Lennar Bay Area Homebuilding is announcing three Bay Area solar-driven communities, located in the Windemere community of San Ramon. All 275 homes will come equipped with a roof integrated solar electric system from PowerLight, a subsidiary of SunPower Corporation as a standard feature. The three Windemere communities, Paloma, Escalante and Stafford Place, are the latest addition to Lennar’s solar-electric program. The company introduced their solar home program in February, when it unveiled the 77-home Milano community in Danville, at the time, the largest solar-driven community in the Bay Area. The homes in the three communities range in square footage from 2,600 to 4,300. In recognition of the Earth Day celebration, Lennar will host grand opening events in all three communities on April 21, from 11am-4pm.
“Our commitment to energy conservation and enhanced value for our buyers has guided this decision to install solar systems in these homes,†said Les Lifter, Vice President of Marketing for Lennar. “Through our research, we listen to our customers and our Bay Area customers are telling us that solar power is a value-added element to their home buying decision.â€
In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1, legislation which put the finishing touches on his Million Solar Roofs Plan, aimed at establishing California as the nation’s leader in solar energy. The plan provides incentives to builders and homeowners who install solar power in new homes and convert to solar energy in existing homes. The bill, which provides tremendous support to Lennar’s existing solar energy initiatives, is just part of a broader effort to push green energy alternatives throughout the state.
Although the incentives from the program will not take effect until 2011, Lennar’s commitment to solar-power puts it in the forefront of forward-thinking builders who have their eye on the future and a concern for the environment. The Windemere homes equipped with a solar energy system can generate considerable savings on annual utility bills in addition to the current, one-time $2,000 federal tax credit.
According to PG&E, homeowners will actually produce renewable power to help supply their own needs while protecting the environment. Any surplus power appears as a credit on the homeowner’s utility bill and reverts back to the PG&E power grid. PG&E then subtracts the energy supplied back to the utility from the consumer’s monthly bill. Unlike solar panels of the past, which were elevated above the roof, the SunPower SunTile solar electric system integrates into each home’s roofline.
“The SunTile systems we are providing to these communities feature the world’s most efficient solar cell, ensuring that homeowners achieve maximum savings on their utility bills each month, while contributing to clean air and a better environment,†said Howard Wenger, Vice President of Global Business Units for SunPower.
The Lennar homes at Windemere are part of the Company’s “Everything You Want, Everything You Need, That’s the Logic of Lennar†program. Rather than offering upgrades that cost extra, Lennar researches what customers want and value in a new home and includes those items as standard features.
What are the prices of the new homes?
Don Hamm dhamm1@yahoo.com
Don: you will want to contact the makers of the home follow the link above to their website. I imagine at that scale they would only be a bit more expensive than a comparable home in the area.
This South Florida-based Lennar Corporation is absolutely notorious. They are currently in the process of poisoning San Francisco’s last African-American neigthborhood, Bayview Hunters Point, in San Francisco. Their heavy construction equipment is filling the air with asbestos and no one really knows what other contaminants in the Hunters Point Shipyard,
Those of us trying to get Lennar out of San Francisco lost in a 5 top 6 vote by our Board of Supervisors to shut Lennar down in the Hunters Point Shipyard, a radioactive federal Superfund site, and the former site of the little-known Naval Radiological Laboratory, which exposed unknowing, mostly Black shipyard workers to radiation exposure to test its effects after World War II.
The racially discriminatory, environmentally unjust toxic load born by Bayview Hunters Point includes not only the National Rad Lab, but also 85% of San Francisco’s solid waste sewage, which is all piped out to Bayview Hunters Point for chemical disinfection before being pushed into San Francisco Bay, or into the Pacific Ocean, at Fort Funston. And, for the past sixty years, whenever anyone has wanted to manufacture or dump anything really noxious, they’ve headed straight for Bayview Hunters Point.
Lennar, the corporation most favored by the Pelosi Machine, including Nancy Pelosi’s nephew Laurence Pelosi and Laurence Pelosi’s second cousin, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, are now filling the air in Bayview Hunters Point with so many air pollutants that children are having chronic nosebleeds that their parents can’t stop.
Toxic alarms have gone off repeatedlyl, sending workers running out the gates of the shipyard, after which Lennar and its corporate toxics management corporation, Tetratech, have failed to tell anyone working on Lennar’s condos what caused the alarms to go off.
Laurence Pelosi’s cousin, Mayor Gavin Newsom, is also giving Lennar municipal solar power to boost the price of their condos built in the middle of a naval shipyard no longer in operation, but still toxic as hell.
All the naval shipyards in the U.S., operating or not, are toxic for all sorts of reasons and radioactive because most all the ships in the U.S. Navy are nuclear-powered.
If this website is really inspired by environmental concern, the Lennar Corporation does not belong here. Their solar panel communities are an effort to centralize and control solar power, a potentially decentralizing technology in the hands of a huge and notorious multinational corporation.
The U.S. military is another big purchaser of solar power, with the largest solar installation in California at the Twin Palms military base around Joshua Tree in Southern Califorhia. One of the two largest solar installations in New Mexico is also a military base.
Want to add the Pentagon to your list of environmental innovators?
This South Florida-based Lennar Corporation is absolutely notorious; there is no corporation in America more responsible for unplanned urban sprawll and now that unplanned urban sprawl has created commuter hell, Lennar wants the biz “redeveloping” the inner cities, which have become desirable once again..
Lennar is currently in the process of poisoning San Francisco’s last African-American neigthborhood, Bayview Hunters Point. Lennar is frilling the air with asbestos and no one really knows what other contaminants building condos—I call them the Superfund Condos—in our Hunters Point Shipyard, a radioactive federal Superfund site.
Those of us trying to get Lennar out of San Francisco lost in a 5 top 6 vote by our Board of Supervisors to shut Lennar down in the Hunters Point Shipyard, a radioactive federal Superfund site, and the former site of the little-known Naval Radiological Laboratory, which exposed unknowing, mostly Black shipyard workers to radiation to test its effects after World War II. In the 1970s, the U.S. government admitted exposing unsuspectinhg Native Americans to radiation to test its effects, and compensated them, insofar as one can compensate anyone for things like cancer, kidney disease, and genetic transmutation. They have never done so in Bayview Hunters Point, and now this City, which has been taken over by the Pelosi Machine, is building condos in the Hunters Point Shipyard.
The racially discriminatory, environmentally unjust toxic load born by Bayview Hunters Point includes not only the National Rad Lab, but also 85% of San Francisco’s solid waste sewage, which is all piped out to Bayview Hunters Point for chemical disinfection before being pushed into San Francisco Bay, or into the Pacific Ocean, at Fort Funston. And, for the past sixty years, whenever anyone has wanted to manufacture or dump anything really noxious in the Bay Area, they’ve headed straight for Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.
Lennar, the corporation most favored here by the Pelosi Machine, including Nancy Pelosi’s nephew Laurence Pelosi and Laurence Pelosi’s second cousin, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, are now filling the air in Bayview Hunters Point with so many air pollutants that children are having chronic nosebleeds that their parents can’t stop.
Toxic alarms have gone off in the shipyard repeatedlyl, sending workers running out the gates, after which Lennar and its corporate toxics management corporation, Tetratech, have failed to tell anyone working on Lennar’s condos what caused the alarms to go off.
Laurence Pelosi’s cousin, Mayor Gavin Newsom, is also giving Lennar municipal solar power to boost the price of their condos built in the middle of a naval shipyard no longer in operation, but still toxic as hell, a radioactive federal Superfund site.
All the naval shipyards in the U.S., operating or not, are toxic for all sorts of reasons and radioactive because most all the ships in the U.S. Navy are nuclear-powered.
If this website is really inspired by environmental concern, the Lennar Corporation and its solar-powered homes do not belong here. Their solar panel communities are an effort to centralize and control solar power, a potentially decentralizing technology in the hands of a huge, notorious multinational corporation, which has not only been responsible for urban sprawl, but now, as well, for the chaos caused by the sup-primne mortgage market. Lennar owns both GMAC and Indymac Bank, both of which have been big players in the sub-prime mortgage market now causing the wave of foreclosures and financial chaos all over the world.
The Pentagon, like Lennar, is another big purchaser of solar power, with the largest solar installation in California at the Twin Palms a military base around Joshua Tree in Southern Califorhia. One of the two largest solar installations in New Mexico is also a military base, while the Hopi and Diné Navajo of the Four Corners battle the non-stop aggression of Peabody Coal and Sithe Global Industries, which is trying to build a 60-acre coal-fired power plant in the Four Corners that would squander most of the desert aquifer accessible there, to the northwestern Diné Navajo.
Want to add the Pentagon to your list of environmental innovators? If you’re going to showcase Lennar for its environmental concern, then you might as well showcase the Pentagon as well.
Ann: While I appreciate that this company may have done horrible things, this is a news site as much as anything else. Do you blame CNN for terrorists actions when they report on them? Do you blame the evening news for murder when they report on gang shootings?
If you have a valid beef with the Lennar company (I know nothing of the events you laid out, but a link or two would help if you have got them), that is one thing, but don’t take shots at me.
If the pentagon suddenly paves its roofs with solar panels you bet I will be covering it on this site, in fact I feel it is important for all sectors of our society to move towards renewable energy.
I understand your views, and sympathize but I think The Sietch is not the right target.
I installed solar panels on my home in San Francisco and my “solar credits” I’m getting will vanish on the anniversary date of my solar installation if I don’t find a way to squander all the solar electricity the panels on my roof are generating by then.
Someone in PG&E’s Billing Dept. gave me a lecture about installing more solar panels than I’d need to cover my own electricity bill, so I think PG&E’s claim that it’s goal is to become the greenest utility in the U.S. is wearing very very thin. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/18/BU80TD6ER.DTL
Ann Garrison is a complete fool. She’s a bug-eyed communist that can’t think past her environmental fervor. She hates the military, this country and anyone that wants the laws of this country enforced. She is part of the Cindy Sheehan click and always doube posts her comments as if that will somehow add truth to the factless tripe she regurgitates.
Re Ann G:
Yeah. I live directly across the street from the Hunter’s Point Shipyard. My back patio is about fifty feet from the shipyard fence where the development is going on.
The opposition comes from whackjobs like Ann and race-baiters like the Nation of Islam who are pushing their own dreary “San Francisco is a racist pesthole” agenda. Most local folks welcome development in the neighborhood, which is the most depressed in the City, lacking even a decent supermarket.
Most of the whackjobs don’t live down here. Me, personally, I can’t wait for the development to get built, up, and running. Can’t come soon enough for me. What I’m trying to figure out is how to get solar power working for my condo/townhouse, though.