In balmy Palm Springs, Calif., the desert sun shines an average of 350 days a year. So converting an auto dealership to solar energy might seem to be a no-brainer. But Paul Thiel studied the economics of solar power for seven years before he took the leap and converted his Palm Springs Motors, a Ford-Lincoln store in Cathedral City, Calif. For a long time, he couldn't make the numbers work. "We started studying it in 2005. The price of the solar system was too high," Thiel says. "It didn't justify to where you could make it pencil, where it would pay off in a reasonable amount of time. The payback would have been 10 to 12 years."
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