Farmington, Conn.-based McPhee Electric, a Phalcon Company, partnered with Collinsville, Ill.-based Day & Night Solar (DNS) to build a solar power installation on its own building. It did this to gain firsthand familiarity with solar, to test a new working relationship with a solar solution partner and to learn about technical issues related to solar power systems, how to interact with local third parties on solar installations, and about payback periods. Most important, McPhee Electric intends to use all of this information and then showcase the project as way to promote the technology to the company’s customers.

“We signed an agreement with Day & Night Solar to become an integrated partner with us and decided we wanted to ‘run the playbook’ ourselves before we began working with customers,” said Michael Balinskas, general manager for PowerHawke, a Phalcon Company. “The pilot would allow us to vet DNS as a solution partner on ourselves before subjecting potential customers to unknown resources and to ensure that our reputation with clients could continue the pattern of excellence to which they are accustomed.”


The company also wanted to appraise the technical viability of solar in its geographic region and understand installation processes.


“We also wanted to understand the entire turnkey process from the regulatory, utility, code and local construction aspects,” Balinskas said. “We learned some things along the way in terms of how to deal with local officials, utilities and others, so that we can do the same when we work with customers.”


The system is designed to provide all of the energy needs of McPhee Electric’s facility throughout the year.


“The $260,000 investment generates $17,000 in annual energy savings, $7,500 in annual zero-emission renewable energy credits, and an overall 52-month payback for us,” Balinskas said.


In transitioning the technology from its own in-house use to customer applications, the company identified important strategies. First, find the ideal customer base.


“Our focus is customers with which we already have consistent working business relationships,” he says. “We are not planning to go out there and compete with the ‘trunk slammers’ for any type of customer business that might be available.”


Second, make sure the demonstration location has high visibility. While the primary target is current customers, the company also realized that there is opportunity to sell to other serious-minded prospects, and high visibility is important to this strategy. McPhee’s facilities have the advantage of being visible to a significant amount of daily vehicle traffic.


The company opted for solar technology that would be even more visible than just rows of panels. The system has a 64.3-kilowatt (kW) canopy structure and a 6.84-kW tracker. The steel parking canopy structure is affixed to the ground with concrete and the panels are attached to a tilted roof. The AllEarth Solar Tracker is a dual-axis active tracker that uses a motor and GPS to the turn solar panels from east to west, and up and down, to ensure the panels are always following the sun’s elevation, which can increase energy production by up to 45 percent over fixed-rooftop systems.


Third, make a sound financial case for adoption of the technology by customers and prospects. According to Balinskas, the incentives package and the savings from the system have to align in a way that proposals to customers and prospects are reasonable and attractive.


“The payback was and is important to us, because it would have been unlikely that we would have pursued this project for ourselves if the ROI was too low,” he said. “Our payback is around four years. What we will be pitching to customers is a system with a three- to six-year payback, which we feel is viable. If you have to push out past a six-year payback, it can be difficult to gain customer interest.”


To date, the company is happy with the system and its prospects for attracting future business. But future changes are possible.


“If we decided to expand the size of the building in the future, that, of course, would increase the load. And then we might need to add to the existing capacity of the solar installation,” he said.