helpful in updating me on what their papers are doing to compete online.

But before I get into some of what they told me, the timing of my talk with Ari Soglin, AME of Online Content for the Bay Area News Group — East Bay, on Monday morning couldn’t have been better or more ironic. We were discussing how there are so many things he’d like to see done online at the Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune, but that the recession has hit newspapers so hard that staff shortages don’t allow as much of it as he’d like.

And then on Tuesday morning I learn that one of the Times’ online producers was laid off. She worked in another area so Soglin wasn’t her boss and didn’t have to give her the bad news. Still, it points out the difficulty of getting more content online when you have to cut staff because you’re not making enough money.

Another word of caution before I continue: I worked with Soglin at the Times for many of the 13 years I was there. He was an editor at the Times before leaving for a few years to lead the editorial content of a startup company before returning as online editor at the Times. I interviewed with him at the startup for an editing job, but the money wasn’t right for me. The company has since folded. I worked with him at the Times and always found him to be professional, smart and a top journalist.

The Times, like many other newspapers, is trying to attract online readers through social networking, and to keep them on their Web sites with discussion boards that are often popular with readers. But with a small online staff, the paper is pushing for all of its print reporters to think beyond print and get their stories online in as many forms as are necessary — blog, video, Twitter, etc.

When I was there the push was to have an audio recorder in every reporter’s hands, although that has since slowed after discovering that podcasts aren’t attracting as many readers. Part of the new push includes training 20 reporters as “MoJos,” or Mobile Journalists, who would have laptops, be able to take photos at news scenes, have Internet connections on the road, and possibly have a Flip camera or similar device to record video, Soglin said. To me, that is exciting and makes me wish I were there with my reporting team again.

At the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Interactive Editor Greg Retsinas told me Tuesday afternoon that the paper’s main focus for online traffic is to build conversations around topics such as food and football.

San Francisco 49ers beat reporter Matt Maiocco blogs constantly about the team and every bit of new information about the team is posted there first, Retsinas said.

The Press Democrat also has an incredible looking site called BiteClubthat focues on food and doesn’t look like it’s part of the newspaper site. The food site really stands out on its own and is updated daily with fresh content.

These methods to get people to their Web sites are just a few of the ways that Bay Area newspapers are learning to deal with a digital age. I’ll get into many more in the Spot.us story. If you have a question or comment, please comment in the spot below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

I returned to talk with the man who laid me off, Contra Costa Times Executive Editor Kevin Keane, about a story I’m doing for Spot.us on the future of Bay Area journalism and how newspapers are using the Internet to try to gain readers.

Before I get into a little bit about what we talked about and where the Times is headed, I want to first throw out the potential conflict of interest I have in reporting and writing this story. While the story won’t focus entirely on the Times, it will probably be a large part of the story because the Times and the other newspapers that MediaNews owns in the Bay Area have a lot of readers. Keane oversees 11 dailies and 12 weeklies in the Bay Area News Group, with 1.6 million print subscribers.

I worked at the Times for 13 years, as a copy editor and assigning editor. I’ve only known Keane for about two years, when he took over as executive editor after the paper was sold by Knight Ridder to McClatchy for a few hours, then to MediaNews. I wasn’t thrilled with the change in ownership, but enjoyed my job and wanted to stay on there as an assistant metro editor. It was a job I had wanted to do my entire life and I really enjoyed it. If you want to view my resume and see what I’ve done, please check it out.

For me to say that I don’t have any grudges against the Times and that I can’t be impartial in doing this story for Spot.us, is something that many won’t believe. I’m too close to the story I’m covering. So while I may try as hard as I can to keep my reporting and writing impartial, I want to warn readers to be on the lookout for it, and I plan to do my best to keep my opinions out of the story.

One thing that makes that easier for me is that while I don’t agree that I should have been laid off, I do understand the company’s decision and think Keane was fair to me during the process. He’s been nice and helpful since I was laid off in June 2008, and was gracious enough to let me interview him for the story I’m working on.

But it was still odd walking into his office Monday, although he put me at ease and asked how my job hunt was going. Walking into the Times building gave me an eerie feeling, and without a pass card to get into the newsroom, I waited in the lobby for a receptionist who never came and called Keane’s secretary to tell him I had arrived for the interview.  A former co-worker walked by and said hello without stopping to shake my hand or inquire how I’ve been since leaving — and other than that and a quick hello to a friend who works there — Keane was the only other person I talked with. I was nervous and glad to walk out when it was over, and maybe things will be different if I ever return. I’m sure there’s nervousness on both sides.

Much of what Keane discussed with me focused on how he still believes in the survival of print news, and that the online audience that the Times and other Bay Area News Group properties are growing and that both serve different customers. Reliable, local news coverage is its strongest asset and adding more blogs and other ways to reach people online, such as through Twitter, will help spread that news, he said. His main message seemed to be something that I used to tell my reporters — that providing quality, in-depth and local news will attract readers no matter what form it comes in.

To get a feel for his views on the news industry, a transcript of an online discussion he had in December is helpful.

On Monday, he didn’t have any major news on where his newspapers are heading online and how they plan to attract readers. For an update on what the Times is doing or plans to do soon online, he referred me to an online editor who I’m trying to get an interview with. I expect that will offer more specifics.

I have some follow-up questions of my own to throw at Keane sometime soon, but if you have some follow-up questions you’d like me to ask, please e-mail me at: aaron.crowe.consulting (at) gmail.com