Solar Isnt the Answer

I can’t deny it—solar is sexy. Everyone’s talking about it. There are government incentives and rebates to help defray some of the cost, customers and employees are asking about it, and there’s no arguing our society needs an alternative to coal, nuclear and fossil fuels. But slapping solar panels on top of a building to “save the planet” isn’t the answer. Maximizing a business’ energy efficiency and achieving true transparency is, ultimately, much sexier. Alternative energy is great, but unless a commercial property has maximized its operational efficiency, using alternative energy from solar panels is just masking the inherent inefficiency of the energy use.

Let’s look at a slightly exaggerated example to prove my point. There’s a 250,000-square-foot office building that’s 60 years old, with 20-year-old lighting, 20-year-old heating and cooling systems, and a huge data center stacked to the roof with servers because the IT team believes “he who dies with the most toys, wins.” (For some, this is unfortunately not much of a stretch.) Now say all the lights, heating/cooling and IT equipment in the entire building are left on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including all major holidays.

At this point, you have two choices if you’re running this building. You can either encourage employees to turn everything off on weekends and holidays, which will reduce the energy use by about 30 percent right off the bat and not cost you a dime, or you can choose to put $1.5 million worth of solar panels on the roof so at least a percentage of the exorbitant energy being used by the building (including weekends and holidays) is coming from the sun and not some coal burning power plant. (Note: many locations don’t even get sun on Christmas, so the solar panels would just be roof decorations.) This seems like a fairly obvious choice, and I may be exaggerating for illustrative purposes, but what remains true, in most situations, is that the use of alternative energy should only be used once the internal system is as efficient as possible.

Before we get into what you should or shouldn’t do, let’s explore why you’d want to install solar in the first place. Most companies install solar for one or all of the following reasons: They want to make their employees and customers happy by showing they’re committed to sustainability; they want to save as much money as possible on their energy bills; or they want to make the most significant environmental improvements they possibly can. Let’s simplify this even further and say that companies want to save money while doing the right thing.

 

Saving green by going green

If a company’s goal is to reduce its operating and energy-related expenses, installing solar panels has a fairly unattractive return on investment when compared to retrofits such as high-efficiency lighting upgrades or the installation of occupancy sensors. Solar panels require a substantial capital outlay with a payback period of around seven to 10 years, whereas upgrading lighting or installing occupancy sensors can have as little as a one- to three-year payback period. Just looking at the financial implications, wouldn’t it make sense to implement every project that has a zero- to seven-year payback period prior to implementing projects with a seven- to 10-year payback period?

 

Going green to be green

Harnessing energy from the sun is absolutely amazing. There’s really only one thing in my mind that’s more amazing: Not needing the energy in the first place. In evaluating the environmental benefits of solar panels, we must include consideration of the full lifecycle environmental cost of producing, distributing, using and disposing of solar panels, as well as the myriad energy-efficiency alternatives. Unfortunately, these trade-offs can only be estimates, since current technology doesn’t let us have 100 percent transparency into the full environmental impact of any decision we make.

 

Employee and customer satisfaction

Let’s face it: As soon as employees or customers see solar panels on a company’s roof, there’s an immediate assumption that the company is “green.” A company could have the most inefficient operations in the world, but as soon as it places a few solar panels on the roof, people think it must be doing something right. Five years ago, if you asked a company what it did to be green, it would tout the fact that it recycled all its bottles and cans. Now, many people know that being the world’s best recycler is just a small piece of being a truly sustainable organization. I believe solar will take the same path.

As energy-efficiency becomes more popular and people become more engaged in totally transparent operational efficiency measures, employees and customers will be more interested in the Energy Star rating and total kilowatt-hours reduced by a company each month, rather than just seeing some solar panels on the roof. In the end, solar is one answer, but it shouldn’t be the first answer. Like dropping a supercharged engine into a rundown car that barely operates, a premature solar installation is a high-cost, high-visibility solution to the wrong problem. Once you can’t reasonably shave any more kilowatt-hours off your energy bill, then alternative energy is a great solution to get you closer to energy neutrality.