At first it was just one or two. But within weeks they were everywhere: outside the supermarket, the tire store, the park.

When Joe Orman left his Cherry Hill tobacco shop last week, the parking lot was empty. When he arrived Monday, a 5-by-3-foot solar panel had been attached to the utility pole at the corner of his property.

"I don't know what the hell is going on," he said. "I saw one go up across the street and wondered how they got permission to put a solar panel on a utility pole."

But it wasn't Orman's neighbor who was responsible.

Over the last month, Public Service Electric & Gas, New Jersey's largest power company, has been installing solar panels on streetlights and utility poles across its distribution network in an effort to meet a
state mandate that 20 percent of electricity come from alternative
energy sources by 2020.

PSE&G has plans to install 200,000 panels; about 5 percent are up so far, mostly in central New Jersey, a company spokesperson said.

"It should take about two years," she said.

As contractors move south, the addition of solar panels to already cluttered streetscapes is drawing the gaze of passing motorists.

In Cherry Hill, where panels are prominent everywhere, on busy roadways and quiet residential neighborhoods, township offices have received a number of calls from residents, said spokesman Dan Keashen.

"Mostly, people are just curious," he said.

Lori Braunstein, founder of Sustainable Cherry Hill, an environmental group, has been inundated with e-mails from friends and acquaintances praising the panels.

"To me, they're beautiful," she said. "It's what they symbolize. We have something really creative and forward-thinking in our town, and it helps me to think we're on the right track."

Elsewhere, some people consider the panels an eyesore.

In Gloucester City, Mike Stanton was outraged to see the panels go up downtown, where historic lighting and new sidewalks were just completed.

"Is this really the best place to put this? Why not put them out in the industrial areas first?" he asked.

All PSE&G-owned poles with a clear view to the south are eligible for panels, as long as they can support the weight and do not have more than one transformer, according to a company news release.

New Jersey is among the nation's leaders in alternative energy, with a solar generating capacity second only to California's.

The panels will feed electricity into the grid, creating about 40 megawatts of power. That represents about a 40 percent increase over New Jersey's current solar capacity, largely created over the last four
years through state and federal rebates on solar installations for
businesses and homeowners.

With the 2020 mandate in mind, power companies are working on a variety of projects across the state.

But with the new technology comes bigger electricity bills. The program to put solar panels on utility poles is expected to raise residential bills up to 34 cents a month.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, which regulates power companies, estimates that energy spending in the state will climb 56 percent by 2020 through a combination of increasing fossil-fuel costs
and the implementation of alternative energy technologies.

That is a sore point for Orman, who has watched his shop's electricity bill steadily climb to $500 to $600 a month since he opened Churchill's Tobacco on Kings Highway in 1984.

"They play. We pay. That you can quote me on," he said.

Contact staff writer James Osborne at 856-779-3876 or jaosborne@phillynews.com.

Second article, about businesses in PA, from March, 2010:

Going solar in Pa. no walk in the sun.

Funding lacking for business properties

By Diane Mastrull

Inquirer Staff Writer

Conditions in the Fort Washington Office Park were all too familiar: wet.

Where Commerce and Delaware Drives intersect, ducks bobbed across a field turned into a small pond by last weekend's three inches of rain.

But a little deeper inside the 563-acre complex of 340 businesses, Missy Quinn and Tom Emig were up on a roof talking about something that doesn't get a lot of attention in the flood-prone park: the sun.

Both work for Cushman & Wakefield of Pennsylvania Inc. She, among other duties, is asset manager, and he is
operations manager for the circa-1962 building they were standing atop
at 500 Virginia Dr.

Actually, the word building doesn't do it justice. At 380,000 square feet - virtually all of it one-story - 500 Virginia Dr. is a workout if traveled on foot. The main corridor is 750 feet long; the
adjacent garage is 120,000 square feet.

Covering all that space is a roof totaling 10 acres. It's flat with unobstructed exposure to - when it's shining - the sun. That is why Quinn, Emig, and the building's owner, APF Properties in New York, want
to cover a good bit of it with solar panels.

Their objective is altruistic and economical: to have a smaller carbon footprint and to reduce electric bills in the energy-hungry structure, which houses a workforce of 800. General Electric
Co. and Honeywell
International Inc. are the largest of the five
tenants.

"All environmental initiatives that reduce energy are very good for this country," Berndt Perl, a partner in APF Properties, said during a visit to Philadelphia
last week. "Because [that] is good for the tenants, it might
also, in the end, make business sense."

But Perl has discovered that actually installing a solar system is anything but a walk in the sun.

Since his group bought 500 Virginia Dr. from General Electric Capital Corp. in May 2007 for $35 million, his efforts to secure funding to convert the facility to solar energy have been "frustrating," Perl said -
and far different than they would be in his native Germany. There, like
much of Europe,
plugging into alternative energy is second nature, he said.

Pennsylvania, by contrast, is in its infancy. Only last year did it start offering homeowners and businesses grants to help offset the cost of buying and installing solar systems.

For commercial real estate companies such as APF Properties, securing any sort of financing for solar "is very difficult," Perl said.

Solar experts confirmed that.

"Typically, solar investment is too large to be undertaken without either restructuring debt or at least using the value of the real estate as collateral," said Andrew Kleeman, vice president and general manager
for Mercury
Solar Systems' Pennsylvania operation, formerly known as Eos
Energy Solutions.

"For larger commercial buildings with CMBS [commercial mortgage-backed securities] debt, the asset typically cannot be used as collateral," Kleeman said.

At the Hankin Group, an Exton residential- and commercial-development company, president Bob Hankin said income from solar systems was derived from a mix of grants, tax credits, and depreciation allowance,
as well as the sale of the power generated and renewable-energy credits.

Those so-called SRECS are sold to utilities and other power providers under government mandate to offset their carbon production. That market is still largely unestablished in Pennsylvania.

"You have this diverse mix of income sources that a bank can't grab onto and say, 'These are my assets,' " said Hankin, who was fortunate to get financing "in a routine sort of way" for a $700,000 112-kilowatt
system that started going up on the roof of his company's headquarters
Thursday.

That financing is a blend of state and federal grants, working capital, and lines of credit not secured by the solar project itself. Hankin credited his company's "fairly underleveraged" status for its
relative ease in getting the funding.

APF Properties has applied for funds from the state Solar Grant Program, which has approved $46 million in applications thus far. The program has $85 million in pending requests for the $34 million still
available, a spokeswoman said Friday.

With program funding not to exceed $1 million or $2.25 per watt, whichever is less, whatever help APF Properties might get would not be enough to cover the size of the system Perl would like to install in
Fort Washington - 2.5 megawatts. His plan is to scale it back to 1
megawatt.

Perl said the 1-megawatt system, which he estimated would cost $5 million and likely would be installed by the end of this year, would cut the electric bills at 500 Virginia Dr. by 15 percent to 23 percent.

"Despite all the impediments, we're just going to push for this," he said.

At least Perl does not have to worry about flooding: The building is just outside the office park's high-risk zone. Emig said a parking-lot entrance was the closest floodwaters have come to the structure in the
10 years he has managed operations there.

Yet APF wants to do its part to prevent any liquid that falls from the sky from running off its 28 acres to lower-lying properties. So it is getting estimates for the installation of pumps to direct rainwater
into a 300,000-gallon aboveground tank already on the premises and two
underground reservoirs that can hold 200,000 gallons in all.

Upper Dublin Township has budgeted more than $700,000 for stormwater-management improvements to the office park this year and is pursuing funds for a longer-term $68
million flood-avoidance initiative recommended by Temple
University's Center for Sustainable Communities.

Of APF Properties' rainwater-harvesting ambitions, Township Manager Paul Leonard said that while the water coming off 500 Virginia Dr. was "nowhere near" the amounts that pour into streets and parking lots from
three major creeks that flow through the park, "every little bit helps."

Contact staff writer Diane Mastrull at 215-854-2466 or dmastrull@phillynews.com.

What do you think? What's happening where you are with solar panels?