New Tech Is Lowering Price On Solar

Utility consumers in Ohio and Nebraska are among those taking advantage of a new and more straightforward technique for combining solar arrays and other renewable energy systems to the grid.

ConnectDER, as it’s understood, generally excludes the requirement to enter a home and it dramatically reduces the amount of electrical work needed.

“It allows you to inject the solar on the customer side of the meter prior to getting into the home,” stated Michael Shonka, a solar installer who has installed the new equipment in a half-dozen homes in the Omaha area. “This means we can cut out $1,000 to $2,000 worth of cost in the system because you don’t need electricians to go through foundations trying to get to the service panel, and you don’t need to rearrange the panel.”

Some people recognize it as a “plug and play” solar.

The ConnectDER “collar” plugs into the meter socket, usually on the boundary of the house, and then the meter plugs into the ConnectDER, meaning that the solar panels’ inverter combines directly with the meter without having to go through the household service panel.

In Nebraska, the Omaha Public Power District confirmed the equipment this past summer, and the Lincoln Electric System is now assessing it. In Ohio, utilities in Tipp City, Yellow Springs and Westerville permit the new technology, as do approximately a dozen other services from Vermont to California and Hawaii.

Shonka said he is “always looking for innovations in the industry,” and heard about ConnectDER at an industry meeting.

“I recognized this as being a problem because every time I went to do an installation, I ran into issues with how to make the electrical connection.” The last few feet of wiring, he said, “are very expensive. You have to get through foundations, run wire in the conduit through the inside of the house, rearrange the circuit-breaker box.”

And various household control panels boxes can't handle solar panels, he said, which can necessitate the installation of a new and larger circuit-breaker box.

Because the ConnectDER includes all the required circuit breakers, he stated, “I don’t have to worry about that. I have to find the meter box. It drops the cost of installation significantly.”

Marketing the goods is time-consuming, said ConnectDER’s product administrator, Jon Knauer, because, “Each new market that we want to sell it into requires utility approval. Over time that gets easier, because once we have a couple utilities sign off, the others tend to follow along. We’re still in the phase of opening up new markets.”

He's Confident On Solar

He’s confident that in the Midwest, with its various municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives, the technology may diffuse more rapidly than in other regions.

Meagerer non-profit utilities “make decisions fairly quickly. The (Omaha Public Power District) approved it in a month or two, which isn’t very long. And there are a lot of statewide municipal or co-op associations that you can take the product to and say, ‘This group of utilities similar to you are doing this, and maybe you should think about doing the same.’”

Knauer announced his company has sold approximately 5,000 of the units national, many of them in Arizona. Some utilities there truly rent rooftops where they install their own panels, he said. They find that ConnectDER works well for them because it enables them to install arrays without setting foot inside customers’ homes.

In Omaha Solar Is

In Omaha, Helen Deffenbacher is a solar proponent who is having a solar array with ConnectDER installed on her Tudor-style house. In this community that hasn’t yet embraced solar energy, she is striving to organize a group solar purchase and maintains that ConnectDER could help to facilitate that.

Deffenbacher is assured that the new technology can provide some energy to the solar industry, however, and proceeds to encourage installers and potential customers to get on board.

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