Tennessee Needs to Allow PACE Financing
Most of us interested in solar power for our homes are not able to afford the initial cost of the solar installation. PACE is the Property Assessed Clean Energy program recently approved by New York state. They passed a bill authorizing municipalities to establish programs that will finance the installation of solar and other renewable systems which allows property owners to pay for the improvements over 15 to 20 years through an increase in their annual property taxes. Right now 15 states have passed such a law. The key feature is the spreading the initial cost of the system over many years for energy retrofit loans and structuring the loan repayments as annual property tax surcharges which are Federal Tax deductable. It benefits both the homeowner and the lender. For the property owner it improves the value of the home and to the bond holder it provides virtually no risk on the investment (PACE lien is senior in the right to mortgage debt).
April 25th, 2010 at 07:16
I am not keen on increasing taxes. How about creating products that allow multiple home owners to share a system and benefit equally from the saving based on individual useage.
August 24th, 2010 at 13:22
That is another option that has been brought to our attention. It amounts to having a number of home owners share a piece of land or having solar on one or more home roofs. The owners then form a partnership to purchase the solar system, whether ground-based or roof-based, and decide how many panels they want to install in the communal panel array. Each owner could have their own inverter and power meter. They purchase so many panels in the array and have the panels send the power collected to their power meter through their inverter. The owners could add panels to their system at any time.