One of the most popular questions at ReVision Energy lately has been “What state rebates are available in New Hampshire?” And no wonder – the residential photovoltaic rebate has come and gone, the solar hot water rebate is on a sliding scale, and the commercial rebates require some modeling to calculate.

Here’s a short guide to the rebates currently available and how they affect the economics of a solar energy installation.

UPDATED March 28, 2012 – Rebates change quickly so contact us for details on current availability.  Our residential solar rebates page is also always kept up to date.

Residential Solar Hot Water

The New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission offers a sliding state rebate based on the production of the system, as modeled in MMBTU / year. Here’s a chart expressing the varying levels of the rebate at different levels of performance:

For a typical residential project installed at a cost of around $11,000, the state + 30% federal rebate incentives amount to $4,800, roughly half the cost of the system.

In a typical home that heats water with oil, a solar hot water system will save around 300 gallons of oil a year. Assuming oil costs are around $3.70gallon, that results in a simple payback of around 6 years!

What Happened to Residential Photovoltaic Rebates?

Due to overwhelming demand, the New Hampshire photovoltaic rebate program has stopped reserving funds outright and is adding new residential solar electric applications to a waitlist. The program is funded through the Renewable Energy Fund (REF), a fund supported by compliance payments made by electrical service providers who cannot meet renewable portfolio standard (RPS) obligations through the purchase of renewable energy credits.

The amount of these compliance payments varies widely year-to-year, and the PUC cautions that “The PUC will continue to accept new applications … and will create a waiting list for applicants …  If and when funding for the program is replenished, those on the waiting list will receive rebate funds … on a first-come, first-served basis.” The earliest that any funding might again be available is July 2012. See: http://www.puc.nh.gov/Sustainable%20Energy/RenewableEnergyRebates-SREG.html

Rebates for Business

New Hampshire’s program commercial solar rebate program makes $1,000,000 available to solar thermal and solar electric projects for businesses, schools, municipalities, apartment buildings – basically any structure not eligible under the residential program.

The rebate structure is more straightforward than the residential program:

• Photovoltaic (Solar Electric): $0.80/Watt up to $50,000 (or 25% of the project cost, whatever is less)
• Solar Thermal rebate: $0.07 per kBTU/year up to $50,000 (or 25% of the project cost, whatever is less)

Like the residential solar hot water program, a RETScreen modeling analysis is used to calculate the kBTU/year performance of the solar hot water systems. Solar electric is fixed based on the nominal wattage.

Between the state rebate and current federal solar incentives, 2012 is an extremely appealing year to go solar if you’re a business.

Let’s take, for example, a medium scale solar thermal project for a business that uses a lot of hot water – a hotel or retirement home, perhaps – that is currently heating water with oil.

We’ll propose a system of 20 flat plate hot water collectors and several super-insulated tanks that will produce over 182,500,000 BTUs/year of clean thermal energy. We’ll imagine that the system will save 2,300 gallons of #2 oil per year, a result of both reduced oil use and greatly reducing standby losses of the oil boiler in the summertime.

Assuming this hot water system costs around $100,000 gross to install, the fuel savings alone will pay for the cost of the system within its first decade of operation.

However, now there is an exciting suite of rebates to apply:

$100,000 gross installed cost
($30,000) federal tax credit
($28,900) accelerated depreciation – avoided taxes over 5 years thanks to lowered net income, assumes 34% marginal tax bracket
($12,775) state rebate – $0.07/modeled kBtu/year
$28,325 net investment – less than a third of the total cost of the project!

Within this new context, that same solar hot water system will pay for itself within two years thanks to the fuel savings.

The wasteful boiler imagined in this formula is not unique – over 750,000 buildings in New Hampshire and Maine use oil for heating, and over $2 billion is shipped out of the local economy to pay for the millions of gallons of liquid fuels used annually. With cost projections for oil, propane, and electricity set to rise, and a strong suite of renewable energy rebates here today, the time has never been better to invest in solar.

Contact ReVision Energy for more information about both the commercial and residential solar rebates or visit our website to schedule a free site evaluation.

Tags: rebate NH, solar rebates

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 9:30 am and is filed under Economics of Renewable Energy, Solar Power, Solar Rebates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.