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Beyond self-sufficiency Photo by Drew Fleming Scott Beeman of Ashland produces enough electricity with solar panels that he can sell the excess to power companies. Couple sell excess power By DAVID PRESZLER ASHLAND -- Scott Beeman and Susanne Watkins designed their new house to draw 80 percent of its power needs from solar energy to lessen their impact on the environment and live more self-sufficiently. 'Blue Sky' program funds wind farms Pacific Power customers who want environmentally friendly power but may not be ready to go solar and sell power back have a new option. The power company recently launched its "Blue Sky" renewable energy program in Southern Oregon. Under the program, customers buy "shares" of renewable energy for $4.75 a month. Each share represents 100 kilowatt hours, roughly the power it takes to run a family's television for two months. Company officials say buying a share a month for a year has the same environmental benefit as not driving a car 2,400 miles. The money will go toward the construction of new generation facilities that harness wind power. The more shares that are purchased, the more facilities will be built. The company says it's already seeking sites and will have a new wind farm up and running by the end of 2001. Buying a share doesn't insure that the power coming to a customers house was wind generated, but it does insure that 100 more kilowatt hours of wind-generated power was added into the western U.S. electricity grid. But the couple's solar power system is about to move beyond self-sufficiency. Next month, they expect to start selling excess energy collected by their 36 solar panels to -- ready for this? -- Pacific Power. The extra power will go into the company's grid and out to other users. "I bet I'm going to sell back more than I use," Beeman says. Under a state ruling approved in December, customers who generate power on a small scale can sell it back to the utility, which is required to buy it. Communities and businesses have been able to sell unused power back to utilities for some time. Now that privilege applies to small producers. "Any excess energy he is providing, we will pay him for," says Pacific Power's Claudia Steinbroner of Beeman. So far, three customers have signed up for the "net metering" plan: Beeman, Dr. Bill Epstein of Ashland and a customer in Albany. Epstein and the Albany resident have already started sending excess juice to Pacific Power. Essentially, the power company installs a special two-way meter that measures the energy it provides, then subtracts the energy provided by the customer. If a customer generates more power than he or she uses, the company will pay 2.29 cents per kilowatt (the company charges 4.5 cents to customers). There is an annual limit on how much power customers can sell back and the capacity of the customers generating system must be less than 25 kilowatts. Epstein, who also has 36 solar panels, started selling power back about six weeks ago. He says he's still learning about the metering system and hasn't gone through a full billing cycle yet, so he's not sure how much he's sold back. Nice as it may sound, selling power to the power company makes more ecological sense than economic sense. The cost of the solar energy system clearly outpaces money saved or made, at least in the short term. "You're doing it for a philosophical reason," says Steinbroner. "It's probably a 20-year payback," says Epstein, whose house is 100-percent solar when the sunlight allows. He pays about $500 a year for power. Beeman says he didn't know anything about the possibility of selling power back when he and his wife began designing their house about five years ago. The retired casino general manager and his wife, who moved to Ashland from Reno, Nev., last fall, simply wanted an environmentally friendly and efficient home. In addition to the solar panel system, Beeman and Watkins' home uses rain water rather than well water. The water collected by the steel roofs on their house and barn -- a combined 4,000 square feet -- is fed into three 9,000-gallon tanks. From the lightproof tanks, it is pumped through a filter and into the house. "Every inch of rain water, I get 2,400 gallons of water," says Watkins, noting that it is more than enough, though the couple does have a backup well. The 36-solar panel system, which cost around $50,000, is quite complex. The panels automatically move to track the sun and the power is transmitted into two dozen 128-pound industrial batteries. Then it passes into inverters that switch the energy from direct current to the alternating current. Solar power runs everything in the 3,500-square-foot house, except heavy appliances. The panels are arranged on three arrays. He and his wife have nicknamed them the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria -- after Christopher Columbus' three ships -- because they see them as a "voyage into a new world." Beeman would like to see the whole country retrofitted with similar small systems, because they are more efficient than current power generation models. Since so much energy is lost during the transmission of power, smaller, local systems would increase efficiency, he argues. And while it make not make economic sense now, he sees a day coming when it will. "Solar living can be nice," Beeman says. "We have not sacrificed a thing." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA