Here comes the sun, but the price is high

We have seen the future, and for the moment, it costs $27,000 a pop. That’s a pretty high price, but it’s also a pretty optimistic future: lower electric bills for Denton residents and a lessening of the city’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Ed and Carol Soph of Denton have become one of the city’s first families to install solar panels on their home. The solar panels provide about half of the electricity they need to power their 2,200-square-foot home, and that’s not the only saving. When their 16 solar panels generate more power than the Sophs need, the excess power flows into Denton Municipal Electric’s grid. Not only does the Sophs’ DME meter quit running at such times, it runs backward, giving them a credit for the power they’re supplying to the utility company grid.

The Sophs look upon their $27,000 initial cost as an investment that will pay for itself in time, but it is probably fair to say that isn’t the only reason they made the commitment to solar power.

One would expect Ed and Carol Soph to be on the cutting edge of energy conservation. They are longtime environmental activists and founding members of Citizens for Healthy Growth, an energetic local watchdog group. Our guess is that they first began to investigate solar panels with a predisposition to take the plunge.

But idealism aside, their cold, hard numbers make economic sense. Not only can solar power reduce the user’s individual electric bill, it can provide power to DME as well, power that isn’t produced by burning nonrenewable fossil fuels. It works out for everybody.

That’s why some cities — Austin and San Antonio are examples in Texas — are providing incentives for installing solar panels. We don’t know the particulars of the San Antonio plan, but Austin offers residents actual financial help in buying the systems: up to 80 percent of the invoiced cost or $13,500, whichever is less.

Jack Thomson, a member of the Denton City Council, would like for the council to look at providing such incentives, and so would we.

We are not sure how popular such conversions would ever become with individual homeowners, but we think that residential developers might be much more inclined to install such systems into their new homes if such incentives were available. It would involve a lot of number crunching to arrive at an incentive that would be attractive to both DME and developers, but we are confident that there is a magic number somewhere.

The city needs to find it, and pray for sunshine.