Photography by Jennifer Silverberg
Bob McMullen
The back half of Bob McMullen’s roof turned out to be the best spot for his solar panels. He’s got six installed on the roof’s western hip, but there are no fewer than 13 crowding the rear, angled southward, gulping up maximum sun. He’s showing me this from the grass behind his house in University City. The panels above us are Tetris-ed together asymmetrically, so he points out the obstacles that informed such an array: a vent protruding here, a chimney over there that casts a meddlesome shadow every morning.
“If shadows are an issue,” I ask, “will bird poop be an issue?” No, he says: The trees they perch in are at a safe remove, and rain would wash it off anyway. His installers, StraightUp Solar, thought of all this, he says: “They look very carefully at what’s up there.”
McMullen himself studied solar carefully before diving in. He’s an inquisitive guy who used to work as a school librarian and teacher of math and science (plus other subjects) to fifth-graders in the Ferguson-Florissant School District. After retiring in 2013, he became fascinated by Missouri’s native plants. He cultivated some in his front yard: serviceberry, chokeberry, red maple. “They bring in the birds and the butterflies,” he says. From there, he began thinking about powering his household with sun. That’s not a crazy notion: St. Louis gets almost 90 percent as much usable sun as Miami, according to calculations by the Midwest Renewable Energy Association, a pro-solar nonprofit in Milwaukee.
So McMullen found his way to the folks with Grow Solar St. Louis, a partnership between the MREA, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and area municipalities. Grow Solar not only hosts info sessions called “Power Hours” but also organizes citizens into customer pools that can buy in bulk and therefore get more competitive prices. MREA is running this program in seven other places around the region, and from 2019 to 2020, St. Louis (which includes the city and county, St. Charles County, and the Metro East) showed the most interest in terms of the number of homes that installed it (233) and the amount they installed (1,936-kW). These numbers were higher than Chicago’s. “There’s clearly a big appetite for solar in the St. Louis area,” says Peter Murphy, the MREA’s solar program director.
There can be hurdles, too. Despite a 1979 statute in Missouri law declaring residential solar a property right, some homeowner associations have restricted where panels can be installed on a house. Disputes have arisen and landed in court. But Stephen Jeffery, a Chesterfield attorney who has represented solar-installing households, says this kind of litigation occurs less frequently now that the technology is more familiar and widespread. McMullen, for his part, discovered that solar-friendly U. City does have its own safety provisions about the weight of panels on roofs, but he had no trouble gaining approval for his setup.
The highest hurdle for most people is the price. McMullen paid about $22,000 upfront in hard and soft costs, yet thanks to a 26 percent federal tax credit and other rebates and incentives, he’ll end up spending only $15,000. In return, he’ll receive lower electricity bills from now on—about $30 or $40, he guesses, compared to the $110 that he was paying before as a monthly flat rate. Those monthly savings will finally add up to his investment costs in about 17 years, he estimates, and his panels are guaranteed for 25 years. “I’ll come out ahead in the long run,” he says.
Photography by Jennifer Silverberg
He fires up his iPad. After a few taps and swipes, he shows me his solar dashboard. It reveals that in 2020, the month that proved the biggest bonanza of sunlight was June, despite the fact that August is, on average, warmer. “Humidity has nothing to do with it,” he says. “June is the summer solstice—that’s when the sun is highest over the house.”
Even then, of course, he’s only capturing a small fraction of the sun’s power. Most sunlight is ultraviolet and infrared. The rest is visible light. Visible light is the only kind that panels can absorb, and the average home-solar setup is only converting 15–22 percent of that to usable energy. But for McMullen’s purposes, that’s enough—sometimes more than enough. On certain days, he’ll glance at his dashboard and observe that he’s drawing in more energy from the sun than he’s consuming (through his appliances, lightbulbs, and electronics). At the end of the month, if he has converted more than he’s consumed, the electric company will purchase his surplus and absorb it into the grid for others to use.
Yet aside from dollars, McMullen says he’s also factoring in his own mortality. He’s 64 years old, he says, and just made a quarter-century investment on his home. “I got—well, I think I got 25 years left,” he jokes. He knows that solar equipment might leap forward in efficiency in the near future, but he chose to go for it anyway: “I thought I’d waited long enough. I know the technology will get better, but I don’t want to keep polluting the Earth during that time.” A major goal of this project, he says, was to shrink his carbon footprint.
Then he reveals another reason that he went for solar: He just thinks it’s cool. Right outside his garage, he shows off the new meter that records his solar intake. “It’s our own power!” he says. “It’s kinda neat.”
