The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome by John F. Wasik

Author:John F. Wasik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

Solar, Sexy, and Expensive

Can a home be even more energy conscious than Kaufmann’s modular designs? Adding more solar panels and wind and geothermal appliances makes it possible to sell power back to the utility company on certain days, ushering in the era of the “zero-energy” home.

Just south of Berkeley, I traveled through a tunnel to Danville, California, one of those idyllic places where everything looks like it just came out of a Restoration Hardware catalog and is the location for another Steven Spielberg movie. In Danville, I visited Lennar’s Milano development, where the new Mediterranean-style homes going up in this dry, verdant valley east of San Francisco will have solar panels, and were a portion of the 375 homes Lennar planned to build in the Bay Area. The homes, which have Internet connections that tell the sprinkler system when to go on, range in size from 3,000 to about 4,000 square feet, so they don’t qualify as pure McMansions. The prices in the Milano development ranged from $1 million to $1.2 million in late 2008.

Solar homes in California are supported by state and local programs, which are creating a market for energy-producing houses. By late 2008, almost five thousand home solar systems had been installed in the Golden State, according to the California Energy Commission.

The million-dollar-plus home I toured was a 3,800-square-foot, two-story house with five bedrooms, four and a half baths, an office, a technology area, and a two-car garage in Milano. The house also included a security system, an intercom, high-speed Internet, a home theater, energy-efficient windows, and high-efficiency air conditioning.

Although most Americans can’t afford this kind of home, it’s not extravagant for the Bay Area, which features some of the priciest real estate in the country. All of the latest doodads are part of the package, ranging from a touch panel display of all of the networked systems in the home to a Web-based irrigation system that will check the weather and turn on the water when needed.

With the average U.S. family’s household energy bill at almost $4,000 a year in 2008—the price of natural gas alone rose 48 percent between 2006 and 2008—reducing that monthly electric, gas, or oil bill is a top priority in millions of households. But is it worth a huge premium to buy green homes? It may be, if energy prices keep rising, as many analysts predict.

No matter how much energy they save, million-dollar solar homes are not going to revitalize the U.S. home market, not even in California. For a clue to how homes could become more energy conscious and still remain somewhat affordable, I looked at the Sacramento area, where the local utility supports green homebuilding and prices are much lower than in the Bay Area. Premier Homes of Roseville, based in an area where summer heat often exceeds 100 degrees, sold zero-energy homes equipped with solar panels, tankless water heaters, and additional insulation.

Although the prices of the houses ranged from $250,000 to $450,000—from $40,000 to $90,000 higher than similar

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