My name is Santiago Perez and I’m a first-time homeowner. We moved into our home 6 years ago in Jamaica plane. It’s a three-unit condo and the building is over 100 years old so there were certainly some improvements that we were looking to make. The first thing we went after was putting solar panels on the roof. It was a long three-year process because it’s a three-unit condo and getting the other owners on board figuring out how to split the the benefits of the solar figuring out the complexity of installing on a flat roof took some time to figure out but it it’s now been completed and we’re very happy.

We in the end decided to have two of the owners participate and the other one not because he rents out his unit and so he’s out of out of state wouldn’t benefit from the incentives. We had to write up a contract that clarified the ownership of the panels and the ownership of the credits and getting sign off from all three owners. That took some working through. Thankfully Massachusetts DOER is one of the agencies that assits with the transition. They had a lot of resources for how to write up that contract, how to negotiate with a condo, and how to think through the particularities of of installing an a condo situation. They had a template for how how to write up a a contract between the the owners and a Condo Association so that it was was absolutely clear it was responsible for solar panels who benefits from the electricity they had resources on how to get financing in the context of a condo run project and versus a unit owned project. So it just demystified a lot.

We benefited from both the federal solar tax credit as well as a choose a specific incentive. It was more than 30% of the cost that came down and it was very important in terms of it being a good investment. In the end it’s those incentives. We’re grateful that they’re available so the way that works is that the solar electricity comes in and first pays for the utility cost of the common area so the building wide Central utility bill and then all the excess gets applied to our our own unit bills in the form of credits. We just have a deduction on our electricity bill for for each unit. It’s very straightforward, just a discount on your utility bill and at the end of the day the total solar covers about half of the total electricity utilization of the building including the EV charging that we do on site.