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Worcester County solar co-op meeting in Snow Hill tonight

(June 23, 2016) The only meeting in southern Worcester for residents interested in forming a solar electric cooperative is scheduled for tonight at 7 p.m. at the train station on Belt Street in Snow Hill. Another meeting is scheduled for June 29 in Ocean Pines.
The 90-minute session will be hosted by MD Sun, a division of the nonprofit Community Power Network.
The idea is for residents to band together and use their collective purchasing power to leverage a discount on installation fees for solar cells on their property, Corey Ramsden, Maryland project manager for the nonprofit, said.
“The first part of the meeting will be about solar technology, so we can establish a baseline of what people might know and how the technology works within the home, Ramsden said.
Next, the processes of forming a co-op and purchasing will be explained, he said.
The final formal topic of discussion, Ramsden said, would be financing options.
While those are the discrete subheadings on the agenda, Ramsden said the meeting is a more fluid arrangement, with questions and answers coming from both the audience as well as Ramsden.
“We get some good interactions,” he said, and from these new interactions new ideas and strategies are formulated and tested.
The most important step before the meeting, Ramsden said, is to register at www.mdsun.org/worcester — though preregistration is not a prerequisite to attend the meeting.
“We just need an idea of how many people are coming,” Ramsden explained. “The process is all driven by homeowners.”
Ramsden said as few as 25 people can form a cooperative arrangement, as he has set up in both Salisbury and Easton.
Once a critical mass is reached, Ramsden said his organization would help develop the request for proposal, which is then shipped off to various vendors. The members of the cooperative would then choose the installer from the proposals based on whatever factors it decided were most advantageous — a local contractor, perhaps, or the vendor offering the best price.  
Those decisions are farther down the road, Ramsden said.
“The process takes seven to 10 months based on the numbers and the location. It all starts with the 90-minute information sessions,” he said.
Before incentives, Ramsden said, a solar power system designed for home use can cost anywhere between $9,000 and $20,000 installed.
Grouping customers into a cooperative situation can bring that cost down. Ramsden said the Federal government provides an incentive good for 30 percent of the installation cost as a tax credit rather than a deduction on income taxes. Maryland, he continued, could kick in a $1,000 grant to homeowners if their home is a primary residence and is not within a historic district.
“If you were to buy a system outright, it would pay for itself in 8-10 years and these systems generally last 20 years,” Ramsden said. “In terms of offset, you should see a 30-70 percent reduction in your bill.”
A residence requires at least 200 feet of space to install a photovoltaic electric system, but those 200 feet all don’t have to be in one place.
 “We test to make sure your house gets enough sun. The hours between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. are the most important,” he said.
These systems are not intended to outright replace existing home-based electrical service, because the generated power can’t be stored, so it’s fed back into the grid for other customers to use. The homeowner is reimbursed for the generated solar power as “solar renewable energy credits” that can be used or sold either individually or by a broker as electricity is generated, he said.