As with any retail service, consumers should expect a straight-forward dealing with installers and get what they’re promised. Most consumers, though, have no previous experiences shopping for solar, so that makes it more difficult to spot shady language in a contract or missing steps in the purchase process. An online search of solar installers in your town could turn up a long list of companies.

To help you combat the mass of information, as well as any misinformation, we created this cheat sheet of things you should consider:

1). The initial query: While you could start with a Google search for solar installers in your area, a better way is contacting your local utility or the city or state agency that oversees these utilities. Often times they have a list of installers who have already gotten the necessary certification to perform solar panel installations. California has such a statewide database. Nevada has one, too. So does New York.

2). Learn about the incentives in your region: Incentives are gonna be the key for you to figure out if you can afford solar panels. The best resource we’ve found for solar incentives by state is this great website, funded by the Department of Energy. You also could find out about rebates or tax breaks from your local utility or installers. Still, it’s a good idea to find an alternative source of information to verify what you’ve been told. The DOE-backed database not only lists incentives by states, it also includes a link to each state’s agency that administers the subsidies. From there you also could find whom to contact to ask about certified installers.

3). How to pay for it:  An average-size system of solar panels, between 3KW and 5KW, costs around $18,000-$25,000 in California, according to the current pricing posted by the state’s solar program website, which is filled with other good information. The pricing in your region may be different, so comparison shop! If you can afford to buy and own a system, then you can reap the most savings over time.

If you can’t put up that much money upfront, then you now have many options to lease or get loans. You could sign up for leases in which you pay a monthly fee for solar electricity without owning the equipment. The company that provides the financing would own the system. A lease typically runs 15-20 years. Because of the growing popularity of the leases, you will likely hear about them from the installers you are interviewing. Check your local banks for loans. Admirals Bank, for example, recently launched a division that provides solar loans nationwide.

4). Lease vs. PPA: Some installers offer leases, while others do power purchase agreements. In a lease, you would usually pay a fixed amount each month regardless of how much electricity the solar panels produce (though that monthly fee may go up at some point during the lifetime of the contract). In a power purchase agreement, you agree to an electric rate and pay for the amount of electricity produced. That means your payment will likely vary from month to month, and the electric rate generally will go up over time. Sometimes installers can only provide one or the other because of local regulations governing electricity sales.

5). Gear research: There is no shortage of solar panel makers, who have more or less standardized the designs and warranties of the equipment (here’s a video about how a solar panel generates electricity). There isn’t a consumer-friendly rating system to say which manufacturers produce better products than others.

You can do your own online research, such as checking out who are among the top 10 solar panel makers in the world. But those make it onto the list because of the size of their factories. Many of those who aren’t on the top 10 also make quality products.

The key is to ask your installers about how long a manufacturer has been in business, any complaints from other consumers, and the repair and return policy. It’s no different than shopping for electronic equipment or appliances.

6). The promise: As with any financing contract, you want to read it very carefully and make sure you understand what you’ve been promised. Many installers promote the idea that if you go solar, you will end up paying less for electricity than you would otherwise. That’s an attractive proposition, especially if you have a high energy bill. But understand that those savings may not happen right away but over time.

No one can predict energy prices many years from now. Those prices depend heavily on the types of fuels used, changing regulations that might add to the cost of generation electricity and market demand. If your utility can’t promise what your electric rate will be in 10 years, how can anyone else promise that you will always pay a lower rate by going solar?

7). Keeping the system running: If you own the solar panels, then you are responsible for their upkeep. The equipment usually doesn’t require a lot of cleaning, though you may not be in such luck if you live in a dusty area or your roof is a magnet for birds. Sometimes squirrels can develop a taste for electrical cables of the system.

Your solar panels are connected to an inverter, which converts the direct current from the solar panels to the alternating current for use around the house. The inverter, therefore, can tell you if the power production dips lower than usual. You should regularly check on the inverter’s reading , and you should be able to do that on your computer or even smart phone.

If you opt for a lease or power purchase agreement, then the company that provides the financing is responsible for the equipment’s upkeep. The financing company may not be the installer who set up the solar panels on your roof, and it may end up hiring someone else to do any maintenance and repair work. You should understand who is in charge of servicing the equipment.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

Apple’s massive solar farm in North Carolina, photo by WCNC-TV

Here’s the 7 projects:

• A solar financing model: NREL and solar financing startup Clean Power Finance will use $2.26 million to analyze data from 1,300 solar installation companies to try to create new types of community and regional financing methods.
• A publication and patent reader: SRI International, the University of Toledo and GE will use $600K to create software that can read and analyze science publications and patents to unearth innovations that can lower the cost of solar.
• Articulate a solar theory: Gordan Moore had his own law for chips, and some in the solar sector talk about a Swanson’s Law for the dropping cost of solar, but folks at MIT will use close to $500K to study the tech evolution process of solar and to create an overarching theory.
• Better forecasting of production costs: Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Arizona State University and the University of Oxford will use almost $950K to analyze data about patents, prices and production to create better forecasts of solar cell, wafer and panel prices.
• A model for solar markets: Sandia National Labs, the University of Pennsylvania and the California Center for Sustainable Energy will use $2.3 million to process data about solar markets and to create a model looking at how economic and social issues impact solar installations.
• Better strategies for community-led solar purchasing: Yale and SmartPower’s New England Solar Challenge will use $1.9 million to develop new strategies to that can make community solar buying programs work better.
• More effective solar installation in Texas: The University of Austin will use close to $500K to collaborate with six Texas utilities to create more strategic ways to install and interconnect solar in the state.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The race for cost-effective and efficient solar power
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Today Wessells is the CEO and co-founder of a half-year-old startup called Alveo Energy, which is looking to develop and commercialize a battery made out of water, Prussian blue dye — which is used to color things like blue jeans, crayons and paint — iron and copper. The battery is meant to be ultra low cost and long lasting, and if successful, could help deliver breakthrough energy storage technology for the power grid.

Start of the journey

For now, the company is just getting started. Wessells co-founder is Stanford Professor Robert Huggins, and the small team works out of office space in Palo Alto, Calif. They plan to round out the team to just four people over the next couple of months, and perhaps double that over the next three years. So, yeah, they plan to stay lean.

Alveo Energy is one of just a few early stage battery startups that’s emerged from the Valley in 2012. I came across the company last week because they managed to snag a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy’s high risk early stage program called ARPA-E. They won one of the largest grants out of the 66 projects that were funded.

Wessells, a first time CEO, called the grant “a validation of their technology,” and an incredibly important milestone for them. The company will probably bring on another investor to round out the seed round in the coming months, but the ARPA-E grant will make up most of the company’s planned seed round.

The funding environment on Sand Hill Road has been really challenged this year for cleantech companies, said Wessells. Investors that might have done a promising battery deal out of Stanford two years ago, today are being dissuaded by their limited partners to fund early stage cleantech firms. They see the risk as just too high.

And perhaps VCs are smart to be more risk averse this time around. Alveo Energy is still in the protoype and R&D phases. They’ve created version one of their prototype, and they published data on that technology about a month ago. Version two of the battery is what they’re working on now and hoping to scale up in size and performance. Currently generation two can provide battery power without degradation (batteries degrade over time) for between one and two calender years — the team hopes that the eventual commercialized battery will provide closer to five to ten years of battery life.

Power grid applications

Unlike some lithium ion batteries that are being used in the next-generation of electric cars, Alveo Energy’s batteries aren’t meant to provide intense bursts of power to move large objects. They have a lower voltage and deliver a smaller charge than typical lithium ion batteries — about one tenth the energy, one third the voltage, and one third the charge, said Wessells.

That’s because only one sixth of the ions in the Alveo batteries’ structure are electrochemically active. Alveo’s battery is made by taking Prussian blue dye and adding in some iron and copper to optimize a battery structure that can use a water-based electrolyte — the optimal structure just chemically works out that way.

Wessells says Huggins first raised the idea of using Prussian blue dye, which is electrochromic, back around the Christmas of 2009 — before that Wessells was working on trying to use lithium. The next two years were spent on devising the structure of Prussian blue dye, iron and copper. Alveo itself is a word that is related to the Latin for something like channels or honeycomb.

The structure also meant that Alveo’s batteries are relatively large and meant, mostly, to be stationary. They’ll be about three to four times bigger than a standard car battery, said Wessells, and will eventually be developed into a 1 kilowatt, 50 kilogram, prototype.

The potential low cost of such a battery is the real breakthrough for Alveo, and the reason why they’re willing to concede on voltage and charge. Wessells says that they’ll be able to make the battery for below $100 per kilowatt hour. Lead acid batteries, which are far cheaper than lithium ion batteries, are being made for around $150 to $200 per kilowatt hour. Lithium ion batteries are far, far more expensive.

Holy grail for clean power

Wessells says that such a low cost battery could be used for a variety of applications for the power grid, including providing storage for variable clean energy like solar and wind. Big battery farms could be built right onto solar and wind farms, to bank power during the night, and when the wind dies down.

A growing amount of companies, large and small, are working on this clean power problem, using both chemistry and software as a solution. One of the more well known startups is Ambri (formerly Liquid Metal Battery), which is also looking to use dirt cheap materials to make power grid batteries, and which is backed by Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates. Other startups like GELI, are looking to create a battery operating system that can better utilize batteries for the power grid.

Alveo Energy has a long road ahead of it. Even though it’s got an ambitious road map, don’t expect a commercialized version for at least three years from now, if not longer. And at that point Alveo also has a lot of options for how it can make its batteries at scale. It can raise money to just build out a factory, which is in the model of a company like A123 Systems — though, A123 Systems went bankrupt this year and is a cautionary tale. Alveo could also license, or straight out sell, its technology to one of the world’s massive battery makers. That would be a safer, less risky, way to go.

Eventually one of these startups or battery conglomerates — whether its backed by venture capitalists or not — will deliver a breakthrough in battery technology that cracks that fundamental problem with clean power. The future of making clean power low cost and mainstream, depends on it.

Image courtesy of Jurvetson, stevendamron, First Solar.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Financing the next generation of great cleantech ideas

The Chicago-based company has engineered a high-performance “switched reluctance motor” and says it has solved the noise and vibration problem that has crippled efforts in the past to commercialize it, according to Heidi Lubin, CEO of HEVT. The motor presents an alternative to conventional induction and magnet motors, which require rare earth elements that can be hard to secure.

The term “rare earth” is something of a misnomer because of many rare earth elements are actually abundant in the Earth’s crust. Seventeen elements are classified as rare earths, the USGS says. But these materials are less likely to become concentrated deposits like other common metals and are generally difficult to mine at a commercial scale, so they have largely come from only a handful of sources.

China provides an abundant and cheap supply of these rare earth materials partly because its production is a by-product of iron mining. In fact, China is the world’s largest producer of rare earth elements, and its past effort to impose restrictions on exports stirred an outcry from countries such as the U.S. and Japan. China eased the export restriction this past summer, but that move didn’t damper concerns about the country’s tight grip on the materials, which also are used for making wind turbines, LED lighting and other green tech products.

The U.S. Department of Energy has funded projects to develop materials and components that won’t need rare earth elements. HEVT is part of a team, led by the University of Texas at Dallas, to design a switch reluctance motor with nearly  $3 million from the DOE’s ARPA-E program. Rare earth mining and processing also can be environmentally unfriendly.

HEVT was founded in 2005 within the Illinois Institute of Technology to target electric hybrids and plug-in electric cars and trucks. But that market is hard to crack. The pace of electric car adoption hasn’t taken off as quickly as some proponents would’ve liked to see, and some battery makers in particular have had trouble meeting their sales projections. So HEVT wants to tackle the more established electric bicycle market first.

“One of the reasons we like the electric bike market is because it’s a high-volume, high-churn market, so that we can reach scale quickly,” Lubin said.

Lubin says the startup has signed purchase orders and letters of intent from customers for up to 7,000 units of its electric motors, though she declined to disclose the customers’ names. HEVT, which will hire manufacturers to make its motors, is counting on these early customers to help it scale up production. Production will be critical for cutting costs and compete effectively with makers of magnet motors. Once the company hits the 10,000-unit goal, said Lubin, then it will be able to reduce its production costs significantly.

To crank up production, the company will need money. HEVT wants to raise a $5 million series A and hopes its newly minted title as the winner of the Cleantech Open will help its fundraising effort. The startup won $250,000 in the competition.

Switched reluctance motor is made up of a rotating disc inside a stationary disc. Each disc has poles that come in contact with each other in a way that allows the stationary disc, which is partly outfitted with copper wire to create a magnetic field, to move the rotating disc and create mechanical energy.

The motor promises a high torque and a wider range of speed over conventional motors. But it also has been bedeviled by problems with noise and vibration, which led to a jerky motion, in the past. HEVT has since modified the physical design of the motor and developed software to help fix the problem.

Aside from the electric bike market, HEVT also wants to see its motors in appliances and industrial equipment, from heating and cooling systems to pumps for oil and gas operations.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

Primus Power’s flow battery

The Department of Energy’s program that gives grants to early-stage energy projects — called ARPA-E — has allocated another $43 million for 19 battery projects, including grants for futuristic batteries made of new chemical mixes, using brand new architectures and utilizing nanotechnology. The ARPA-E program has been aggressively funding next-generation battery technologies over the years, and though these are small grants, the amount of innovation happening is substantial.

The funds go to projects that are very early stage, and are supposed to help bring disruptive R&D closer to commercialization. While Japanese and Korean conglomerates dominate the industry of producing small format lithium ion batteries for laptops and cell phones, these next-gen batteries are mostly targeted for electric cars and the power grid. Some of these projects also aren’t strictly traditional batteries, and a couple are flow batteries, which are large tanks of chemicals that flow into a containerized system and provide energy storage for the power grid (see Primus Power’s flow battery pictured).

Notable winners of the funds include big companies like Ford, GE, and Eaton, small startups like Khosla Ventures-backed Pellion, and projects out of the labs of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Here’s some of the winners (for the full list of 19 go here):

• Ford: $3.13 million for a very precise battery testing device that can improve forecasting of battery-life.
• GE Global Research: $3.13 million for sensors thin-film sensors that can detect and monitor temperature and surface pressure for each cell within a battery pack.
• Eaton: $2.50 million for a system that optimizes the power and operation of hybrid electric vehicles.
• Pellion Technologies: $2.50 million for the startup’s long range battery for electric vehicles.
• Sila Nanotechnologies: $1.73 million for the startup’s lithium ion electric car battery that it says has double the capacity of current lithium ion batteries.
• Xilectric: $1.73 million to “reinvent Thomas Edison’s battery chemistries for today’s electric vehicles.”
• Energy Storage Systems: $1.73 million for a flow battery for the grid, with an electrolyte made of low cost iron, and using a next-gen cell design.
• Battelle Memorial Institute: $600K for a sensor to monitor the internal environment of a lithium-ion battery in real-time.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry

Winners of the funds (which still need to be finalized) include a combination of large corporations like Ford, GE, Eaton and SRI, as well as university and government labs like Texas A&M, Pacific Northwest National Labs, Colorado State University and the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

One of the more surprising winners was Other Lab, which is a lab in San Francisco created by inventor Saul Griffith. Other Lab will receive $250,000 for a project to work on a high-pressure natural gas tank that uses small diameter tubes tightly wound into a tank shape — “intestine” like, they described it in the release. Ford scored the biggest grant, while Other Lab received the smallest.

ARPA-E named the program Methane Opportunities for Vehicular Energy, or MOVE. The grants are supposed to solve some of the barriers for bringing natural gas vehicle technology to smaller regular cars — the tanks are often times too expensive or too big for a consumer car.

New, abundant and super cheap natural gas resources discovered in the U.S. in the past few years are fundamentally remaking the energy ecosystem in the U.S. While natural gas is still a fossil fuel — and emits carbon — it is cleaner than coal and can be used for both generating electricity, and as a transportation fuel. If just 30 percent of coal-fired generation plants were replaced with natural gas plants in the U.S., the U.S. would be able to hit a 17-20 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2020.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The race for cost-effective and efficient solar power
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• Green IT Q3: Solar stumbles while car sharing zooms ahead

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy

In Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s speech on Tuesday, he said that battery innovation in the U.S. over the past three or four years has been “fantastic.” In numerous interviews with the CEOs of these battery companies at ARPA-E, executives referred to the emergence of new energy storage tech for the grid and EVs as a new boom.

In Chu’s speech he referenced a startup called Vorbeck Materials, which is working with Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL) and Princeton University, to develop next-gen lithium batteries using graphene. In a speech by former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, Scott took the opportunity to talk about Fluidic Energy, an energy storage company in Phoenix, Arizona, that’s making rechargeable metal air batteries, and on which Scott is on the Board.

Silicon Valley battery maker Envia Systems made news at ARPA-E this week thanks to its breakthrough that it can build a high energy-dense battery that could create a 300-mile range electric car and could cost around $25,000 to $30,000. Envia is backed by venture capitalists, General Motors, and the Department of Energy. “There are three countries in the race for batteries for electric vehicles: Japan, Korea and the U.S.,” said Atul Kapadia, CEO of Envia Systems to me in an interview at ARPA-E. Envia is looking to partner with global battery manufacturers to license it’s tech or establish joint ventures.

Eos Energy Storage, a startup based in New Jersey, is building a low cost grid battery using air and zinc and is shooting to commercialize its battery in two years at a cost of $160 per kWh. Eos Energy Storage President Steve Hellman told me in an interview that he thought the U.S. was leading in terms of grid battery innovation, and that he thought other countries would be hard pressed to recreate the ARPA-E event, and have it be chock full of grid battery innovation.

Phil Giudice, CEO of Liquid Metal Battery — a startup building a sodium battery and backed by Bill Gates — told me he also thought the U.S. was dominating the grid battery space, and that there has been “10-fold more activity” in the U.S. compared to other countries in terms of grid battery innovation and investmtent. Liquid Metal Battery is looking to continue development on its battery, which sandwiches molten salt between two layers of liquid metal, this year.

Other energy storage companies I chatted with at ARPA-E include Pellion, which is developing magnesium battery tech, Recapping, which is developing high energy density capacitors, PolyPlus, which has an air and liquid battery, FlexEl, which makes flexible batteries, and Prieto Battery, which is developing a next-gen lithium ion battery. Government players like the Army, and corporations like Johnson Controls are also developing home-grown energy storage tech.

However, the way it works with early stage scientific innovation is that not many of the companies will likely be home runs. Bill Gates, in a speech on Tuesday, noted that the failure rate of these battery projects would probably be 90 percent, which is why the world needs to try thousands of these ideas.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• Electric vehicle outlook: 2012–2017
• The race for cost-effective and efficient solar power

All hail the Tron crossing guard.

Walking around the opening night of the ARPA-E technology showcase is like getting to peek into a window onto some of the most interesting energy-focused labs across the U.S. — from the corporate R&D efforts of GM and Johnson Controls to government-backed labs to the occasional venture-backed startup. It’s also about as geeky as looking straight into a lab window; much of these groups don’t have commercial products yet and have little or no marketing and branding (but I guess you don’t need slick branding if you’re selling a membrane to an industrial conglomerate).

Here’s my photos from walking around the event:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The race for cost-effective and efficient solar power
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry