7.3 Solar Savings and Avoided Fuel Costs

Solar Savings

When I think about a SECS and the potential solar utility for a client in a given locale, I am familiar with the variable costs (VC) of fuel in a home or a commercial building. I am also familiar that SECSs have a relatively high fixed cost (FC) of the system's initial investment. So, I need a metric that can show me the annualized and cumulative flow of cash as costs and savings (in today's dollars) over the period of analysis.

We see in our reading that earlier solar engineers had developed strategic ways to apply the concepts of Life Cycle Costing Analysis (LCCA) for SECSs. Because solar technologies like PV (photovoltaics) and SHW (solar hot water) tend to substitute for fuels that need to be purchased, the authors recognized a value in specifying SECS financial potential in terms of avoided fuel costs (another FC), otherwise termed fuel savings (FS). The opposite of a "cost" is a "savings" in marginal analysis, right? But saving fuel is only one of at least seven parameters affecting the flows of cash for a system. Annualized cash flows are the sum of costs and savings in a year.

• The Solar Savings (SS) are the sum of avoided fuel costs (fuel savings) and incremental costs of operation for the SECS that we calculate for a system, typically on an annual basis, then put in today's dollars, and finally summed for a cumulative solar savings. Notice that (in the best scenarios) there are three savings parameters (+) and four cost parameters (-) assessed. Can you describe what each of these parameters is, and how they each function?

SS = FS - incremental mortgage/loan payment

- incremental maintenance/insurance

- incremental parasitic energy costs

- incremental property taxes

+ tax credit incentives

+ production credit incentives

• The Life Cycle Savings (LCS) are the cumulative solar savings for the period of analysis, framed in today's dollars.