Kelly: (00:06 )
Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09 )
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: (00:13 )
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18 )
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19 )
and I’m Kelly Westby. So I’m excited to be talking to Eric Wallace, who works at Steven Winter associates providing consulting, design and inspection services for solar energy systems. He actually also gets involved in a variety of programs including energy star enterprise green communities and New York City energy code projects. But before joining SWA, Eric spent several years designing commercial scale solar power systems, large and small commercial scale, as well as some single family and multifamily and institutional projects. Today we’re going to focus on solar photovoltaic systems. We’re going to talk about urban installations and specifically New York City regulations. So I’m just going to jump into the conversation that we have with him. So, welcome, Eric. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Eric: (01:13 )
Thank you very much, Kelly.

Eric: (01:14 )
So I just want to kind of dive right in: Can you lay the groundwork for us? What does the solar market look like right now and what’s your component of it?

Eric: (01:27 )
Sure. So the big story of the solar market over the past decade is really about cost reduction and sustained incentives. So just since 2010, residential and commercial scale systems have dropped about 60 percent in cost, and utility scale systems have dropped almost 80 percent in cost. What remains to be the highest cost barrier for solar are what we would call soft costs. So those are your engineering, your sales acquisition costs, or any permitting costs. So anything other than the material and labor costs. So that has dropped hugely in countries like Germany and Australia, but it remains high for a variety reasons in the United States. But despite that there’s been a huge drops in cost. On top of that, we still have great incentives. The federal investment tax credit is worth 30 percent of the cost of the system right now that’s scheduled to sunset over the next few years.

Eric: (02:32 )
The good news is that it survived the most recent revamp of the tax plan under this administration, which kind of proves the general knowledge that climate change might be controversial, but solar power isn’t. It has bipartisan support across the board and because it’s saving people money, and giving people more choice on power. Other than that, you also have new tariffs in the past year or two both on modules and cells, as well as on steel and aluminum. And the exact impact is yet to be seen. There’s some estimates around 10 to fourteen cents per kilowatt for installation increase in cost, but they are reviewing exemptions to the rules and there’s bound to be legal challenges to these tariffs. So it’s still not really clear what the overall impact is going to be.

Kelly: (03:23 )
Okay, great. And you mentioned incentives and a lot of them are tax related. Have you run into any issues with clients that you’ve worked with that have problems taking advantage of the tax incentives?

Eric: (03:38 )
Yeah, the biggest issue is usually if we’re working with a nonprofit developer, for example, with a low income housing development. Sometimes they can find ways to get around that if they can get an equity investor, or have a for-profit branch of their organization that can take advantage of the tax incentives. So there are ways around that. There are also certain companies that specialize specifically in providing what we call a power purchase agreement to nonprofit entities that can’t take advantage of those incentives. So if a nonprofit developers trying to build a low income multifamily building but they can’t get those incentives, they can go through a company like grid alternatives that specializes in providing that for them.

Kelly: (04:26 )
Okay, great. And can you talk to me a little bit about the type of solar and specifically solar pv phot