Solar panels on common condo roof in California

[RubberToe]

All,
I am unfortunately the President of an HOA. We have a single building with 50 units, and a common roof over 3 floors. All electrical panels for the units are in the garage under the building. We are in the process of updating our CC&Rs and I saw that they now have the same wording concerning solar panels that they do concerning EV charger installation. Note that I personally took advantage of the EV charger installation option several years ago (2015) when I installed a charger in my parking space in the common parking area. See the wording in the attachment that our lawyers are suggesting in the CC&Rs.

And also see the Davis-Sterling discussion of Civil Code Sections 714 and 714.1 here (and attached):

Solar Energy Systems

My reading of this is that as long as there is an equitable distribution of the "usable" area, an owner can install panels on the common roof. So this would create several issues: 1) running conduit down the building side, which would be unsightly, and may(?) need to be disguised, 2) the installation of the related equipment in the garage where the individual unit electrical master panels are located. And as you can imagine, what if all 50 units wanted to do this.

Does this all sound right, and does anyone have experience actually doing this on a common roof, and can point me to a thread where this was discussed? I'm most curious about the impact on the outside of the building where the conduit would be, and if that would have to be disguised. If not, then I could imagine a scenario where there are multiple runs of 2" metal conduit coming from the roof down to the garage.

Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing stopping an owner from doing this.

RT

 

[miimura]

I would strongly suggest that you survey interest in solar among your owners. The best way to do it is for the association to install one system and have owners buy a share of the system with their meter credited with the same percentage of kWh production per billing period as their ownership share. This avoids a lot of the insurance and liability for damage issues. It also allows a single optimum installation on the common are roof.

However, this depends on your utility having a scheme for virtual net metering that can assign production from one production meter to the individual owners' meters in the prescribed percentages.

 

[Watts_Up]

Do you want to charge EVs ONLY during the day, like 11 am to 3 pm on average, about 4 hours a day,
or any time, like in the evening, because in this case you will need getting some batteries,
which will be quite costly depending on how much solar energy you want to store.

I'm currently installing solar panels for a building to reduce the electrical billing utilities.
The solar energy will be use principally for the lighting of the common areas of the building,
especially at night, and the consumption is about 15 kWh a day, and will save about $200 a month.

I am located in San Francisco, so to have enough solar energy in winter I need to install 8 kW of solar panels,
or about 20 solar panels of 400W each, and 20 kWh 48V of batteries, to cover all the conversions losses.

In the summer the solar production will be about twice, so there will be a surplus that I plan to use to heat water,
using a heat pump, but this could be used also to charge an EV. This will require using a split phase 240V and a 10 kW inverter.

I estimate the total cost to be around $10k, for a DIY installation, so not including any labor cost.

If you plan to make a solar project, I would recommend estimating your electrical energy requirement,
which will give you an idea of the solar energy you will need to generate and how much energy you will need to store, and cost.

For example, if I drive about 60 miles a day, so I would need about 15 kWh every night.
I have a $0.20/kWh low peak EV rate, so my EV monthly consumption is about 400 kWh or $80.
If I spend $10k for the solar project, it would take 125 months or 10 years to cover the cost.