Horror Stories in time for Halloween [RE-wrenches]

[Jeff Yago]

I was doing commercial and institutional solar thermal DHW systems in
the very early 1970's including YMCA's, hospitals, car washes, hotels,
and military installations.  There were only a few of us but we did
very good work and our solar businesses were profitable.

Then sometime around 1978, Jimmy Carter went on TV and announced there
would be a 25% fed solar tax credit.  Almost every solar dealer I knew
then went out of business because it took almost two years to pass the
legislation and nobody would buy a solar system now as they wanted the
tax rebate and it was not retro-active.

Then, I believe it was sometime in 1980 when the legislation was
finally ironed out, two months later there were so many solar
"installers" you could find them advertising on every local radio
station, in every phone book, and using mass market phone
solicitation, promising these $4000 to $6000 solar hot water heaters
(which had about $300 in parts) would save the homeowner thousands of
dollars in taxes.

Those of you old timers out there know we spent the next 10 years
either removing these trash systems or having to fix them at a loss to
avoid the bad publicity for our industry.

I have posted on this board before, that solar tax credits are a two
edged sword, and they always bring un-qualified installers into the
market because the incentive for both the homeowner and the installer
is to do the minimum to qualify for a tax credit or utility rebate,
not to install a quality system.

I saw this ruin the solar thermal industry in the early 1980's and it
never fully recovered, I really hate to see it do the same to the
solar pv industry.

I agree that other utilities benefit from their own tax breaks,
depletion allowances, and mister taxpayer paying for god knows what
that only benefits big oil, gas, and nuclear, but that's just it,
these kinds of tax breaks do not cause unqualified suppliers to enter
their market does it?  If there is not a better way for a state or
federal government to help our industry then this, then I would just
as soon not have these "benefits".  We are better then this, we need
to stop acting like that guy on the corner with his hand out.

Jeff Yago

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