Residential Solar Competitive With Electricity In 25 States Next Year: NRG CEO

Solar power for your home has been around a long time, but for many homeowners, it's required subsidies, special financing arrangements, and still delivered long payback periods.

That's changing fast, according to the CEO of a major Texas electric utility.

David Crane, who runs NRG Energy, says that in fully half the states of the union, electricity from residential solar panels will be cost-competitive with that delivered by local electric utilities by next year.

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Crane was quoted two weeks ago in a blog post by Navigant Research, which focused on his company's aggressive efforts to migrate to solar power for a growing portion of its portfolio.

NRG recently acquired Roof Diagnostics Solar, one of the 10 largest residential-solar installers in the country. RDS does business in the Northeast--New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut--and plans to expand into California as well.

It will be rolled into NRG's existing residential-solar financing and installation business, which already operates in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Vermont.

Because it's such a large producer--it sells more than half the electricity it generates to other utilities--NRG has a lot more to lose from "distributed generation," the term applied to the effect of hundreds of thousands (soon millions) of renewable power sources owned by individual rate-payers.