Pre-Installation – Our journey to Solar Electricity (part 2)

After the site analysis determining that solar electricity was an option for us the next step was clear this project with the electric company since we would be tying our electric system in with the electric grid. The two things you need from the electric company are an interconnect agreement and a net metering agreement. The interconnect agreement informs the electric company that your location is generating electric power and that in the case of an electrical outage that you have a automatic cut-off that will stop feeding power to the grid; this is for the safety of anyone who works on the electric lines in your area. The net metering agreement basically says that the electric company will accept the power that you generate to offset the amount of power that you use.

We quickly found out that no one in our town had ever ask to build a solar electric system before and that a process needed to be developed before this could happen. Thanks to our forward looking electric company (Templeton Light and Water), this process was developed and pushed through board approval so that we could continue.

In our case, the next step was to clear the roof of a plumbing pipe that was on the west side of the roof, and would be in the way of the solar array. It should be noted that any kind of shading on a PV array can reduce the output of the array, so even this pipe would have caused a problem. A plumber and roofer were able to come out late in March of 2007 to move this pipe over to the east side of the roof where it would not cause any problems.

Our journey continues with Installation in part 3…