July 9, 2009 Go solar, and save money in return Play video

(NECN: Peter Howe, Bellingham, Mass.) Many budget- and environment-minded New Englanders have looked into installing solar energy, only to be scared off by the huge up-front costs. But now Kim Loring and others are discovering a new plan that can slash the $25,000-to-$35,000 cost to just $1,000 up front.

Thursday was a day Kim had dreamed of for year: Switching over her three-bedroom ranch home in this town along Interstate 495 southwest of Boston to run by the sun.

But when she and her husband, Richard, first looked into installing solar panels, they got sticker shock. While they have an almost perfectly oriented roof for solar energy, facing just 18 degrees west of due south to get maximum sunshine year-round, installing solar panels was likely to cost as much as $35,000 up front. They could recoup perhaps half of that over time from tax credits and state rebates. But still, having to come up with that much money up front made it impossible for the Lorings.

Until, in April, Kim learned about a pair of companies, GroSolar and Sun Run , that just launched a whole new approach to solar in Massachusetts. As Kim explains it, "For $1,000 down, you can get this system, and for 18 years. You pay a certain amount and then you're up and running. It makes it very affordable.'' GroSolar handles installing the system,

then sells it to Sun Run, which effectively offers financing and maintenance to the system buyer and works behind the scenes to collect tax credits. (Sun Run has various options for when homeowners who've bought a solar system sell the home to someone else.)

The Lorings will get probably, on a net basis, 30 percent of their power from utility NStar after they complete the switchover within a couple of weeks. But GroSolar's Patrick Brown explains that much of the time, the Lorings will be powering NStar -- cutting their typical monthly electric bill from $126, now paid all to NStar, to $99, paid partly to NStar, partly to Sun Run. "During the day, no one's home, you're going to feed electricity into the grid, spin your meter backwards,'' Brown says as he shows the location in the Lorings' basement garage where the power supply comes down from the roof and is fed into an "inverter" that delivers electricity to the house or out to the power lines on the street. "It depends on how bright and sunny the day is and how much electricity you're using in the house,'' Brown says.

Howe: Now, one factor that could challenge the growth of solar power in New England is that the price of natural gas has been coming way down over the last year, dropping by roughly two-thirds on futures markets since July 2008. As a fuel source for many electric generating stations, gas tends to be the single biggest factor driving how expensive conventional electricity is here in New England. If the low gas price trend holds and electric rates follow, it'd mean less savings for the Lorings and other solar users.

But Kim says it's not all dollars and cents. "I wanted to do the solar panels for the environment first and then to save money,'' says Kim, who works for a Hopkinton company, Fishman Corp., that sells industrial fluid dispenser products to companies including Evergreen Solar of Devens, Mass., the state's biggest solar-panel manufacturer. She's also vigilant about turning off lights and computers to save electricity. "My husband's the opposite. He wants to save money first,'' Kim laughs.

Hopefully, they'll both save green, and be green.

And if you are wondering whether solar energy might make sense at your home in Massachusetts or New England, the key threshold question is: Do you have a south-facing roof that has at least 450 square feet available for mounting solar electric panels? If the answer is yes, then it might be cost-effective; if no, almost certainly it won't work for you.