Should you want a solar panel on your home or business in Georgia... it's not easy to do. You'll have to come up with the 18 to 25 thousand dollars it will cost for the equipment and installation.

Georgia's General Assembly has tried to make it easier to finance small scale solar installations. But Georgia Power and Electric Membership Companies or EMCs stood in the way,worrying that the arrangements would create third-party power providers.

Now State Representative Mike Dudgeon of South Forsyth thinks he has a bill that would make it easier for homeowners to get financing for solar panels and would ease the mind of Georgia Power and EMCs.

GPB's Michael Caputo talked with Dudgeon and asked him first to describe what his bill would do for homeowners...

Caputo - Describe how this bill might make it easier for homeowners to get panels.

Dudgeon - What the law will do is make it crystal clear that any kind of financing that you would like to do that the market offers, to put in the solar technology would be legal. And very specifically the most popular type of financing is where the agreement between the financier and the installer is based on the power output of your house. Because when you put in solar you expect to save money on your regular power bill. By factoring that into the lease payments, it makes the customer and the financier on the same page that you're going to save that kind of energy.

Caputo - Is this a shift in thinking by Georgia Power because in the past Georgia Power has said they didn't want to see this change. They thought it would be a competitive negative. Is there a change?

Dudgeon - There is a little bit of a change. What Georgia Power and the EMC's were most concerned about was not as much residential or small business using the power on their own premises. What they were concerned about was third party transactions where I may have solar on my property but I sign a deal with you and I'm going to send the power to you. And we have a deal where I send the power to you and we're using the utility's power lines and grids, transformers and so forth. If we limit it such that if you're sizing the solar for use on your property or your business and it's appropriately sized for your needs .. and not to be a backdoor generator for a lot of other people... if we do that and we make sure that the appropriate safety requirements to that if you connect to power system's grid so that you don't cause problems in the power system's grid. If we have all those things done than the power company and the EMC's became comfortable with this kind of business arrangement.

Caputo - Solar power is taking off in Georgia but on a big scale, the big farms. It really hasn't really taken off for the homeowner. How would you assess that?

Dudgeon - That's exactly right. I had a meeting with the Commissioner Tim Echols of the (Public Service Commission) last week. A lot of solar people were there. They showed data where Georgia is, of course, like you said. is doing great with expansion of utility or large-scale solar. But the residential and small business was so small that on bar graph you almost couldn't even see it. And what you've seen is because of that bar in Georgia where you have to lay out all that money up front. It's very hard to get adoption.

Hopefully, if the law passes and gets signed by the Governor, that we will see like we see in other states once its become comfortable with the financing, that we'll see it take off. (It's) no different if there was no access for mortgages for houses, you'd see a lot less people living in their own house. That financing is key in order to let people adopt the technology.

Caputo - What are the chances this bill passes?

Dudgeon - I think the chances are pretty high.

Tags: solar panels bill, State Representative Mike Dudgeon of South Forsyth, solar panels, financing