Map of Mountain View Solar Installations

The pictue above shows the location of homes with solar systems sold by SolarCity in Mountain View and adjacent areas. What a great picture!

Mountain View is #3 Solar City in the Bay Area

Back on April 3 I reported on a survey about residential solar adoption around the state. Yesterday, the NorCal Solar Energy Association released a new study that ranked Bay Area cities in various aspects of solar adoption. Unlike the previous study, this one combined large scale commercial solar (like Google and Microsoft) with residential.

Of cities with more than 50,000 population, Mountain View ranked third in watts per capita. The top 5 large cities were:

1. Napa 43 watts/capita
2. Pleasanton 36
3. Mountain View 34
4. San Rafael 33
5. Santa Rosa 28

We came in #8 in terms of total installed watts for cities of any size. The figures for this category:

1. Oakland 6.0 megawatts
2. San Francisco 4.5
3. Santa Rosa 4.3
4. San Jose 3.7
5. Napa 3.2
6. Hayward 3.1
7. Pleasanton 2.4
8. Mountain View 2.4
9. Vacaville 2.3
10. San Rafael 1.8

About 80-85% of the installed capacity comes from Google and Microsoft, but those of us who participated in the Solar Buyers Group should feel proud of our contribution too.

Installations are accelerating

The pace of installations is accelerating. The status of the 130 SolarCity customers in Mountain View is as follows:

Installation complete: 54
Installation in progress: 35
Permitting: 41