San Francisco News Blog

Look, Ma! Solar panels and a three-car garage!

If asked to guess which city in California sported the most rooftop solar installations, you might well guess San Francisco, right? And if asked which city would be most likely to include such information on its official travel brochure or within the stump speech of its politically striving mayor -- well, that'd be a no-brainer.

But, alas, the answer isn't San Francisco. It's San Diego. A study released yesterday by the group Environment California tracks the proliferation of solar rooftops in recent years. And, according to the survey, San Diego has far and away the most rooftop solar installations in all the realm, 2,267, easily outpacing No. 2 San Francisco's 1,493.

In defense of our fair city, we did beat L.A. Also, San Diego has 1.5 times the population of San Francisco, perhaps 120,000 more housing units (with roofs!), and occupies 324 square miles to San Francisco's roughly 46. Oh, also, it's sunny there -- which may explain why San Diego's rooftop solar installations are also generating a hell of a lot more power than ours.   

San Diego's panels have a power capacity of 19,452 kilowatts. San Jose came second at 15,818, followed by Fresno, Los Angeles (dammit!), and then us at 12,763. By the way, San Francisco's expensive plan to build a five megawatt (5,000 kilowatt) solar installation in the aptly named Sunset District wouldn't factor in here, as this is a measure of smaller-time solar rooftops.

When it comes to gauging what cities have the highest proportion of solar rooftops, San Francisco is light years away from the list. Nevada City comes first, with 18.8 percent of its households sporting panels, while Sebastopol places second at 15.5 percent. Sonoma rounds out the Top 10 list at 5.8 percent.

Similarly, when it comes to ranking generating capacity per capita, it's a small city's game. City of Industry (near L.A.) snags the top billing at 1,563 KW per head. Bay Area resort town St. Helena's 556 KW is good enough for second, while Sonoma (347) and Sebastopol (325) are fourth and fifth.

While state-sponsored subsidy programs encouraging residential solar power use are reaching the bottoms of their coffers, the solar survey's authors, not surprisingly, push for greatly augmenting these solar incentive offers. Perhaps this is the latest indication that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's skill set does not include advanced mathematics: While he has repeatedly mused about the notion of "a million solar rooftops," the state is already running out of funds to promote more than the 51,000 turned up by this study.  

Photo   |   BuildingGreenUSA