How commercial solar panels benefit commercial businesses is one of the first questions that a business owner should ask themselves. Solar can be expensive to install and understanding how that investment repays that expense is one way to see the benefit of going solar, especially for California businesses. This blog goes into details about how going solar power benefits commercial clients.
5 Reasons Why Your Commercial Building Needs Commercial Solar Panels
Saves Money- ROI
- Saving The Planet
- Low maintenance
- Reliability
There are many reasons why your commercial business needs solar, here are five key ones.
1. It Saves Money
One way that going solar for commercial clients saves money is that when you produce your own energy, you don’t pay for tiered rates like you would pay the local utility company. You are free to use energy when you need to without too much consideration for the time of day or peak usage hours that other commercial businesses must consider. The way this saves you money is that you no long have to pay higher energy rates based on when you use energy.
Since solar power is free once the array is paid for, the energy you use is also free. What can you do with the monthly expenditure that you used to pay to the local energy company?
2. It Can Make Your Business More Money
You can also think about this as a way to make more money. Since you are no longer paying for energy in the traditional sense, you are free to invest that money into company growth. Because you are not having to worry about when you use energy, you can shift production to day hours which can save you in labor costs. Many night workers earn a shift differential. While you may still need some workers for those shifts, you can switch many to daytime hours and potentially lose some expenses of shift differential.
2022 may be the last year for the federal solar initiative which can repay you a percentage of the cost of your solar array. For 2022, the Federal Solar Tax Credit is 26%. That is a big return on investment. Additionally, the cost of solar components is dropping and the labor to install solar systems is also dropping. That means that the startup to go solar is lower making the return on investment higher.
ROI for commercial is a measurement against the cost of producing energy over the cost of buying energy. When a solar array is sized to meet the needs of your business and the future needs of your business, you pay less for energy. How much incoming electricity will your solar array offset? That translates into a savings of monthly expenditures to power your company. That is money the commercial solar system is saving you.
There are other ways to think about ROI when it comes to a solar project for commercial applications. First, is the singular rate that solar energy costs you – the cost of setting up the system in comparison to the varied rates that your local utility company charges – base rates, tiered rates, and excessive usage rates, etc. A solar array does away with all the varied rates that you used to pay. You pay one rate and that is the monthly cost of setting up your array. If you paid for the system directly, then each month the system produces energy that helps to recuperate those setup costs.
To determine how much ROI a system can produce for your company, talk with our experts. We are happy to provide business-specific information that shows the ROI potential for your unique business.
3. It Helps to Save the Planet
Solar energy is a green renewable energy because it helps the environment by reducing the solar footprint of companies. The majority of electricity sold by your local utility comes from power plants that burn some form of fossil fuel to create electricity. That process produces greenhouse gasses and smog. When you go solar, the energy that your solar array produces is clean and helps to offset climate change. A solar array does not produce greenhouse gasses or smog because it does not burn fossil fuel to create energy.
When your business goes solar, you are reducing the amount of energy needed locally and that means that your local utility is buying smaller quantities of dirty energy and using more clean energy.
The other way that going solar helps the environment is that any excess energy that you make you can send to your local utility, and they may or may not pay for it. However, the more energy you send to your local utility, the less dirty electricity they need to purchase or produce.
Those two ways of using solar energy help the environment a lot.
4. It’s Low Maintenance
Once a commercial solar array is installed and operating, it requires very little maintenance. Once a year, sometimes more often depending on your locations, the system needs to be cleaned. Other than that, there is very little maintenance. When you combine solar energy production with smart technology, you can monitor the energy production per commercial solar panel and can tell when maintenance on a panel or solar component is needed.
5. It’s a Reliable Form of Energy
Commercial solar arrays are highly reliable. In California and throughout many western states the local utility companies are not able to guarantee that energy will be available all of the time. It used to be that on occasion a power outage would occur. These days, Public Safety Power Shutoffs are common during the hotter times of the year. Once the local power company turns off the power it can be days or weeks before power is restored.
Many businesses and homeowners are moving to solar energy to gain a greater control over the production of energy. Those systems help companies remain open and in full production when the surrounding community is without power. Solar energy provides greater energy independence and greater control over the way businesses use energy and when they use energy.
Unique to Every Business
Every business has a unique set of needs for energy usage. While all of these benefits are applicable to most businesses, they will vary from one type of business to the next. Even businesses that have similar energy demands will see variations in the benefits of going solar.
To explore the unique energy usage for your business, give our experts a call.
How to Get Started
The best way to get started with going solar is to explore the benefits that solar energy offers your business. Coldwell Solar offers the following services:
- Consulting – the perfect starting point to understand how much energy you need for current operations and whether a scalable system is right for you. The process outlines your current energy usage, rough size and benefits of going solar, and how that process applies to your business’ energy needs – both for today and in the future.
- Solar Design and Engineering – is the next step in the process. Solar design matches system output to business energy needs and the physical design of the system to fit your commercial building, structural concerns, and opportunity to grow the system as your business grows.
- Financing – When needed, financing options that fit your business’ needs. If you want to own the system outright or lease the system, we have financing options that make good business sense.
- Construction – As a licensed contractor, Coldwell Solar will install your solar array to exceeding expectations of local, state, and federal regulations.
Post-Installation Services
As a leader in solar installations in California, Coldwell Solar offers more than just solar array sales and installations. We want your solar system to operate properly and to meet your energy consumption needs. To that end, we offer maintenance services that keep your energy production at peak capacity.
Those services include:
- Comprehensive Check-up is an annual service that also includes system maintenance as needed. We look at system components and measure their performance to their warranty specifications. Doing so not only keeps your solar array in top shape, but it can also reduce wear on the system and prolong the systems naturally long lifecycle.
- Monitoring is the way we test solar performance and thanks to smart technology that process can be much simpler. The benefit is that we can recognize when solar components or panels are not working at peak energy production. Our repair service is often same-day, and we inform you if there is any need to limit energy production for repairs.
It’s our goal to keep your solar array and system operating at peak efficiency. We want your system to produce the most energy possible for the duration of the lifespan of the array and its parts.
The Coldwell Solar service options help you determine the best way to go solar and then maintain peak efficiency. We would be happy to provide more information on how solar can help your business’ energy needs.
