A small army of volunteers descended on the roof of Rick Lopez’s modest Denver bungalow Wednesday to put up a solar installation for free.
“I got a letter in the mail from the VA asking if I wanted to participate,” the 63-year-old Vietnam veteran said.
He called a friend at the Department of Veterans Affairs to make sure it was legitimate.The offer — and the 3-kilowatt system on Lopez’s roof — came from Grid Alternatives, a nonprofit organization bringing solar energy to the homes of low-income residents.
Founded in 2004, the group has installed 3,500 solar systems on low-income residents’ homes in California and is expanding to Colorado.
In the fall, it will start operations in New York and New Jersey.
“These systems were really out of the reach of low-income families, even though they cut energy bills,” said Kristina Sickles, the group’s Colorado development officer. “Now they aren’t.”
Grid Alternatives uses a combination of donated equipment, expertise from solar companies, corporate backing and volunteer labor to make solar arrays available to low-income households.
Among those working on Lopez’s home was Andrew Hoag, a manager at Petaluma, Calif.-based Enphase Energy.
The company donates its micro-inverters and staff.
“It is a way for us to do public service,” Hoag said.
One of the organization’s big backers is Wells Fargo & Co., whose foundation has provided $2 million to Grid Alternatives.
“This was too good to keep in California,” said Ashley Grosh of Wells Fargo Environmental Affairs. “We made a push to make Colorado the next place.”
Colorado was a natural choice, said Ron Binz, chairman of the Grid Alternatives board.
“There is a strong solar infrastructure in Colorado,” said Binz, who was chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission and is President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Still, there is about a $5,000 funding gap on each system — which runs $12,000 to $17,000 — that has to be filled, according to Grid Alternatives.
The Colorado program got a jump-start with a $200,000 grant from the Colorado Energy Office.
And that is what helped make the solar array on Lopez’s roof possible.
The system should cover 60 to 100 percent of the household’s energy needs, Sickles said.
Homeowners pay Grid Alternatives 2 cents for every kilowatt-hour that the solar panels produce.
If the system covers the entire demand of an average bill, the Grid Alternatives family would pay about $13 for its electricity, compared with the average $75.67 Xcel bill.
“I feel truly blessed,” Lopez said. “All these people just showed up and made it happen.”
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912, mjaffe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bymarkjaffe
