The state of Mississippi recently provided further incentives for businesses and residents to consider switching to solar energy.
According to information from the Public Service Commission, homeowners and businesses are being offered a $3,500 rebate for rooftop solar panels.
Currently, most homes in the Greenwood Utilities and Delta Electric Power Association service areas operate solely on the companies’ grids, which run mainly on fossil fuels.
“Solar energy is what we call an intermittent source,” said David O’Bryan, manager of Delta Electric. This is part of what makes solar energy, while environmentally friendly, difficult to use.
The availability of solar energy depends on two things, ac-cording to O’Bryan and Brian Fin-negan, CEO of Greenwood Utilities.
The first is the amount of sunlight a solar panel can access. Solar panels only produce energy as long as they have direct sunlight, O’Bryan said. This means during the night, solar panels are not producing any energy.
The second factor affecting the availability of solar energy is technology. According to both O’Bryan and Finnegan, technology has not developed enough to make a battery that is both affordable and capable of storing enough excess energy to power a house when the sun is not out.
Greenwood Utilities serves about four homes that use solar energy, Finnegan said. Delta Electric also serves “very few” solar-powered customers, O’Bryan said.
Dr. Anita Batman, a Greenwood resident, is one of those Greenwood Utilities serves. She has had solar panels for a number of years and has had no hiccups, she said.
“Last night my neighborhood was dark, but my computer was up and running this morning,” she said Friday afternoon, referring to the lightning storm that left more than 1,000 customers in the Greenwood Utilities and Delta Electric Service areas without power.
“My electricity hasn’t twinkled in all those years,” she said.
In 2016, when she decided to install solar panels at her home, Batman ran into complications with Greenwood Utilities. “I was told the future of energy was in hydrocarbons,” she said.
However, eventually she managed to finish the roughly $20,000 process of installing solar panels.
Her setup includes a battery, she said, though she could not recall immediately how big its capacity is. She did say that her conversion to solar power would have cost about $10,000, or half what it ended up costing, if she had not purchased the battery.
The solar panels “paid for themselves in the first five years, and I run my errands around town in my electric car,” Batman said. “I’m running on sunshine.”
Finnegan says solar power can be beneficial to homeowners. “Right now, most solar panels can provide some relief to the homeowner to run certain parts of their house,” he said.
O’Bryan also recognizes the appeal of solar energy but says there’s currently only a “limited place for it” due to the unequal benefit compared to the cost.
“There’s limitations on the benefit. Over the years we’ve found the capacity for solar installations is 25-30%,” he said.
This means at any given time, the solar panel is producing only one-fourth to one-third of what it can.
And, because there currently are not affordable batteries able to store an excess of solar energy to power through the night or cloudy days, switching an electrical grid to solar power would cause rolling blackouts.
In switching from fossil fuels to renewables such as solar power, Finnegan advocates wisdom.
“I think that solar is a critical part of our industry as we go forth, but we have to be wise with how we go about it,” he said.
- Contact Katherine Parker at 662-581-7239 or kparker@gwcommonwealth.com.
