From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Residential Solar Electricity and Other Energy Saving Technologies Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Frank Rusco, Director, Natural Resources and Environment Related GAO Work: GAO-17-142: Electricity: Status of Residential Deployment of Solar and Other Technologies and Potential Benefits and Challenges Released: March 2017 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's March 2017. Traditionally, electricity has moved in one direction, from electricity suppliers to customers. Today, rooftop solar panels, battery systems, smart thermostats, and other technologies increasingly allow customers to generate, store, and efficiently manage their electricity use. A team led by Frank Rusco, a director in GAO's Natural Resources and Environment team, recently looked at potential benefits and challenges of these technologies. Sarah Kaczmarek sat down with Frank to talk about what they found. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] What's the government doing to incentivize people to install solar panelsEUR [ Frank Rusco: ] Quite a lot, actually. First, there are federal tax credits which can pay up to the 30 percent of the cost of installation. Secondly, 41 states require utilities in those states to buy excess power generated by those systems. And lastly, some states even provide additional tax incentives. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So solar panels certainly seem more common. Is that the trendEUR [ Frank Rusco: ] It is a trend. Still, there are very few households that have solar panels. For example, there's less than 1 percent nationally. However, since 2010, the number of solar panels on residential properties has increased by more than a factor of seven. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So tell me about some of the benefits for people who are using technologies like solar panels or other things like smart thermostats. [ Frank Rusco: ] Well, the main benefit is the cost of power. With all the incentives, and if you can afford the initial installation cost, and you live in a place with a lot of sun, you can actually reduce your utility bill. Going forward with smart thermostats and advanced meters that can communicate with thermostats and smart homes where all of the appliances are attached to the thermostat and can be operated remotely from a smart phone, for example, there are a lot of opportunities to sort of change how people use power and how much they use. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Sounds like some good benefits now and some interesting ones in the future, as well. Could you tell me, though, can there be too much of a good thing here, or are there some challenges with solar panel technologyEUR [ Frank Rusco: ] Potentially, yes. There are challenges with incorporating more and more solar power onto a grid that is used by many, many thousands of users and supplied by many, many producers of electricity. Now to understand this, I'll make an analogy to water. When you turn the tap on the water, water comes through the pipes and that's connected to either a tank full of water or a reservoir, and so as long as there's water in a tank and water in the reservoir, people can turn on their taps, and it doesn't affect anybody else's use. Electricity is a little more complicated. There is effectively no central storage of electricity, so electricity has to be generated exactly when it's consumed, because basically, electricity moves at about the speed of light. So if a bunch of people turn on their air conditioners, there's a system operator who sees oh, there's this power drain, and they have to be able to turn up power generation--some maybe a gas plant or hydro. They have to start generating more electricity instantaneously to balance the system. If the system gets too far out of balance, then you'll get a black out or a loss of power. So if you have a lot of solar panels, as they do in Hawaii. Fourteen percent of the houses in Hawaii have solar panels on them, and if all a sudden, say, you have a intermittent cloudy and sunny day, the clouds come over, all of a sudden, the system has a lot less power on it, and the system operator then has to turn on other generators to balance the system. And conversely, when the clouds go away, and all of a sudden the solar panels are generating a whole lot of electricity, well then, the system operator has to turn down other generating sources. And so it's a little more complicated than it used to be. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] What do you see as the bottom line of your report for customers who use these technologies or might be thinking about doing so in the futureEUR [ Frank Rusco: ] Well, if you're thinking about doing it in the future, you want to look at what tax incentives are in place at the time that you're going to do it. These things may be changing over time, either from federal policy or state policy. So you need to figure that out. See if it makes sense. Going forward, if you have more of these smart technologies installed in your house or you have a fully smart house, you might actually be able to benefit in many other ways. And, for example, have an electric vehicle being charged by your solar panels when they're producing more electricity than your house is using, and then use the battery of your car to put power back into your house at night. So there's a lot of options. 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