Sites for Solar PV
Look at the scenery pass by you as you drive or ride through Tennessee. Look at aerials or Google views of Tennessee and imagine the sites that are suitable for solar farms. Rooftops, vacant lands, brownfields, parking lots, highway sidings and centerlanes; they are all around us. With the price of solar PV dropping and the cost of electricity rising over time, these sites will be valuable income generators as our TVA generation partner pays an excellent feed-in tariff, somewhere between 19 cents to 21 cents per kilowatt-hour of solar power generated. The price for solar PV today mounted in open fields can vary from $3.20 to $6.00 per watt installed depending on the technology chosen and the size of the array. As the payback reaches 5 years or less, which in certain cases it has, then after the payback is completed, the expenses of the upkeep of solar arrays is minimal and the income is basically a continuous stream for the length of the contract between the purchaser and TVA through its distributor. The present length of contract for the green switch partner program is ten years. The banks are starting to realize the income stream is there and are investing in solar farms around the country. Lets not continue the image that Tennessee is sleeping.