Thirty thousand square feet of PV panels grace the roof of the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco.

Although Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting on Friday called the delay "a minor setback," ensuring residents and businesses that the program would get underway at some point, local solar businesses see the hold-up as fairly major.  A program that may happen in the near future is precisely what the solar industry doesn't need, says Mike Hall, President of Borrego Solar, a Berkeley-based solar installation company.

"This was never billed as something that 'might' happen," Halls says. "The SFPUC said it was something that would happen." Hall had already signed a lease on a San Francisco office for Borrego, hoping to take advantage of the GoSolar's incentives for using San Francisco-based installers.

"We probably would not have opened a San Francisco office had there not been this program," Hall explains, " We would have just continued to service San Francisco clients from our Berkeley office as we have been doing for years."  He adds that the incentive program was part of the city's plan to encourage green businesses to move into the city, where rent is expensive. "If you don’t have some kind of government program in place, it’s cheaper to cross the bridge than to pay rent in San Francisco, which is about three or four times more what it is in the East Bay," Hall says.

A "wait and see" attitude is already a major barrier to solar adoption, as people wait for new technologies and rebates to come online, Hall points out, and an incentive program waiting in the wings only adds fuel to the fire. "Why would anyone sign a contract now when they think they can wait a month and get a $4,000 rebate?" he asks. "Even though the program will supply retroactive payments, that's a difficult point to get across to people."

Nat Kreamer, CEO of San Francisco-based solar PPA provider Sun Run echoed Hall's concerns in an interview with GreenTechMedia. "You're now not going to invest the resources and time in investing those resources as you would have a month ago," he said. "Companies are now delaying decisions because of the uncertainty about whether that incentive program actually exists. … Businesses have to plan. And knowing when something is going to happen is important. Any regulatory uncertainty makes it difficult to plan."

Meanwhile, Berkeley-based solar providers are dealing with a stalled solar incentive program on the eastern side of the Bay as well. The Berkeley program was announced with much fanfare in late 2007, but Hall says city officials have announced that, in the best case scenario, the program will start in pilot mode this summer, which means it won't truly be online until the end of the year at the earliest.

"Some people might have made the investment in solar regardless, but now everyone, even those people, are back on to the fence," he says.

Southern California, which doesn't have the same "green" reputation as northern California has nonetheless beat the Bay Area to the punch and gone ahead with an $875 million plan to link solar panels across the rooftops of commercial buildings into a distributed solar power plant. The program was launched by Southern California Edison last week with support from Governor Schwarznegger. Over the next five years, the utility plans to put enough photovoltaic panels on commercial buildings to produce 250 megawatts of electricity.