Drive through many of Ann Arbor's neighborhoods and you will see a fair number of houses where the owners have installed rooftop solar panels — at their own expense.
Jerry Davis is one of the more recent of these homeowners. He lives in an attractive stucco house in Ann Arbor's Burns Park neighborhood.
Several of his neighbors installed rooftop solar panels some time ago. But for his house? Well, a lot of other things had to come first.
"This house was built in 1919," he explained. "It wasn't insulated, the roof was a mess, the windows were leaky."
But over the years, the price of solar panels came down. The federal government now offers a tax credit of thousands of dollars for rooftop solar, more if you also install home battery storage. And the city of Ann Arbor struck a group discount deal with companies that install solar panels. For Davis, it was time.
He showed me his brand new panels on three sides of the roof, installed in early October, and a large home storage battery installed on the side of the home. "But honestly, the prices, we could have gone either way," Davis said. "It was really that ethically, we felt compelled to go solar as soon as it was feasible for us."
Even with all these discounts and credits, Davis paid $20,000 to own the equipment that makes and stores a lot of the electricity he consumes. Even the cost for a smaller system — just solar panels — is too steep for many people in Ann Arbor.
Enter the city's solution, Proposal A, which would create a Sustainable Energy Utility. Don't get confused by the name. It's not a utility like DTE Energy. It's a city-run renewable energy service that will supplement what DTE Energy provides. The proposal would also help the city with its net-zero emissions goal, A2zero.
Missy Stults is sustainability and innovations director for the city of Ann Arbor. "It's opt in," she explains. "No one has to take service. It doesn't raise taxes."
Instead, the SEU would be a service residents sign up for, if they want it. The city would sign up a batch of subscribers at a time, take out the commensurate amount of loans, install their rooftop solar panels, or their panels and home storage batteries, start billing the customers, and pay back the loan with money from their bills.
Stults said this solar-produced electricity would almost certainly be cheaper than DTE's rate. People who opt in would pay the cheaper solar rate to the city, in a separate bill, during time periods that their panels were producing electricity, and they'd pay the DTE Energy rate to the company at other times.
"The modeling that we've done shows that if you were to sign up for solar, your rates, assuming just a pretty conservative estimate, assumes about 16 cents per kilowat hour. And today you pay [DTE] about 19 cents," Stults said.
People who opt for a home battery storage system will find it cheaper than investing in a generator, she said, and they would have electricity when DTE's power goes out. The long term potential for the SEU is dramatic, she said.
"The city uses about 440, 460 megawatts of electricity a year. And we've estimated if every roof were to participate, we could get about 400 megawatts. "
That's just solar. It doesn't include geothermal projects, which could come later, tapping the energy stored in the ground, on properties belonging to the city's school system, or parks. Those projects could potentially power hundreds of households.
The long-term plan involves dotting neighborhoods with microgrids. People whose homes are too shaded for solar panels could be connected via an electric wire to a neighbor who has solar plus battery storage. They could pay that neighbor for a share of their power during outages. Whole neighborhoods could potentially keep the lights on during outages in this manner.
Larry Davis didn't hesitate for an instant when asked if he would be willing to have his home be the hub for such a microgrid.
"100%," he said. "You can look around Ann Arbor — there's a lot of trees hanging over a lot of precarious looking electric wires, and it only takes one tree to knock out the whole neighborhood. It feels to me that we would be much more resilient if we have localized hubs, when the power goes off, as it does fairly regularly."
Missy Stults is hopeful voters will get the message that even if they don't want to participate, a "yes" vote on Proposal A helps the city and other residents procure cleaner and more resilient energy.
The worry is that some people might be confused by the terminology "Sustainable Energy Utility" and think that means the city is cutting ties with DTE.
It isn't — but there is a grassroots group, Ann Arbor for Public Power, that thinks the city should do just that, and hopes to put the issue on the city ballot in two years.
For now, though, voters have Proposal A in front of them. Supporters say they can safely vote yes for it — no strings attached — unless they hate clean energy from the sun.
