Why Doesn’t the Housing Industry Use Solar Panels When Building Homes?

A prominent Southern California Realtor has asked that her congress person tell her why the Housing Industry during the last run-up did not put in more solar? So, the Online Think Tank decided to answer her direct question:

Why doesn’t the housing industry use solar panels when building a home?

This was a huge topic in “Building Industry News” magazine for a good nine months at the top of the bubble. The reason as stated is because putting solar panels on the home raised the price of the home some $30,000 minimum. It also increased liability for major builders, with all the lawsuits housing developers set up shell corporations that they close as soon if not right before the final home is built, this prevents class action lawsuits.

Even adding $1500 worth of insulation or a better fitting door or $3,000 for double pained windows was not done, this saves $1,000s per year on energy bills. The reason for that as stated is because raising the price of the homes an extra $3,000 means some folks would not qualify for the low or no-down financing. In hindsight, well obviously many of these folks had no business buying a home at all. They could not even buy a $1,400 chicken coup for cash, and yet they were sold homes for $250,000 to $450,000 with no money down, marginal credit and questionable statements on their loan application forms. But, I need not tell you this, more of an education for others reading this.

Solar Panels make sense, make what you can, when you are not using it, “grid bank” it selling it back to the grid allowing your electric meter to run backwards, everyone wins, no need to worry about capacity in power lines for demand and on hot days it helps prevent brown and rolling blackouts due to high usage from air-conditioners.

Now then, certainly the developers and builders of new housing tracts could have done this and their economies of scale would have fostered new innovation, research and free-enterprise would have filled in all the blanks and lowered the cost, it was a great time for that opportunity, which is gone now. Our Online Think Tank discussed this at length during the run up to the bubble pop. The real estate lady of course is preaching to the choir of course, but those are the arguments and debate points on that topic.

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