Days are bright for solar power firm
10:00 PM PDT on Sunday, June 17, 2007
As demand increases for solar power in globally warming Southern California, a panel installer has moved its headquarters from Fallbrook to Murrieta and opened sales offices in Los Angeles, Orange County and Palm Springs.
Founded by Mo Rousso in 2001, HelioPower provides solar power systems to both home owners and businesses.
"The first year we didn't make any money. We had a handful of sales," Rousso said.
But this past year the company made $12 million in sales. Its most recent project was the installation of 1,600 solar panels (250 kilowatts) on an office building in Corona.
HelioPower has been awarded a 600-panel project in Fresno and a 500-panel project in the Waterbrook district of Fallbrook.
The move to Murrieta gave the company three times the amount of warehousing space and allowed for more opportunity to expand its product line.
"We originally started the business in Fallbrook and had an employee base there, so we wanted to stay as close to Fallbrook as possible," Rousso said. "Being in Murrieta allows us to be more efficient when we deploy our crews to Riverside, Palm Springs and Los Angeles and still service our customers in San Diego County."
HelioPower offers a grid-tie photovoltaic system as well as a grid-tie inverter that can be installed in almost any structure, an off-grid, stand-alone system that uses solar power to charge sealed deep-cycle lead-acid batteries and solar domestic water and pool heating.
The photovoltaic system consists of solar panels that are installed on a south-facing roof at a 30-degree angle if the roof does not provide a natural slope to maximize exposure to the sun.
While HelioPower stockpiles panels at its new Murrieta warehouse, various companies including Sharp, Mitsubishi and British Petroleum manufacture the panels.
The panels convert energy from the sun into direct-current electricity, which is then converted to utility-grade alternating current electricity by the grid-tie inverter.
Unused electricity supports the electrical grid, essentially rolling back the solar power owner's electricity meter.
Over time, owners accumulate credit for surplus electricity and, depending on the number of solar power panels installed, rid themselves of a monthly electric bill.
Customers pay $7 a month to the power company for the service. "The charge is so they can come out and continue to read the meter," Rousso said. "All the storage (of surplus electricity) is done on their grid, it's a lot easier to pay them that seven bucks than to buy a big bank of batteries to store that power."
HelioPower is aided by recent California legislation.
Last year Gov. Schwarzenegger signed SB-1, which aims to have 1 million solar roofs in California by 2018.
The goal of the legislation is to provide California with 3,000 megawatts of solar power, the equivalent of 1 million homes, by allowing net metering and requiring developers after 2011 to offer solar energy systems to buyers.
Before founding HelioPower, Rousso worked as a strategist for a consulting agency and helped develop European market strategies for a Houston-based energy company.
