A national homebuilder will offer rooftop solar installations as a standard feature on all the homes it builds in a new sustainable neighborhood outside of Denver.

Standard Pacific Homes will include a 1.4-kilowatt solar system standard on all of the houses it builds in the new Candelas subdivision outside of Denver.

“And homeowners will have the ability to upgrade that system,” said Craig Campbell, the Colorado division president for Standard Pacific.  He said homeowners who upgrade will be able to install enough solar to generate up to 80 percent of the electricity they need to power their homes.

All of the houses Standard Pacific and any other builder in Candelas constructs will have to be Energy Star rated and the community will have a strong focus on sustainability and environmentally-friendly living, Campbell said.

Candelas will even have a sustainability director and sustainability fund that will allow the community to give financial grants to homeowners, after the neighborhood is established, so they can make efficiency and power generation improvements.  “We offer community-specific designs,” Campbell said. “We build for the specific demographics we’re targeting.”  And rooftop solar panels seem like a good fit for the development.

While Standard Pacific, which started in Irvine, Calif. in 1965, generally builds energy-efficient homes anyway, the product they’re constructing in Candelas is even more so, Campbell said. “We want to meet the needs of the buyer.”

While the houses in Candelas will all be energy-efficient and as sustainable as possible, they will not be scaled back.  “We really focus on the move-up buyer,” Campbell said.

That means houses are a little bigger with nicer finishes and a lot of attention to detail.  He said Standard Pacific has been waiting for the developers behind Candelas to get the neighborhood up and going.

“There’s been a lot of anticipation,” he said.  And since it launched, he said there has been a lot of interest from buyer groups. The builder is starting off in the new subdivision with 80 lots and will buy more as the developers open them up and homes sell.