In Pennsylvania, a commercial program promises to provide 100 homeowners with photovoltaic (PV) solar panel arrays up to $35,000 in value with no upfront costs, providing they live in Philadelphia, have a flat roof and a clear view of the sky to the south of their home.

The program, delivered by the GREENandSAVE Home Optimization Service Group, is not a government program, but a private initiative, and essentially offers to lease up to $35,000 in solar panels for twenty years with no upfront costs and no maintenance fees. The program is apparently administered by a GREENandSAVE partner, though no names are given.

What will $35,000 buy, in terms of solar electricity? GREENandSAVE doesn’t provide specifics, but in the Pennsylvania solar marketplace a 5-kilowatt, grid-tied system is currently priced at $40,000 before federal tax credits (30 percent) and state rebates (from the PA Sunshine program, at $2.25 per watt).

Also applicable are federal and state renewable energy credits, or RECs, which together – at least in Pennsylvania – total about $3,520 per year, but homeowners availing themselves of the GREENandSAVE program won’t get these. Instead, the company will, and this is where the real financial benefits of solar leasing programs are revealed.

The GREENandSAVE program further states that homeowners will save 50 percent of their average electric bill for the first two years. Further savings accrue because the lease terms are locked in, while Philadelphia utilities will likely up their cost per kilowatt hour when rate caps expire at the end of 2010.

The company states that homeowners will save an average of $15,000 over the course of the lease. This prediction would seem daring, given that the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, or PUC – which has jurisdiction over 11 electric distribution companies serving the state – has so far seemed to consider the needs of consumers over those of utilities.

In 1996, Pennsylvania’s electric rates were 15 percent higher than the national average, so in 1997, under the 1997 Electricity Generation Choice and Competition Act, the PUC froze them and adopted restructuring policies that led utilities to sell off their generation plants. The buyers, for their part, sold the output at wholesale market rates under FERC jurisdiction, and gave retail electric customers the opportunity to choose suppliers, including alternative energy suppliers.

Today’s electric prices in Pennsylvania are at or below the national average. Generation rates were extended for many of the electric providers, but the caps on transmission and distribution rates all have expired. All remaining caps – on PPL Electric Utilities Inc., Metropolitan-Edison Co., Pennsylvania Electric Co., and PECO Energy Co. – will expire by Jan. 1, 2011.

So far, GREENandSAVE reports signing up about 40 homeowners, whose solar installations will begin this fall. Once the pilot program, of 100 homeowners, is complete, GREENandSAVE hopes to roll out a second phase targeting an additional 5,000 homeowners. Frankly, I don’t know if there are that many flat roofs in Philadelphia.

As an added bonus, homeowners will earn a $250 just for signing up (a feature presumably restricted to Phase 1 of the program).

All in all, it appears to be a worthy program for those who live in the City of Brotherly Love, benefiting homeowners, the environment, and the solar energy industry, which needs to succeed if global warming gases are to be reduced enough to save the planet from meltdown over the next two or three decades.