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Everyone “Diggs” 1 Block Off The Grid (1BOG.org)
Big news just announced from 1 Block Off The Grid (1BOG.org)
With 1 Block Off The Grid (aka 1BOG.org) San Francisco residents can save up to 48% off the cost of a solar system for their home (total cost for low energy users would be about $3,200 for a system). The deadline for taking advantage of 1BOG’s offer is September 15, 2008 so check out 1BOG’s web site soon for more details.
I just heard this news from Sylvia Ventura, co-founder of 1BOG, and I’m mentioning this to my blog readers because this seems like a particularly unique opportunity for my fellow San Franciscans to receive low-cost solar power - and I’m a supporter of affordable renewable energy.
San Franciscans can currently benefit from the largest government-sponsored rebates that have ever been available, but some of them will soon no longer be unavailable. Between 1BOG’s discounts and the rebates, this is likely the lowest price opportunity for solar available in San Francisco this year. In addition to securing volume pricing, the team at 1BOG helps guide and educate its members through the process, making getting solar power less intimidating than going it alone.
The background on 1BOG
1BOG’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of renewable solar energy in residential homes. Their primary tool for doing this is to make solar power more accessible financially by negotiating deep discounts in the price of solar systems. 1BOG’s unique business model involves bringing together a large group of homeowners in a given city, and then using group purchasing power to negotiate volume pricing so that everyone in the group benefits.
According to Sylvia, 1BOG aims to take the equivalent of a city block off the San Francisco grid by the end of the year. This isn’t an actual city block - it’s more like a “virtual block”, the aggregate of all the participating solar homes in San Francisco. Afterwards, their goal is to reduce San Francisco’s electricity demand by many blocks, and then to repeat this in cities across the country.
Taking a block off the grid, or roughly 50 homes, in San Francisco would be a real achievement, given current numbers. According to 1BOG’s site “The city has set a goal of 10,000 solar roofs by 2010; to date less than 700 residences have solar on their roofs.” This low level of adoption is largely due to cost, but also due to inadequate information (e.g. about government incentives and tax benefits).
You can see a visual image of the demand for 1BOG in San Francisco:
A Bad Time to Take a Vacation
Another story from Sylvia - her family was taking her kids on a 10-day summer vacation in Tahoe last week that they had planned 6 months in advance, including family visiting from out of town. This soon turned into an entrepreneurial working vacation when unexpected promotional pandemonium broke loose…
When 1BOG put an announcement on the news wire on August 19 (during their family vacation) that they had selected Real Goods Solar as their solar power installation partner, a CleanTechnica blog post about the news suddenly became a popular story on Digg. By the next day, there was 100 Diggs, and the story hit the front page on Digg, and became the top story with over 600 Diggs in just a couple of hours!
Within hours, 1BOG.org was flooded with thousands of visitors, and this led to 80 new registrants, bringing their total number of members to 340.
Why did this get so popular on Digg out-of-the-blue? Sylvia isn’t sure, but she suspects that Digg is very much community-oriented, and that 1BOG has an inspiring community-oriented concept.
Where to Next? Going National
Though 1 Block Off the Grid is focused on completing their first round of community solar installations in San Francisco, the word has gotten out nationally. According to Sylvia Ventura, they are now considering the next cities they want to serve. My guess is they will go to the cities with the largest number of registrants at 1BOG’s site, so that should be motivation for people outside of San Francisco.
1BOG has signed up 40 people in Washington DC, 15 in Las Vegas, 6 in Portland, and a number of people in other Bay Area cities such as San Jose and Sacramento.
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