It’s very green to renovate historic buildings. But must they be powered by coal and nukes? Photo: local louisville via Flickr.
After years of enduring energy-wasting apartments in various big cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC — I feel blessed to be able to inhabit my own house in a very cute, well preserved small city in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Apartment living, with its drafty windows, walls and ceilings free of any shred of insulation, and shared utility bills split equally among tenants regardless of who turns down the heat and who doesn’t, galled the energy geek in me. But since I didn’t own the place, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. And forget about asking the landlord to pony up to blow R-30 fiberglass in the attic. It was quite enough to get the toilet fixed by the weekend.
Home is where the hearth is — so who needs solar panels?
Now, living with a family in my own house-castle, the only limitation to delving into energy efficiency is our budget (and of course, the kids’ willingness to turn off the lights).
Except that our Edwardian townhouse also happens to be located in an official historic district. That’s good news for aesthetics and for property values. But it turns out that historic districts are bad news for clean energy.
Let me explain.
Since I work as a solar power developer for colleges and universities, we wanted to walk a bit of our own talk on a smaller scale at home. Home solar is becoming more affordable every month. And if there’s a company like Sun Edison or Sungevity serving the area, you can avoid most or all the upfront costs of installation by leasing the panels for an immediate savings over what you’d pay your electric utility anyway.
As I’ve argued before, solar power is the “teddy bear” of energy sources: It’s not only clean but its fuel (sunshine) is absolutely free and you can make your own energy, kicking your electric company to the curb.
So, what’s not to like about solar panels on your home’s roof?
Well, plenty, if you’re a historic preservationist and your idea of what your house should look like from the outside is frozen in the year the house was built. In our case, that would be around 1910-1920.
Now, there are exceptions of course for modern technology. Of course, power, phone and cable lines are acceptable. In some historic districts they even allow satellite dishes. But around the US, historic preservation authorities have been leery of or even antagonistic towards solar panels. Even Al Gore had trouble getting approval to put up PV on his 70-year-old house in Nashville.
In our town, we’ve been told that solar panels would only be allowed if 1) pedestrians can’t see them from the street or 2) we build a new structure just to hold the panels.
Sounds reasonable enough, right? Well, not really.
The cost of a purpose-built solar tower would make the project too expensive, even if we had the land to do it, which we don’t. And solar panels really need to face the sun to produce enough power to earn their keep. On our house that means on the southern face of our pitched roof, easily visible from the street below.
So I guess solar is out at our house. But boy, do we have a pretty facade. Our historically inoffensive house will probably hold its value nicely in case we can’t afford to pay our utility bills in the future and we get foreclosed. Unless the next buyer doesn’t want to pay high utility bills either.
In that case, our house could just sit there empty for a while, looking all ready to host a barbershop quartet or a suffragette tea. Maybe the historic preservation folks could use it as a museum to show schoolkids what empty houses looked like when Woodrow Wilson was president?
Don’t worry, go geothermal
Not to be stuck themselves in a pre-World War I mindset, our local preservationists have come up with a workaround: why not just have the City install an underground geothermal district heating system to serve a bunch of houses like mine as well as nearby businesses?
Forget that digging up the ground under a bunch of hundred-year-old buildings to put in pipes and a heat-exchanger sounds so complicated and expensive that it’s unlikely to fit in our already tight city budget for another couple decades.
The point is, you can’t SEE a geothermal system because it’s underground. And that’s why preservation folks, bless their hearts, love it.
Our local historic preservation group used Earth Day as a chance to make some good points how green it is to save and renovate old buildings. But their attitude towards solar panels is not so green.
But until that happens, I guess the preservation people would just have us keep using power from the grid, courtesy of coal, natural gas and nuclear power. And I thought historic preservation was supposed to be friendly to the environment?
Well, verboten solar is just not good enough for me. I don’t see why the energy infrastructure of Kaiser Wilhelm’s era — chimneys and coal bins — is so much more charming than some tastefully installed solar panels on the roof?
And let me put the architecture history buffs at ease. I promise, letting me have a little solar would not turn out to be a gateway drug for anything-goes street-front tackiness. I won’t try to enclose my porch in plexiglass, install a neon “Jesus Saves” sign or turn my front yard into a parking deck anytime soon.
Just look around the country. Solar panel people can be good neighbors, even when you’re trying to cultivate a Model T-era vibe. Communities best preserve their past by allowing their citizens to enjoy prosperity now and in the future, not by turning historic neighborhoods into open-air musuems.
– Erik Curren, Transition Voice
