Power to (and for) the people

You wouldn't know it to look at the front of their Higgins Court home in Brockville, but Peter and Linda Breedyk have converted their rooftop into a solar power generating station.

The 38 solar panels on their home's roof, and another 10 on their garage roof, started putting power into the Ontario Hydro grid on Tuesday afternoon, Sept. 21.

The panels, mounted onto the Breedyks' southern-exposure rooftop facing the back yard, create a 9.6-kilowatt generating station.
As it poured rain outside Thursday afternoon, Peter laughed and admitted that the system fired up on "the worst week of the year" for generating solar power.

Peter, a manufacturing specialist with Ross Video in Iroquois, is a member of the Brockville Climate Action Group, and had been contemplating the idea of installing solar panels for some time.

In August of 2009, when he saw the provincial fee schedule that was announced for MicroFIT homeowners -up to 80 cents per kilowatt hour of power generated -he called Linda over to his computer to ask her opinion.

Linda, who works as a dental assistant, agreed that the time was right for them to take this on. With both of their children grown, and Peter and Linda bringing in a steady income, the time seemed right to take on the initial expense of installing solar panels, and then watch their investment pay for itself through the electricity they generate.

"I think we were one of the first with a good-sized MicroFIT program in Brockville," Peter said.

MicroFIT (which stands for "micro feed-in tariff") is offered by the Ontario Power Authority to homeowners, farmers, small businesses and institutions generating 10 kilowatts or less of renewable energy. The FIT program, on the other hand, is designed for small, medium and large renewable energy projects generating more than 10 kilowatts of electricity.

Simply put, the solar system creates energy whenever the sun is out.

"This is a revenue-generating (system)," Peter explained. "We have two meters: One meter measures how much we use, the other meter measures how much we generate. If we consume more than we generate, we're pulling from the grid. If we generate more than we consume, then we're adding to the neighbours' requirements. We're getting paid 80 cents per kilowatt hour, and it's only costing us eight to 10 cents, depending on what the rate is."

"It will offset the cost that we are paying," Linda added. "If we were off-grid, then we would have to have a solar battery system in order to store it."

"That's a big 'if'," Peter added, "and we're not there yet."

Peter and Linda, who are "on the grid" like most of us, buy their household electricity through Bullfrog Power, which uses power from renewable sources like wind, water and solar. They also updated their appliances and changed their energy consumption habits, all with the goal of "going green."

Then came the idea for installing solar panels. But the path to getting them up and running was not a smooth one.

After they researched solar panels and decided that this was a feasible venture, their first decision was whether to get a ground or roof-mounted unit. For aesthetic reasons, they went with a roof-mounted unit.

Next up was getting a building permit, mainly to determine whether their roof trusses could handle the additional weight of solar panels along with a load of snow in the wintertime. They also needed to replace their 12- year-old roof. Attic ventilation problems had "cooked" their shingles, causing them to warp prematurely.