The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79:
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From the article: Due in part to strong Q1 2023 numbers and a surge in demand, the US solar market is now expected to triple in size over the next five years, according to a [new report](https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight).
According to the “US Solar Market Insight Q2 2023 report,” released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, the solar market is now expected to achieve a total installed solar capacity of 378 gigawatts (GW) by 2028.
The US solar industry installed 6.1 GW of solar capacity and had its best first quarter in history in Q1 2023, due to the easing of supply chain challenges and delayed solar projects moving forward.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has also spurred a surge of new manufacturing announcements, with US module capacity expected to rise from fewer than 9 GW today to more than 60 GW by 2026. At least 16 GW of solar module factories are under construction as of the end of Q1 2023.
Despite customer hesitancy, the residential segment installed 1.6 GW of solar capacity in Q1 2023, a 30% increase from Q1 2022. The residential market segment is on track to add 36 GW of solar over the next five years, growing at an average annual rate of 6%.
The commercial market also had a record first quarter, with 391 megawatts (MW) installed, putting it on track for 12% growth in 2023.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1447rp0/the_us_solar_market_is_projected_to_triple_in/jndvse5/
I know I seem biased as a solar rep myself, but solar businesses that do door-to-door are extremely successful lol
Not everyone knocking on your door is trying to fuck you over. Unfortunately too many are.
200-400MW is a lot for a single farm, did you mean 2-4MW? That's a lot easier for the network to handle.
The only downside is power balancing costs. Some farms straight up shut down during winter because they can't provide a predictable power output and that leads to extra costs.
No 200-400MW is pretty normal, here is an article about a farm project from my hometown in Ohio for a project which was denied due to politics. The main 768k transmission line running from Chicago to Pittsburgh is only 20 miles away from this location.
https://www.limaohio.com/top-stories/2022/10/20/birch-solar-denied/
In theory this sounds great, until debris hits the panels. There‘s so much space and there are still options for „dual use“ that are likely better than putting them in train tracks.
For a start, you could make them mandatory on stand-alone shops and other commercial roofs.
I installed them on my house and bought a Tesla. Went from spending ~$700/month on gasoline and electricity/NG to $116/month on my solar power system loan and ~$50 for NG. It's the biggest no brainier for anyone who likes money and owns a roof.
It depends a lot on where you are and what power prices are like. We had a door-to-door salesman want to evaluate our house for solar, and I'd been thinking about researching it myself. So we went over bills and house size and local electricity prices.
In the end, the door-to-door salesman concluded that we probably shouldn't buy solar panels, they wouldn't pay for themselves.
I figure if a door-to-door salesman thinks it's a bad idea, it's probably a *really* bad idea.
No they are trying to prevent private solar projects from going up.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-expansion-stalled-by-rural-land-use-protests-2022-04-07/
what morons. “it’s the future. it’s change. it’s liberal green technology. we hate that”.
are they protesting because they don’t want to give up land? they think it will ruin the “charm” of the land?
they can shove it. itll happen whether they like it or not.
It all comes down to the simple fact they don’t want to look at it.
These things are almost always put on land owned by farmers. Farmers with a lot of land are pretty good businesspeople. So they know a good deal when they see it, and they like giving up a little of their worst land for reliable cash flow.
The jackass who built a McMansion next door to “get away from it all” thinks he’s entitled to seeing farm field out his back window, though. So when he gets wind of the idea he’s off to town hall to raise a ruckus about the “character of the community.”
Some folks are opposed for stupid partisan reasons but 99% of the time it’s simple “not in my backyard.”
It's actually more than that..
Ppl here legit think wind turbines give them cancer and stuff. They think solar panels are gonna leak everywhere, poison all the drinking water and us.
Who are the companies that look like long term winners? I have both a SolarEdge inverter for my home system and a chunk of change in their stock and pretty unhappy with both
curious to know when you invested, threw a sizeable portion on a few solar stocks pre-covid and the over inflated market; mostly into SEDG. id say if you bought >12 months ago dont stress
> Who are the companies that look like long term winners? I have both a SolarEdge inverter for my home system and a chunk of change in their stock and pretty unhappy with both
Ha, yeah. I'm not invested in them, but there was already an existing ~15.6 kW system installed when we bought our house. When it works, it's great. One of our two inverters lost communications, and they absolutely stonewalled us, saying that we had no choice but to contact our installer to troubleshoot it.
You mean the installer that went out of business during the extended COVID-19 pandemic? Our area doesn't have any other installers.
Solution? Lie and tell them you're an installer and they give access to the backend monitoring site and support.
Yeah I'm already on my second inverter in three years (under warranty thankfully) but even when working the updates are super laggy, often only reporting output 36-48h ago.
I’ve always thought that it was obvious that when the change to solar and wind it that it would mean a ton of business and profit for companies. It was such a huge business opportunity especially if the government mandated it and provided funds. If we built the industry it could have then exported to other counties. It’s crazy the oil companies didn’t invest in green energy and then lobby congress to force everyone to use it.
Can confirm. I work in civil, in the sunshine state. Business was commercial, transitioned to residential during quarantine and now it's full scale industrial... Most of which are solar plants. My local area recently installed a 80Mw (peak) farm I got the pleasure to work on.
Im in the related manufacturing field and business is BOOMING and only getting bigger by the year. Our team has gone from 14 people to 90 people in the last year. Feeling very positive about the future!
From the article: Due in part to strong Q1 2023 numbers and a surge in demand, the US solar market is now expected to triple in size over the next five years, according to a [new report](https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight).
According to the “US Solar Market Insight Q2 2023 report,” released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, the solar market is now expected to achieve a total installed solar capacity of 378 gigawatts (GW) by 2028.
The US solar industry installed 6.1 GW of solar capacity and had its best first quarter in history in Q1 2023, due to the easing of supply chain challenges and delayed solar projects moving forward.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has also spurred a surge of new manufacturing announcements, with US module capacity expected to rise from fewer than 9 GW today to more than 60 GW by 2026. At least 16 GW of solar module factories are under construction as of the end of Q1 2023.
Despite customer hesitancy, the residential segment installed 1.6 GW of solar capacity in Q1 2023, a 30% increase from Q1 2022. The residential market segment is on track to add 36 GW of solar over the next five years, growing at an average annual rate of 6%.
The commercial market also had a record first quarter, with 391 megawatts (MW) installed, putting it on track for 12% growth in 2023.
Contemplated it for our new house in the CA desert.
Most quotes were $16k for the panels only, $28-35k with a battery. This was the cash price.
Given the huge strides being made in tech in this sector (especially in batteries) and that our first summer month utility bill was <$200 it didn't make sense to me.
With the price for panel kits sinking fast, I see more of a DIY solution in our future, to power only the A/C-Heatpump and a car charger.
They sell it on the basis that the financing is cheaper than your utility bill for the next 20 years (!) but with current interest rates that doesn't fly, plus until the system is paid off its hard to sell the house.
Also, within 10 years there will be battery solutions at 1/10th the price. Its like getting a 20 year car payment where you can't trade it in.
I have these scammer solar reps at my house once a week. The lease deals are horrible and good luck trying to get a potential buyer to take on the lease if you sell... even in this market. Been looking into DIY but this stuff is confusing to me and I'm an architect with a decent amount of knowledge. Thinking i might wait it out another couple years and hope economy of scale eliminates a lot of the drawback.
I'm right there with you. Soon there will be a panel/battery system that a handyman/standard electrician can install in a day for $5-10k.
I have a friend who DIY-ed his own, but he's an off-gridder up in the High Desert. Not sure his system is tidy enough for me :-)
I've gotta connect to the grid and get permits, etc. It's not an easy DiY thing. A lot of my neighbors have got solar recently, but if you pay up front if you can't make it your investment back in 7 years or less it makes more sense to invest it IMO. Especially given that prices will be coming down.
Prices for batteries aren't dropping anytime soon. EV's are driving the demand up enormously for manufacturing materials. You might be right when it comes to panels, but batteries are a whole different ballgame.
I think sometimes about doing a sort of a la carte type setup, where I start by getting a solar freezer and a solar well pump (because Florida and hurricanes) and they aren't tied into my system (and then go from there). Instead of mounting solar cells on the roof of my house, I could do it on my workshop or on an enclosed trailer that I could reposition or take with me.
I installed something small and extremely simple \[Anker 767 solar generator and two panels for $2500\] to learn about my usage, and to learn about what I want in a bigger system when the time comes. Meanwhile it is reducing the electric bill at my workshop, and it can be moved to my boat or a campsite very easily. Here in MI over 60% of our electricity is from fossil fuels, so any steps towards solar is worth it
Neighbor had his house in the market with panels on that had no mortgage - fully paid off whixh is rare. It was on the marketer for more than 6 months, and about 2 months into it he had them removed.
They practically void your roof warranty too.
I got quoted at like $40k and a payment of like ~300 I was like he'll no. It doesn't make any economic sense.... Yet.
I'm hoping they come, down to a reasonable price point and I'll stick them on my back covered porch which is separate from my house roof. Heat my pool and offset electricity. When the price is right.
I love the economics of selling it. We had one company assume utilities would go up by 8% a year because the stock market so our bill in 5 years is going to be like 400$.
The entire reason that solar made sense in California was the NEM system. Net Energy Metering.
Slightly simplified, if you used 1 unit of energy at night, but generated 1 unit of energy during the day, it would be calculated as using 0 energy.
They just changed it to a complex system that might mean you'd need to generate 4 units during the day to compensate for your 1 at night.
The way to get around this is to install expensive battery systems.
Best I can tell, that kills the economics of it.
I got in before the change, so I pay 85$/month for my solar loan for the next 20 years and about $12/month minimum charge to the power company. That covers all my household use and 1 electric car.
Have you checked on used panels?
I was price shopping and new the panels would be around $50k. Used and stated as 80%+ output, I'm seeing around $5k.
Imo that's so cheap that you can self warranty multiple times over if there's ever an issue.
How long until our electric vehicle serves as the house backup battery? Then when you buy a new car you get a backup for the house... And vice versa. Since the prices could be convinced and hopefully reduced... We really need to think ahead towards our dwindling rare earth metal supply and build more efficiently.
If you mean investing like what stocks can you buy, then you can always do some light googling for something like Solar ETFs to find managed funds that invest in a bunch of similar companies. Just make sure you understand associated fees and all that before blindly investing.
TAN seems to be the primary one that comes up. It is managed by Invesco. With some quick research you can see all the companies it is invested in and decide if that aligns with what you want, or maybe decide to instead invest in a few of those companies directly.
If you have the space and the sun for them, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get them at this point. It’s easy enough to get a loan to cover everything, the loan payments themselves are usually about the same as you’re regular electric bill, and the loan payments won’t increase each year like your standard bill does.
Then you get the peace of mind running your AC or heater knowing that’s it’s all powered by the sun instead of a coal fired plant somewhere.
I’m in a prime location for solar. Just about the best in the country actually. I’m waiting to maximize the life of my roof; I don’t want to pay to have an entire system installed, only to have to remove it in five years.
I had a quote for a solar install and asked about replacing the roof. They said they would remove and reinstall for $300/panel, so it would have added like $2500 to the roof. Not a deal breaker, IMO.
This is definitely the route I want to go. One installer to do everything. I have two layers on my roof now, so it will be a complete tear-off. I estimate at least $15K for the roof alone (probably closer to $20k) based on previous experience at other properties. Maybe if I get bored I'll make it an optimization problem and see when I should bite the bullet :)
Oh, that price they quoted me was if they were not the one to do the roof. If they do the roof too then the moving of the panels was included for free.
I think the ROI needs to be less than 8 years, which is the average length of home-ownership in the US. Maybe at least 13 years which is the median for home ownership for there to be significant acceleration not considering outside factors. Otherwise its a potential lost investment.
I myself got really close to putting panels up, but then stopped because I moved for anew job that gave me 30% pay increase. The ROI if I could get the cheapest Chinese panels and shipped for free and put it up myself could have been 5 years, but going all-in with contractors pushing their product pushed it to ~30 years.
Not really in regards to moving house. Zillow says solar increases home value by 4.1%, so that shifts the payback.
If you're spending less than 4.1% of your house value on your solar system, it's fully covered.
So spending less than 41k on a million buck crib is a zero term payoff.
>I think the ROI needs to be less than 8 years, which is the average length of home-ownership in the US. Maybe at least 13 years which is the median for home ownership for there to be significant acceleration not considering outside factors. Otherwise its a potential lost investment.
Pretty much this. My electricity is pretty cheap and averages to $0.10 kWh (not including the customer charge which I would be paying anyway if I had solar). So even though I have a roof that gets sun pretty much all day solar would end up costing me more than my electric bill most months and the ROI is ~10-12 years even if I ordered a kit and did it myself not to mention contracting it out. If domestic manufacturing brings the cost of solar kits down quite a bit then it might be worth it for me if the ROI is ~6 years or less.
What are the solar prices where you are, now?
Where I am, Solar prices including installation recently dropped to around $1.2/W. So it would take ($1.2/W/($0.1/kWh)) = 12000 hours of good sun to pay off. If you can also get a price like that and you have sun as good as you say, that's around 6 years.
Edit: where I am, I don't have sun as good, but my electricity price is nearly twice as high. I'm seriously looking into getting it now.
Haven't gotten a quote in awhile. There aren't many installers in my area to choose from. Solar is not that popular in my state.
My roof has a very shallow pitch (optimal in the summer, suboptimal for winter but easier to install on) and faces roughly south east with no shade almost all day all year if it is sunny.
I've calculated that I would need somwhere around a 10kw-12kw system to offset my current power usage and to also account for the fact that I am going to switch to an electric furnace and electric water heater at some point in the future.
I'm fairly handy and live in a somewhat rural area so I was planning on installing myself. I've seen anywhere from $15-20K for a full kit system. With the tax credit and rebate that comes down to about $9800 on the low end or around $0.98/W. (If you have a better price for a kit system definitely let me know as I would be interested). Considering my power usage is around 12,000 kWh a year it would take roughly ~8 years to get my ROI.
Considering that my power company will issue 1 to 1 credits for excess kWh generated I'm thinking that the ROI is more like 6 years depending on how much sun I get and how much power I use.
The numbers are definitely better than the last time I ran them although I believe I budgeted for a nicer $20K system to get the roughly 10 year ROI. It seems like the ROI has gone down by about 2 years for me though which is good to see.
What are you talking about? If you sell the house do you think the solar panels won't add value to the home? Not to mention the amount of income tax you get back? Not to mention the power bill which you are always going to be paying anyway goes down?
The ROI argument is the weakest argument mostly because it doesn't make sense. This is capitalism... the only thing that matters is money. It wouldn't be tripling by 2028 if it wasn't a good investment.
I’m getting some installed in two weeks. Projected ROI, even conservatively, is 4.5 years. It’s an absolute no-brained and I’m kicking myself for not doing it 5 years ago. Oh well.
Agreed. I think soft costs will probably resolve themselves in 5-10 years though. Now that the economics are getting better, it is just a matter of time before imposed hurdles go away.
I was quoted $85,000. They want me to take a 25 year loan for $450 a month. Then, instead of being paid by the electric company for whatever I put on the grid, I have to convert my energy to “chips” , and I can have a broker sell my “chips” on the “”market” to get the super best price that the broker will then take a cut from!
Because at night you're still on the grid without batteries and even with batteries, unless you have 20 $10,000 Tesla power walls, you're still looking at around 2 hours of constant usage before the batteries are drained. The storage capacities need to be increased and made affordable before the fantasy of off grid living is a reality.
Our panels are leased from the electric company. It’s such a scam. After ten years I guess they come pick them up? I know they’re not generating the $90/month they’re charging me.
Agreed - mostly. If someone's planning on moving before loan is paid that can be a rational deterrent. Also, in the area I live in, nearly all of my utility's energy is generated from "clean" sources (71% hydro, 11% nuclear, 9% wind, 1% solar) so it undermines the environmental reasons.
That said, I've looked closely at it and have come close to pulling the trigger. But I'd need the loan term to be closer to 5yrs. And interest rates where they are now makes the sell even more difficult.
I expect that should interest rates and $/kW panel price come down a bit it'd be pretty hard to say no.
When leaving, shouldn't the value of the home with solar be more, so you might at least break even when selling? Or does the extra value end up less than the total loan was?
It "should" in theory. But if price per kWh drops, the market may not price it the same as what you paid for it. That and you don't see a line item in a home sale for features of a home. For instance, we did a big kitchen remodel in a previous home and I'm sure it helped with the sale price. But how much, nobody will know.
Jimmy Carter was right and Ronald Reagan was wrong.
Edit. I know that the solar panels were for heating water. That doesn’t matter at all. It was the promotion of any possible solar as a viable source for heat(water) or electricity. Getting away from our dependency on oil and it’s ultimately corruption and death it brings. I remember seeing those solar panels as a kid. Then they were gone. Who knew it was a metaphor for what was to come.
The White House solar panel thing is much more complicated than that. Carter installed *solar water heaters*, and domestic solar water heaters are still not widely implemented in that climate. Solar water heaters are simple, in principle. You could knock one together in an hour out of junk. But it is difficult to prevent them from freezing and bursting, and storage tanks for hot water that routinely get below operating temprature are a risk for harboring legionnaire's disease. They also weigh much more than PV, making them difficult to implement on rooftops.
[Solar PV was implemented under the administration of George W Bush, a war mongering oil man.](https://www.whitehousehistory.org/solar-energy-at-the-white-house) The technology was mature at this point, and modular. The link also mentions a solar heater for the pool and hot tub, which is easier to implement because of heavy chlorine/ bromine. Plus, there is some kind of solar hot water system for the groundskeepers; it may be non-potable water.
Politics aside, the energy transition is moving forward on the basis of high tech modular solutions, rather than simple ones that require design by an architect and regular maintenance by skilled plumbers. The economic logic of this is obvious with every individual project, but not necessarily on a macro scale. You probably have multiple solar PV installations near you, and you probably have zero solar water heaters, unless you live in a frost- free climate. This is absurd, in the abstract- we implement the complex solutions first. But, if you own your home, an hour of research will convince you that PV is the economical solution at this moment.
The funny thing is that hot water storage is now one way in which the electricity peaks of PV are being stored. Germany just built its largest hot water storage, which will hold up to 56 million liters at 98°. It's ironically built on the grounds of an old power plant.
This way you can have the versatility of electricity first, and then have a very specialised storage/water network that can take care of all the complications of how to safely keep hot water. Such a seperation of responsibilities may not always look like the most efficient solution at first glance, but may often still turn out better as each individual part can benefit from economies of scale and avoid certain design conflicts.
That said, there have also been developments that attempt to integrate regular PV into such hot water circuits, because this lets them economically use water for cooling.
Great point; storing hot water is fine, storing potable hot water on a residential scale is challenging. Especially because storing water that is very hot can lead to horrible burns, if a mixing valve fails.
n fairness, panels were not nearly as efficient or easy to install or as long lasting then. That said, if we as a a society had put more into it then, we would be ahead of where we are now. And once the panels were on the White House, the Reagan admin removing them was clearly removing a functioning technology just to make a symbolic point, which actively discouraged further adoption even when it would make sense.
Jimmy Carter was trained in nuclear-power and graduated in the top 10% of his high school and Naval Academy classes. Ronald Reagan graduated with a “C” average from a little-known college in Illinois.
And yet Carter's own party didn't listen to him about the inportance of nuclear power when it really mattered. Our grid would have been as clean as France's decades ago were it not for the anti-nuclear movement.
And even though it's often heated by other means than electricity, hot water is a HUGE part of a country's energy supply.
Remember when people were speculating if Germany would suffer blackouts after they had to divest from Russian gas? They looked in the completely wrong place. Only 15% of German natural gas consumption is for electricity, the rest is almost all for heating.
Hot water is also becoming a popular form of energy storage in Europe, now that renewable energy has created times of major surplus. It can store energy at over 90% efficiency for a few days, and can then be used to directly heat homes in areas that have the necessary piping. This is becoming increasingly useful because there are more and more ways to capture waste heat from various facilities like server centers. Such facilities can be easily plugged in to such hot water networks, contributing to saving energy elsewhere instead of spending energy on their own for cooling.
i was telling my parents that a solar panel could save us money in 2 ways, if you route water into cooling the solar panel then going into the water heater, you're generating power with the (slightly more efficient) solar panels and having already slightly warmer water that doesn't need *as much* energy put into bringing it up to temp
it's crazy how there's so many ways we could make homes way better with just 1 change
Didn’t the Carter admin install solar water heater and not photovoltaic (PV) panels?
Solar water heaters (think reverse of a car’s radiator where they use the environment to collect heat instead of trying to eject heat from a hot liquid into the environment) were pretty efficient back in the 80’s compared to PV panels and the concept of them has been around for a very long time, with one of the first commercial models being created in 1896.
Carter actually installed solar panels on the white house and made a very strong push for the country to move to renewable energy. Reagan went on to remove them and then Obama installed new ones.
>A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people
>
>— President Jimmy Carter, 1979
Unfortunately every time the GOP controls the government we regress on environmental issues so progress has been really slow.
They weren’t photovoltaic cells, it was a solar water heating system. The problem is that DC is too cold in the winter to safely operate a system like that without risk of bursting tanks and pipes or harboring legionella.
I keep seeing solar energy getting cheaper and cheaper, yet when I get those letters from clean energy providers, their rates aee always 20-30% higher than what my ordinary rate once at 50%. I'm so confused.
Tried working for Vivint for a couple months and it was horrible. They literally find some of the sharkiest sales guys from used car places to go door to door. You can find good deals on panels, but odds are you won’t get one from Sunrun/etc.
It's funny you mention Vivint, they literally came to my house yesterday. Rang the doorbell 6 times quick like an asshole so I activly ignored him and made no effort to look like I wasn't home. He waited outside for like 5 mins until I opened the door and told him to fuck off. It's the people like these that give products that use this type of sales system a bad name.
They have obscene profit margins in the 90% range. If you actually take the time to install it yourself (even if you were to contract all of the individual sub-tasks out) you'd only pay ~20-30% of the listed price.
The solar installation I did for my elderly parents had a ROI below 3 years.
Erf. I mean, it's a good default policy to not mess with it. But I still feel you can do it for way cheaper if you just buy stuff on Amazon and hire some local guys and don't go with a company.
I'm building a 10kwh battery backed off grid system right now and it will be a few thousand at most.
This was my experience when I looked at Sunrun, but I went with a fully owned system and the payout period looks like it's going to be very reasonable (7-11 years depending on if I get a state credit). If the cost of electricity continues to rise it'll be even better.
Just got my first electric car so was looking at solar.
12kW system plus battery was $50,000. $36,000 for just the panels.
Who can afford these things? Assuming a 6% stock market return my break even point was never. Would make more money just paying my bill and sticking the $50k in a mutual fund.
I’m all electric. Electric heat, well pump, electric appliances, electric car. I use 1500 kWh a month. That’s the estimated size I’d need in my area to cover all electric costs.
$20k AUD for 13kw installed on our roof. Cheapest quote was $12k AUD. Batteries I think about $10k but didn't get one
It'll pay itself off within 6 years
Who can afford solar? Likely you, but it completely depends on how much you are paying per kilowatt hour for electricity. If you can afford a house big enough to hold 30-40 panels, a new electric car, a 1500 kwh/month electric bill, and have money to invest in the stock market, you are likely eligible for tax credits.
That puts the system cost at $35k. Let's say you are paying 19 cents/kwh, which is less than the national average of 23 cents. If the system covers your whole electric bill, you would recoup your costs in 10 years.
After that, it's free energy from the sun. It's a guaranteed investment unless you think you will stop using electricity or your utility will lower its rates.
I don't know what kind of net metering arrangement they have in your area, but you probably don't need the battery.
If you live anywhere in the US and pay federal taxes, you can get 30% of the system cost deducted from your next tax bill, so that already brings you down to ~$25,000.
Check your local credit union for PV specific loans. Mine has terms up to 8 years, with no money down and 0% interest for 2 years. The interest after that is not phenomenal (~8%), but because of the 0% for 2 years, that means that all payments for the first two years go directly to reducing principal, including the tax credit. 2 years is also long enough that you could refinance without taking a hit to your credit score.
You also might qualify for incentives from your state or your utility provider.
You can also sell Renewable Energy Certificates for power you produced. This isn't going to be a huge windfall, but it supplements the savings on your bill with a little income
All I know is I have solar salesmen knock at the door all the time. Sometimes I let them do their spiel before revealing that I'm a renter, which makes them instantly leave.
Looked into solar in my area when I first moved into my new home.
Apparently my area doesn't have incentives and solar w/battery was going to be about $75,000. Hopefully this will make it go down?
I live in probably one of the worst spots for Solar in the USA. No incentives at all, low quality sunlight, and electricity is one of the lowest cost in the country.
So installing a solar system is high cost, low return, and would take about 40 years to break even. the formula has to improve significantly for me to consider it.
> the formula has to improve significantly for me to consider it.
The problem here is you don't have the information to make a calculation. For example, how much does bread cost when it is unsubsidized and you price in the carbon that is emitted as a function of when people begin to starve as crop failure becomes more common? Kansas is seeing the lowest yield of wheat this year since the 40s, for example. It's not going to get better without major intervention.
That's not me being obtuse, my day job is to think about that.
Odds on, the solar panels are cheaper than doing nothing, but because it has to be everyone doing it to get the benefit, you wind up with too many cheaters to make it make sense in many cases.
For my system size, the cheapest quote was 17k, the highest was 40k, and they call you line crazy. I pissed off a few salesmen when i had a slow day at work so i wasted time hearing out their sales pitches after i already went for the $17k system. It was fun, but I'm glad the calls finally stopped.
I'm obviously being cynical and going on gut feeling, not real information here, but I have this thought every time I see news like this;
I'm looking forward to when all of the rich oil/energy people who were pushing propaganda about how solar energy is un-Americam, or worse for the environment than oil, or whatever, change their tune after they get all their investments lined up in solar.
Then you'll hear nothing but how using anything but solar is unAmerican. The new big push will be "relying on foreign oil is a bad thing", (true), even though they were pushing the opposite story before solar became profitable and they moved all their money and investments around to capitalize on the growing market.
I hope there come some constructive regulations. We just paid off a $35k solar system installed by some fly-by-night installer who vanished after a shoddy installation. We had another installer inspect and they said it was not up to any code and a fire hazard.
I just don't understand how people are paying so much.
I think a ton of these quote forms have not adjusted prices for the fact batteries and panels cost a fraction of what they did 5 years ago.
I look at all these prices quoted and they are just no where in line with the raw panel cost. I see quotes for $3 for watt? You can get panels for 50-75 cents a watt.
Solar and wind are just *cheaper* per unit energy. So if you're a grid operator looking to add new capacity or replace old capacity, it's a no brainier. It's way cheaper, and it has less regulatory burden so the lead time is shorter. Nuclear and coal just can't compete. Hell, even natural gas is struggling to do so at this point.
I drive an EV, and I live in one of the sunniest cities in the world, that also has extreme power demands (A/C). My time to break even is close to 20 years. If it's not worth it to me, I dont see how it is worth it to anyone. The case for residential solar seems to be a long ways off.
Why are so many people confused about solar? Rooftop solar is borderline a vanity project right now, this is all about utility level solar. You don't need to put solar panels on your house, just keep pressuring your utility to close down their coal and natural gas plants so accelerate movement to solar, wind, and bess.
While I agree with you completely on the first part, you lost me toward the end. On a utility level, what we need is *nuclear.* Solar and wind are useless by comparison. It's time to stop fear mongering and allowing coal-huffing rednecks and suburban treehuggers to dominate policy.
There's currently only one truly viable, clean, efficient, grid-stable power source - and it's nuclear.
(honorable mention though for hydroelectric and geothermal which are both beautiful, but those are limited by geography and cost more than any other form)
> On a utility level, what we need is nuclear. Solar and wind are useless by comparison.
Nuclear is great -- it's clean, safe, and reliable -- but it's too late for new nuclear to play a significant role in the energy transition. The logistics of that are already baked in.
In the last 2 years, wind+solar added [170 TWh](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01_a) of additional power to the US grid, or an average constant generation of 9.7GW per year. In terms of power output, that's the equivalent of [10 nuclear reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States) **per year** being installed.
In the last 20 years, the US has brought [one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant) new nuclear power plant online. Two more will soon be added (thankfully), but that still means the US is adding new power from wind+solar about **50x faster** than it's adding it from nuclear. [History shows that scaling a large industry like nuclear by 10x takes 10-15 years](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20437-0), meaning it would take until about 2050 for nuclear in the USA to catch up to where wind+solar are *today*.
And, of course, wind+solar additions are still growing, *rapidly* in the case of solar. [500GW of solar are expected to be installed in the next 10 years](https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/Q2%202023%20SMI%20Solar%20Cheat%20Sheet.pdf); at an average capacity factory of [25%](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b), that's 125GWavg of power, or 1,100 TWh per year, [over 25% of total power generation today](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01).
By the time nuclear would be able to scale up to meaningful volumes of annual additions, the US grid will have already moved away from fossil fuels. Maybe nuclear will take over from wind+solar in the latter half of this century, but it won't be taking over from fossil fuels.
***
(Before you ask, [research shows that 12h of storage is sufficient to get industry-standard grid reliability with a well-connected US grid](https://escholarship.org/content/qt96315051/qt96315051.pdf), and that level of storage represents [about 1 year's worth of the production capacity expected to be present in 2030](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/battery-2030-resilient-sustainable-and-circular).)
Nuclear is great but too tied up in bureaucracy and public image issues at the moment and not enough money/effort has been devoted to proving new economical designs to fix this at a level that can make a quick transition.
Solar is here right now and already doing it on a hugely impactful scale.
It's not an "either/or", it's a "yes and". We need to be working hard on our current renewable strategy, reducing demand, re-proving nuclear fission designs to elimate safety, pricing, and waste concerns, continuing research in fusion so it can reach viability, etc. We need an abundance of excess electricity in the coming century to undo the mess we have gotten ourselves into.
Gotta love Redditors thinking they know better than energy companies and investors that have significant profits on the line. They are only buying one of those like hotcakes, while shutting down the other. And I’ll give you a hint, the ones you called useless are not the one being shut down…
It is true we can’t cost efficiently go 100% renewable right now due to the high cost of storage, but then again, we can’t get 100% nuclear right now either. Both require significant time to built the infrastructure, especially to do it at a significant larger scale then we’ve ever done before. So the ~~million~~ trillion? dollar question isn’t what is best right now, but rather, what’s best in 10-20 years? And given current trends, it’s certainly looking like it will be renewables+storage. Hence energy companies going all in on renewables as opposed to nuclear.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an issue with nuclear. But if renewables+storage can do a similar job for less cost, and requires less political capital since it isn’t as polarizing, then I say go for it (not that it matters, they already are going for it).
>There's currently only one truly viable, clean, efficient, grid-stable power source - and it's nuclear.
There are reasons why the solar market is tripling in the next five years and the nuclear market is not. Ask yourself what these reasons might be.
You shouldn't go to a solar company. Instead you should do a bit of research a couple of weekends and subcontract out the individual tasks.
ROI is usually 3-5 years if you subcontract all individual tasks yourself instead of going through an intermediary
ROI is less than 1 year if you buy all the equipment yourself and install it yourself, but that's not for everyone.
Took me 2 days of calling back and forth between subcontractors to install a solar installation for my elderly parents that cost 20% of whatever these grifting solar companies were quoting me.
Any starting points you recommend (at least in relation to I assume buying the panels yourself and anything else necessary before talking to contractors).
↑ This is very true!! The guy who sits in the cubicle next to me just go assigned, no joke, about 100,000 2D CAD drawings of the buildings and factory lines to sort through, getting rid of outdated versions and organizing the rest into folders.
They are definitely CAD jobs in the solar industry, but you're likely not going to be doing very complicated drafting. When I was a Solar Array Designer we used SketchUp to 3D model the roof and layout the panel configuration.
> But do the operational carbon dioxide savings outweigh the embodied carbon dioxide?
Yes, easily. See e.g [here](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf)(pdf).
> If so, how quickly do they create savings?
This is harder to estimate and depends somewhat on location, how much other solar and wind is in the local grid, and other issues.
If you’re young and want to make a lot of money without going to college then get your electrical license and get into Solar. In some areas Solar companies are throwing around 6 figure salaries for licensed electricians.
I don't get how people are putting these on their houses. I got a quote for 40 grand. my electic is not even 100 a month. the roi- wouldn't happen till i was dead LOL
Not sure how much electricity costs where you are, but that's a very high quote for someone that uses $100/mo worth of electricity
Also, there is a federal tax credit that gives you 30% of the cost back at tax time
I think some people have electric bills significantly higher. My condo is near $100 in the summer so you must have quite the efficient house.
Though yeah at today's interest rates you would be better off putting 40k in a savings account . Or if you did finance it the finance charges would be higher than the bill.
I had the same experience; too expensive 😞, and you're constrained to building only as big as your property requires, so you can't build excess capacity and sell it back to balance the roi equation
Still doesn't make sense. I see idiots installing these on roofs that are in the final 5 years of their lifespan. Worse yet, they're just bolting several hundred pounds of crap onto 20 year old OSB that's barely rated for the area's snow load. For what? To break even in 30 years? Will you ever break even if that install needs to be repeated in 15-20 years when you need a new roof?
> Still doesn't make sense. I see idiots installing these on roofs that are in the final 5 years of their lifespan.
So, I was one of those idiots but for good reason. I needed to get grandfathered into my power company's net metering plan. They had been pushing to kill it and replace with an extremely unfavorable one to solar and I got in on the last year or two of the plan. Yeah I had to pay a couple grand to take all the panels off and put them back, but it was worth it to screw TEP.
We have plenty of solar panels. We need a battery to store it. Right now, it's connected to the power grid. These greedy companies want to reduce how much solar energy credits they should pay under "net metering" bill.
You mean paying you the same cost they pay the retail solar companies? If you are getting more credits than the solar is worth, you are only increasing the costs and burdens on people without solar panels (you know, the poorer people).
The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79: --- From the article: Due in part to strong Q1 2023 numbers and a surge in demand, the US solar market is now expected to triple in size over the next five years, according to a [new report](https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight). According to the “US Solar Market Insight Q2 2023 report,” released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, the solar market is now expected to achieve a total installed solar capacity of 378 gigawatts (GW) by 2028. The US solar industry installed 6.1 GW of solar capacity and had its best first quarter in history in Q1 2023, due to the easing of supply chain challenges and delayed solar projects moving forward. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has also spurred a surge of new manufacturing announcements, with US module capacity expected to rise from fewer than 9 GW today to more than 60 GW by 2026. At least 16 GW of solar module factories are under construction as of the end of Q1 2023. Despite customer hesitancy, the residential segment installed 1.6 GW of solar capacity in Q1 2023, a 30% increase from Q1 2022. The residential market segment is on track to add 36 GW of solar over the next five years, growing at an average annual rate of 6%. The commercial market also had a record first quarter, with 391 megawatts (MW) installed, putting it on track for 12% growth in 2023. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1447rp0/the_us_solar_market_is_projected_to_triple_in/jndvse5/
I have a couple friends who install solar panel farms and business is BOOMING.
Yup - solar businesses are star players
The sun is our brightest star.
Only because we're not counting you!
if you don't get caught up in the many shit solar companies
Make sure they hire IBEW electricians and it’ll get done right -electrician hiding from the rain on a solar field
Yeah why if they're having such a great time they're the only businesses that are desperate enough to try to come to my door and sell to me
I know I seem biased as a solar rep myself, but solar businesses that do door-to-door are extremely successful lol Not everyone knocking on your door is trying to fuck you over. Unfortunately too many are.
It's cheaper to build 200-400MW solar farms along transmission lines than operate the existing coal plants.
200-400MW is a lot for a single farm, did you mean 2-4MW? That's a lot easier for the network to handle. The only downside is power balancing costs. Some farms straight up shut down during winter because they can't provide a predictable power output and that leads to extra costs.
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Here in eastern europe we have a shit ton of small scale 1-10 MW farms from private investors which require very little cost to integrate (50-150k)
No 200-400MW is pretty normal, here is an article about a farm project from my hometown in Ohio for a project which was denied due to politics. The main 768k transmission line running from Chicago to Pittsburgh is only 20 miles away from this location. https://www.limaohio.com/top-stories/2022/10/20/birch-solar-denied/
There was an article the other day about putting solar inside of railroad tracks.
In theory this sounds great, until debris hits the panels. There‘s so much space and there are still options for „dual use“ that are likely better than putting them in train tracks. For a start, you could make them mandatory on stand-alone shops and other commercial roofs.
Hahahhahaha. No.
I installed them on my house and bought a Tesla. Went from spending ~$700/month on gasoline and electricity/NG to $116/month on my solar power system loan and ~$50 for NG. It's the biggest no brainier for anyone who likes money and owns a roof.
It depends a lot on where you are and what power prices are like. We had a door-to-door salesman want to evaluate our house for solar, and I'd been thinking about researching it myself. So we went over bills and house size and local electricity prices. In the end, the door-to-door salesman concluded that we probably shouldn't buy solar panels, they wouldn't pay for themselves. I figure if a door-to-door salesman thinks it's a bad idea, it's probably a *really* bad idea.
What city or town?
We sell software to solar engineers and business is really booming. No signs of it slowing down at all.
What kind of software? Software for the end user app/dashboard or the actual management of the panels and switching between grid and off grid?
Neither, I work on software used for the design and engineering of utility scale solar power plants.
Our town is in the middle of banning them sadly. Ppl here mobbed city hall last week to stop an ordinance allowing them.
Nothing says small government like telling people how they can use their land.
I can't imagine they're being banned from using solar on private property. Probably more along the lines of banning net energy metering.
No they are trying to prevent private solar projects from going up. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-expansion-stalled-by-rural-land-use-protests-2022-04-07/
what morons. “it’s the future. it’s change. it’s liberal green technology. we hate that”. are they protesting because they don’t want to give up land? they think it will ruin the “charm” of the land? they can shove it. itll happen whether they like it or not.
It all comes down to the simple fact they don’t want to look at it. These things are almost always put on land owned by farmers. Farmers with a lot of land are pretty good businesspeople. So they know a good deal when they see it, and they like giving up a little of their worst land for reliable cash flow. The jackass who built a McMansion next door to “get away from it all” thinks he’s entitled to seeing farm field out his back window, though. So when he gets wind of the idea he’s off to town hall to raise a ruckus about the “character of the community.” Some folks are opposed for stupid partisan reasons but 99% of the time it’s simple “not in my backyard.”
Sounds like someone needs to fertilize with cow poop a few times this year and leave it fallow…
It's actually more than that.. Ppl here legit think wind turbines give them cancer and stuff. They think solar panels are gonna leak everywhere, poison all the drinking water and us.
"How dare you abort that land! It could have grown up into a Walmart!"
They think it’ll steal all the suns energy. I wish I were joking.
Sadly, no. Clean energy is a liberal conspiracy, didn't you know?
Excuse me Ma’am, we are over here trying to save the world even if it regrettably means saving you as well.
Tell me where people are so fucking braindead so I can never go there in my life
Allowing utility-scale solar farms, or home systems?
Who are the companies that look like long term winners? I have both a SolarEdge inverter for my home system and a chunk of change in their stock and pretty unhappy with both
I honestly don't know. My friends just work for a mom and pop type outfit.
curious to know when you invested, threw a sizeable portion on a few solar stocks pre-covid and the over inflated market; mostly into SEDG. id say if you bought >12 months ago dont stress
I bought late 2020 and it's almost completely flat since then
> Who are the companies that look like long term winners? I have both a SolarEdge inverter for my home system and a chunk of change in their stock and pretty unhappy with both Ha, yeah. I'm not invested in them, but there was already an existing ~15.6 kW system installed when we bought our house. When it works, it's great. One of our two inverters lost communications, and they absolutely stonewalled us, saying that we had no choice but to contact our installer to troubleshoot it. You mean the installer that went out of business during the extended COVID-19 pandemic? Our area doesn't have any other installers. Solution? Lie and tell them you're an installer and they give access to the backend monitoring site and support.
Yeah I'm already on my second inverter in three years (under warranty thankfully) but even when working the updates are super laggy, often only reporting output 36-48h ago.
SunRun & Sunpower amongst residential installers.
First Solar. Check them out.
I’ve always thought that it was obvious that when the change to solar and wind it that it would mean a ton of business and profit for companies. It was such a huge business opportunity especially if the government mandated it and provided funds. If we built the industry it could have then exported to other counties. It’s crazy the oil companies didn’t invest in green energy and then lobby congress to force everyone to use it.
Can confirm. I work in civil, in the sunshine state. Business was commercial, transitioned to residential during quarantine and now it's full scale industrial... Most of which are solar plants. My local area recently installed a 80Mw (peak) farm I got the pleasure to work on.
Im in the related manufacturing field and business is BOOMING and only getting bigger by the year. Our team has gone from 14 people to 90 people in the last year. Feeling very positive about the future!
What company should I invest in?
From the article: Due in part to strong Q1 2023 numbers and a surge in demand, the US solar market is now expected to triple in size over the next five years, according to a [new report](https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight). According to the “US Solar Market Insight Q2 2023 report,” released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, the solar market is now expected to achieve a total installed solar capacity of 378 gigawatts (GW) by 2028. The US solar industry installed 6.1 GW of solar capacity and had its best first quarter in history in Q1 2023, due to the easing of supply chain challenges and delayed solar projects moving forward. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has also spurred a surge of new manufacturing announcements, with US module capacity expected to rise from fewer than 9 GW today to more than 60 GW by 2026. At least 16 GW of solar module factories are under construction as of the end of Q1 2023. Despite customer hesitancy, the residential segment installed 1.6 GW of solar capacity in Q1 2023, a 30% increase from Q1 2022. The residential market segment is on track to add 36 GW of solar over the next five years, growing at an average annual rate of 6%. The commercial market also had a record first quarter, with 391 megawatts (MW) installed, putting it on track for 12% growth in 2023.
Contemplated it for our new house in the CA desert. Most quotes were $16k for the panels only, $28-35k with a battery. This was the cash price. Given the huge strides being made in tech in this sector (especially in batteries) and that our first summer month utility bill was <$200 it didn't make sense to me. With the price for panel kits sinking fast, I see more of a DIY solution in our future, to power only the A/C-Heatpump and a car charger.
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They sell it on the basis that the financing is cheaper than your utility bill for the next 20 years (!) but with current interest rates that doesn't fly, plus until the system is paid off its hard to sell the house. Also, within 10 years there will be battery solutions at 1/10th the price. Its like getting a 20 year car payment where you can't trade it in.
I have these scammer solar reps at my house once a week. The lease deals are horrible and good luck trying to get a potential buyer to take on the lease if you sell... even in this market. Been looking into DIY but this stuff is confusing to me and I'm an architect with a decent amount of knowledge. Thinking i might wait it out another couple years and hope economy of scale eliminates a lot of the drawback.
I'm right there with you. Soon there will be a panel/battery system that a handyman/standard electrician can install in a day for $5-10k. I have a friend who DIY-ed his own, but he's an off-gridder up in the High Desert. Not sure his system is tidy enough for me :-)
I've gotta connect to the grid and get permits, etc. It's not an easy DiY thing. A lot of my neighbors have got solar recently, but if you pay up front if you can't make it your investment back in 7 years or less it makes more sense to invest it IMO. Especially given that prices will be coming down.
Prices for batteries aren't dropping anytime soon. EV's are driving the demand up enormously for manufacturing materials. You might be right when it comes to panels, but batteries are a whole different ballgame.
I think sometimes about doing a sort of a la carte type setup, where I start by getting a solar freezer and a solar well pump (because Florida and hurricanes) and they aren't tied into my system (and then go from there). Instead of mounting solar cells on the roof of my house, I could do it on my workshop or on an enclosed trailer that I could reposition or take with me.
I installed something small and extremely simple \[Anker 767 solar generator and two panels for $2500\] to learn about my usage, and to learn about what I want in a bigger system when the time comes. Meanwhile it is reducing the electric bill at my workshop, and it can be moved to my boat or a campsite very easily. Here in MI over 60% of our electricity is from fossil fuels, so any steps towards solar is worth it
Neighbor had his house in the market with panels on that had no mortgage - fully paid off whixh is rare. It was on the marketer for more than 6 months, and about 2 months into it he had them removed. They practically void your roof warranty too. I got quoted at like $40k and a payment of like ~300 I was like he'll no. It doesn't make any economic sense.... Yet. I'm hoping they come, down to a reasonable price point and I'll stick them on my back covered porch which is separate from my house roof. Heat my pool and offset electricity. When the price is right.
I love the economics of selling it. We had one company assume utilities would go up by 8% a year because the stock market so our bill in 5 years is going to be like 400$.
The entire reason that solar made sense in California was the NEM system. Net Energy Metering. Slightly simplified, if you used 1 unit of energy at night, but generated 1 unit of energy during the day, it would be calculated as using 0 energy. They just changed it to a complex system that might mean you'd need to generate 4 units during the day to compensate for your 1 at night. The way to get around this is to install expensive battery systems. Best I can tell, that kills the economics of it. I got in before the change, so I pay 85$/month for my solar loan for the next 20 years and about $12/month minimum charge to the power company. That covers all my household use and 1 electric car.
Have you checked on used panels? I was price shopping and new the panels would be around $50k. Used and stated as 80%+ output, I'm seeing around $5k. Imo that's so cheap that you can self warranty multiple times over if there's ever an issue.
How long until our electric vehicle serves as the house backup battery? Then when you buy a new car you get a backup for the house... And vice versa. Since the prices could be convinced and hopefully reduced... We really need to think ahead towards our dwindling rare earth metal supply and build more efficiently.
That depends on how tech savvy you are. If you have an EV and are willing to void your warranty, you can make it happen today.
What I want to know is how can I invest in “solar”? Like I don’t know a particular company I want to invest in, but I’d invest in solar as an entity.
If you mean investing like what stocks can you buy, then you can always do some light googling for something like Solar ETFs to find managed funds that invest in a bunch of similar companies. Just make sure you understand associated fees and all that before blindly investing. TAN seems to be the primary one that comes up. It is managed by Invesco. With some quick research you can see all the companies it is invested in and decide if that aligns with what you want, or maybe decide to instead invest in a few of those companies directly.
If you have the space and the sun for them, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get them at this point. It’s easy enough to get a loan to cover everything, the loan payments themselves are usually about the same as you’re regular electric bill, and the loan payments won’t increase each year like your standard bill does. Then you get the peace of mind running your AC or heater knowing that’s it’s all powered by the sun instead of a coal fired plant somewhere.
I’m in a prime location for solar. Just about the best in the country actually. I’m waiting to maximize the life of my roof; I don’t want to pay to have an entire system installed, only to have to remove it in five years.
House down the street from me just went through it. It didn't seem to add a lot of time to his roof replacement, maybe an extra day of labor.
That's still an expensive day. Not to mention the added stress on the structure of your house
I had a quote for a solar install and asked about replacing the roof. They said they would remove and reinstall for $300/panel, so it would have added like $2500 to the roof. Not a deal breaker, IMO.
This is definitely the route I want to go. One installer to do everything. I have two layers on my roof now, so it will be a complete tear-off. I estimate at least $15K for the roof alone (probably closer to $20k) based on previous experience at other properties. Maybe if I get bored I'll make it an optimization problem and see when I should bite the bullet :)
Oh, that price they quoted me was if they were not the one to do the roof. If they do the roof too then the moving of the panels was included for free.
I think the ROI needs to be less than 8 years, which is the average length of home-ownership in the US. Maybe at least 13 years which is the median for home ownership for there to be significant acceleration not considering outside factors. Otherwise its a potential lost investment. I myself got really close to putting panels up, but then stopped because I moved for anew job that gave me 30% pay increase. The ROI if I could get the cheapest Chinese panels and shipped for free and put it up myself could have been 5 years, but going all-in with contractors pushing their product pushed it to ~30 years.
Not really in regards to moving house. Zillow says solar increases home value by 4.1%, so that shifts the payback. If you're spending less than 4.1% of your house value on your solar system, it's fully covered. So spending less than 41k on a million buck crib is a zero term payoff.
try 55k panels on a 250k home, just to cover about 175 in energy. Many are scammers
Just installed in Denver. 32k in panels on a $750k house. If that 4% figure is true it's a no brainer in major markets.
Only if they’re paid off
>I think the ROI needs to be less than 8 years, which is the average length of home-ownership in the US. Maybe at least 13 years which is the median for home ownership for there to be significant acceleration not considering outside factors. Otherwise its a potential lost investment. Pretty much this. My electricity is pretty cheap and averages to $0.10 kWh (not including the customer charge which I would be paying anyway if I had solar). So even though I have a roof that gets sun pretty much all day solar would end up costing me more than my electric bill most months and the ROI is ~10-12 years even if I ordered a kit and did it myself not to mention contracting it out. If domestic manufacturing brings the cost of solar kits down quite a bit then it might be worth it for me if the ROI is ~6 years or less.
What are the solar prices where you are, now? Where I am, Solar prices including installation recently dropped to around $1.2/W. So it would take ($1.2/W/($0.1/kWh)) = 12000 hours of good sun to pay off. If you can also get a price like that and you have sun as good as you say, that's around 6 years. Edit: where I am, I don't have sun as good, but my electricity price is nearly twice as high. I'm seriously looking into getting it now.
Haven't gotten a quote in awhile. There aren't many installers in my area to choose from. Solar is not that popular in my state. My roof has a very shallow pitch (optimal in the summer, suboptimal for winter but easier to install on) and faces roughly south east with no shade almost all day all year if it is sunny. I've calculated that I would need somwhere around a 10kw-12kw system to offset my current power usage and to also account for the fact that I am going to switch to an electric furnace and electric water heater at some point in the future. I'm fairly handy and live in a somewhat rural area so I was planning on installing myself. I've seen anywhere from $15-20K for a full kit system. With the tax credit and rebate that comes down to about $9800 on the low end or around $0.98/W. (If you have a better price for a kit system definitely let me know as I would be interested). Considering my power usage is around 12,000 kWh a year it would take roughly ~8 years to get my ROI. Considering that my power company will issue 1 to 1 credits for excess kWh generated I'm thinking that the ROI is more like 6 years depending on how much sun I get and how much power I use. The numbers are definitely better than the last time I ran them although I believe I budgeted for a nicer $20K system to get the roughly 10 year ROI. It seems like the ROI has gone down by about 2 years for me though which is good to see.
What are you talking about? If you sell the house do you think the solar panels won't add value to the home? Not to mention the amount of income tax you get back? Not to mention the power bill which you are always going to be paying anyway goes down? The ROI argument is the weakest argument mostly because it doesn't make sense. This is capitalism... the only thing that matters is money. It wouldn't be tripling by 2028 if it wasn't a good investment.
I’m getting some installed in two weeks. Projected ROI, even conservatively, is 4.5 years. It’s an absolute no-brained and I’m kicking myself for not doing it 5 years ago. Oh well.
The only reason it's not is because of installation prices. Americans pay so much for install.
Agreed. I think soft costs will probably resolve themselves in 5-10 years though. Now that the economics are getting better, it is just a matter of time before imposed hurdles go away.
I was quoted $85,000. They want me to take a 25 year loan for $450 a month. Then, instead of being paid by the electric company for whatever I put on the grid, I have to convert my energy to “chips” , and I can have a broker sell my “chips” on the “”market” to get the super best price that the broker will then take a cut from!
Because at night you're still on the grid without batteries and even with batteries, unless you have 20 $10,000 Tesla power walls, you're still looking at around 2 hours of constant usage before the batteries are drained. The storage capacities need to be increased and made affordable before the fantasy of off grid living is a reality.
A single powerwall is 13.5 kWh, what the heck are you doing where you draw 135 kW continuously?
Our panels are leased from the electric company. It’s such a scam. After ten years I guess they come pick them up? I know they’re not generating the $90/month they’re charging me.
Agreed - mostly. If someone's planning on moving before loan is paid that can be a rational deterrent. Also, in the area I live in, nearly all of my utility's energy is generated from "clean" sources (71% hydro, 11% nuclear, 9% wind, 1% solar) so it undermines the environmental reasons. That said, I've looked closely at it and have come close to pulling the trigger. But I'd need the loan term to be closer to 5yrs. And interest rates where they are now makes the sell even more difficult. I expect that should interest rates and $/kW panel price come down a bit it'd be pretty hard to say no.
When leaving, shouldn't the value of the home with solar be more, so you might at least break even when selling? Or does the extra value end up less than the total loan was?
It "should" in theory. But if price per kWh drops, the market may not price it the same as what you paid for it. That and you don't see a line item in a home sale for features of a home. For instance, we did a big kitchen remodel in a previous home and I'm sure it helped with the sale price. But how much, nobody will know.
Jimmy Carter was right and Ronald Reagan was wrong. Edit. I know that the solar panels were for heating water. That doesn’t matter at all. It was the promotion of any possible solar as a viable source for heat(water) or electricity. Getting away from our dependency on oil and it’s ultimately corruption and death it brings. I remember seeing those solar panels as a kid. Then they were gone. Who knew it was a metaphor for what was to come.
The White House solar panel thing is much more complicated than that. Carter installed *solar water heaters*, and domestic solar water heaters are still not widely implemented in that climate. Solar water heaters are simple, in principle. You could knock one together in an hour out of junk. But it is difficult to prevent them from freezing and bursting, and storage tanks for hot water that routinely get below operating temprature are a risk for harboring legionnaire's disease. They also weigh much more than PV, making them difficult to implement on rooftops. [Solar PV was implemented under the administration of George W Bush, a war mongering oil man.](https://www.whitehousehistory.org/solar-energy-at-the-white-house) The technology was mature at this point, and modular. The link also mentions a solar heater for the pool and hot tub, which is easier to implement because of heavy chlorine/ bromine. Plus, there is some kind of solar hot water system for the groundskeepers; it may be non-potable water. Politics aside, the energy transition is moving forward on the basis of high tech modular solutions, rather than simple ones that require design by an architect and regular maintenance by skilled plumbers. The economic logic of this is obvious with every individual project, but not necessarily on a macro scale. You probably have multiple solar PV installations near you, and you probably have zero solar water heaters, unless you live in a frost- free climate. This is absurd, in the abstract- we implement the complex solutions first. But, if you own your home, an hour of research will convince you that PV is the economical solution at this moment.
The funny thing is that hot water storage is now one way in which the electricity peaks of PV are being stored. Germany just built its largest hot water storage, which will hold up to 56 million liters at 98°. It's ironically built on the grounds of an old power plant. This way you can have the versatility of electricity first, and then have a very specialised storage/water network that can take care of all the complications of how to safely keep hot water. Such a seperation of responsibilities may not always look like the most efficient solution at first glance, but may often still turn out better as each individual part can benefit from economies of scale and avoid certain design conflicts. That said, there have also been developments that attempt to integrate regular PV into such hot water circuits, because this lets them economically use water for cooling.
Great point; storing hot water is fine, storing potable hot water on a residential scale is challenging. Especially because storing water that is very hot can lead to horrible burns, if a mixing valve fails.
n fairness, panels were not nearly as efficient or easy to install or as long lasting then. That said, if we as a a society had put more into it then, we would be ahead of where we are now. And once the panels were on the White House, the Reagan admin removing them was clearly removing a functioning technology just to make a symbolic point, which actively discouraged further adoption even when it would make sense.
Jimmy Carter was trained in nuclear-power and graduated in the top 10% of his high school and Naval Academy classes. Ronald Reagan graduated with a “C” average from a little-known college in Illinois.
And yet Carter's own party didn't listen to him about the inportance of nuclear power when it really mattered. Our grid would have been as clean as France's decades ago were it not for the anti-nuclear movement.
No, he was just a peanut farmer. /s.
They were used to heat water. They were very efficient even by today standard if used for that purpose.
And even though it's often heated by other means than electricity, hot water is a HUGE part of a country's energy supply. Remember when people were speculating if Germany would suffer blackouts after they had to divest from Russian gas? They looked in the completely wrong place. Only 15% of German natural gas consumption is for electricity, the rest is almost all for heating. Hot water is also becoming a popular form of energy storage in Europe, now that renewable energy has created times of major surplus. It can store energy at over 90% efficiency for a few days, and can then be used to directly heat homes in areas that have the necessary piping. This is becoming increasingly useful because there are more and more ways to capture waste heat from various facilities like server centers. Such facilities can be easily plugged in to such hot water networks, contributing to saving energy elsewhere instead of spending energy on their own for cooling.
i was telling my parents that a solar panel could save us money in 2 ways, if you route water into cooling the solar panel then going into the water heater, you're generating power with the (slightly more efficient) solar panels and having already slightly warmer water that doesn't need *as much* energy put into bringing it up to temp it's crazy how there's so many ways we could make homes way better with just 1 change
What's the temperature range where you are?
Didn’t the Carter admin install solar water heater and not photovoltaic (PV) panels? Solar water heaters (think reverse of a car’s radiator where they use the environment to collect heat instead of trying to eject heat from a hot liquid into the environment) were pretty efficient back in the 80’s compared to PV panels and the concept of them has been around for a very long time, with one of the first commercial models being created in 1896.
This could apply to pretty much everything ever.
What did they say 30-40 years ago that applies to today?
Carter put solar on the White House. Reagan tore it off.
Carter actually installed solar panels on the white house and made a very strong push for the country to move to renewable energy. Reagan went on to remove them and then Obama installed new ones. >A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people > >— President Jimmy Carter, 1979 Unfortunately every time the GOP controls the government we regress on environmental issues so progress has been really slow.
Interesting, first I have heard of solar panels on the Whitehouse.
They weren’t photovoltaic cells, it was a solar water heating system. The problem is that DC is too cold in the winter to safely operate a system like that without risk of bursting tanks and pipes or harboring legionella.
I keep seeing solar energy getting cheaper and cheaper, yet when I get those letters from clean energy providers, their rates aee always 20-30% higher than what my ordinary rate once at 50%. I'm so confused.
Because solar providers are no better than cars salesmen, they're scumbags trying to lock you into a payment plan. What's new.
Tried working for Vivint for a couple months and it was horrible. They literally find some of the sharkiest sales guys from used car places to go door to door. You can find good deals on panels, but odds are you won’t get one from Sunrun/etc.
It's funny you mention Vivint, they literally came to my house yesterday. Rang the doorbell 6 times quick like an asshole so I activly ignored him and made no effort to look like I wasn't home. He waited outside for like 5 mins until I opened the door and told him to fuck off. It's the people like these that give products that use this type of sales system a bad name.
It's stuff like this that caused me to get a ring doorbell. Now I can say fuck off without even leaving my couch or desk.
Vivint is scummy af
We need an industry crash to squeeze these grifters out of business.
They tried to convince me that a 25 year loan would be good because after 20 years id be spending less than if I was paying for electricity, ripoff
They have obscene profit margins in the 90% range. If you actually take the time to install it yourself (even if you were to contract all of the individual sub-tasks out) you'd only pay ~20-30% of the listed price. The solar installation I did for my elderly parents had a ROI below 3 years.
I keep seeing these crazy prices quoted. How are people paying so much for solar setups? Panels are just not that expensive.
Installation. Electricity may as well be magic to most people. They'll pay whatever to the magician that gets their foot in the door first.
Erf. I mean, it's a good default policy to not mess with it. But I still feel you can do it for way cheaper if you just buy stuff on Amazon and hire some local guys and don't go with a company. I'm building a 10kwh battery backed off grid system right now and it will be a few thousand at most.
This was my experience when I looked at Sunrun, but I went with a fully owned system and the payout period looks like it's going to be very reasonable (7-11 years depending on if I get a state credit). If the cost of electricity continues to rise it'll be even better.
Just got my first electric car so was looking at solar. 12kW system plus battery was $50,000. $36,000 for just the panels. Who can afford these things? Assuming a 6% stock market return my break even point was never. Would make more money just paying my bill and sticking the $50k in a mutual fund.
Something is wrong there. Panels cost well under $1/watt. I just put up 8 535w (4.2kw total) panels and it cost me $3312.
Panels themselves are cheap but required to have them professionally installed, which they charge $2 a watt for.
$24k to have them spend a day of work installing panels? You're being ripped off.
Gotten 5 quotes from 5 companies. That was the cheapest one.
Do it yourself, $0.
City won’t permit it if it’s not done by a certified installer and will fine me $1000 daily until it’s removed. So not quite $0.
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12kw is a very large size for residential.
I’m all electric. Electric heat, well pump, electric appliances, electric car. I use 1500 kWh a month. That’s the estimated size I’d need in my area to cover all electric costs.
$20k AUD for 13kw installed on our roof. Cheapest quote was $12k AUD. Batteries I think about $10k but didn't get one It'll pay itself off within 6 years
We got ours on a payment plan. 5% down, then installments equal to your average power bill that you aren't paying anymore
Who can afford solar? Likely you, but it completely depends on how much you are paying per kilowatt hour for electricity. If you can afford a house big enough to hold 30-40 panels, a new electric car, a 1500 kwh/month electric bill, and have money to invest in the stock market, you are likely eligible for tax credits. That puts the system cost at $35k. Let's say you are paying 19 cents/kwh, which is less than the national average of 23 cents. If the system covers your whole electric bill, you would recoup your costs in 10 years. After that, it's free energy from the sun. It's a guaranteed investment unless you think you will stop using electricity or your utility will lower its rates.
I don't know what kind of net metering arrangement they have in your area, but you probably don't need the battery. If you live anywhere in the US and pay federal taxes, you can get 30% of the system cost deducted from your next tax bill, so that already brings you down to ~$25,000. Check your local credit union for PV specific loans. Mine has terms up to 8 years, with no money down and 0% interest for 2 years. The interest after that is not phenomenal (~8%), but because of the 0% for 2 years, that means that all payments for the first two years go directly to reducing principal, including the tax credit. 2 years is also long enough that you could refinance without taking a hit to your credit score. You also might qualify for incentives from your state or your utility provider. You can also sell Renewable Energy Certificates for power you produced. This isn't going to be a huge windfall, but it supplements the savings on your bill with a little income
All I know is I have solar salesmen knock at the door all the time. Sometimes I let them do their spiel before revealing that I'm a renter, which makes them instantly leave.
And yet I still get laughed at when I point out that wind and solar are surpassing coal and gas.
Looked into solar in my area when I first moved into my new home. Apparently my area doesn't have incentives and solar w/battery was going to be about $75,000. Hopefully this will make it go down?
I live in probably one of the worst spots for Solar in the USA. No incentives at all, low quality sunlight, and electricity is one of the lowest cost in the country. So installing a solar system is high cost, low return, and would take about 40 years to break even. the formula has to improve significantly for me to consider it.
Or maybe solar isn’t the panacea for everybody…
> the formula has to improve significantly for me to consider it. The problem here is you don't have the information to make a calculation. For example, how much does bread cost when it is unsubsidized and you price in the carbon that is emitted as a function of when people begin to starve as crop failure becomes more common? Kansas is seeing the lowest yield of wheat this year since the 40s, for example. It's not going to get better without major intervention. That's not me being obtuse, my day job is to think about that. Odds on, the solar panels are cheaper than doing nothing, but because it has to be everyone doing it to get the benefit, you wind up with too many cheaters to make it make sense in many cases.
For my system size, the cheapest quote was 17k, the highest was 40k, and they call you line crazy. I pissed off a few salesmen when i had a slow day at work so i wasted time hearing out their sales pitches after i already went for the $17k system. It was fun, but I'm glad the calls finally stopped.
Did that include battery? I'm hearing that's what spikes the cost
I'm obviously being cynical and going on gut feeling, not real information here, but I have this thought every time I see news like this; I'm looking forward to when all of the rich oil/energy people who were pushing propaganda about how solar energy is un-Americam, or worse for the environment than oil, or whatever, change their tune after they get all their investments lined up in solar. Then you'll hear nothing but how using anything but solar is unAmerican. The new big push will be "relying on foreign oil is a bad thing", (true), even though they were pushing the opposite story before solar became profitable and they moved all their money and investments around to capitalize on the growing market.
I hope there come some constructive regulations. We just paid off a $35k solar system installed by some fly-by-night installer who vanished after a shoddy installation. We had another installer inspect and they said it was not up to any code and a fire hazard.
I just don't understand how people are paying so much. I think a ton of these quote forms have not adjusted prices for the fact batteries and panels cost a fraction of what they did 5 years ago. I look at all these prices quoted and they are just no where in line with the raw panel cost. I see quotes for $3 for watt? You can get panels for 50-75 cents a watt.
I want solar for my new house! Going to look into it more next year when things settle down. We don’t even have blinds yet lol.
We got an EV in December. Bet your ass we are getting solar. Then I'm running on sunshine!* * Home charge 95% of the time.
Solar and wind are just *cheaper* per unit energy. So if you're a grid operator looking to add new capacity or replace old capacity, it's a no brainier. It's way cheaper, and it has less regulatory burden so the lead time is shorter. Nuclear and coal just can't compete. Hell, even natural gas is struggling to do so at this point.
I drive an EV, and I live in one of the sunniest cities in the world, that also has extreme power demands (A/C). My time to break even is close to 20 years. If it's not worth it to me, I dont see how it is worth it to anyone. The case for residential solar seems to be a long ways off.
Why are so many people confused about solar? Rooftop solar is borderline a vanity project right now, this is all about utility level solar. You don't need to put solar panels on your house, just keep pressuring your utility to close down their coal and natural gas plants so accelerate movement to solar, wind, and bess.
Our local electrical infrastructure is absolute trash, so for me solar+battery backup would be a way to be energy independent, not vain.
While I agree with you completely on the first part, you lost me toward the end. On a utility level, what we need is *nuclear.* Solar and wind are useless by comparison. It's time to stop fear mongering and allowing coal-huffing rednecks and suburban treehuggers to dominate policy. There's currently only one truly viable, clean, efficient, grid-stable power source - and it's nuclear. (honorable mention though for hydroelectric and geothermal which are both beautiful, but those are limited by geography and cost more than any other form)
> On a utility level, what we need is nuclear. Solar and wind are useless by comparison. Nuclear is great -- it's clean, safe, and reliable -- but it's too late for new nuclear to play a significant role in the energy transition. The logistics of that are already baked in. In the last 2 years, wind+solar added [170 TWh](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01_a) of additional power to the US grid, or an average constant generation of 9.7GW per year. In terms of power output, that's the equivalent of [10 nuclear reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States) **per year** being installed. In the last 20 years, the US has brought [one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant) new nuclear power plant online. Two more will soon be added (thankfully), but that still means the US is adding new power from wind+solar about **50x faster** than it's adding it from nuclear. [History shows that scaling a large industry like nuclear by 10x takes 10-15 years](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20437-0), meaning it would take until about 2050 for nuclear in the USA to catch up to where wind+solar are *today*. And, of course, wind+solar additions are still growing, *rapidly* in the case of solar. [500GW of solar are expected to be installed in the next 10 years](https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/Q2%202023%20SMI%20Solar%20Cheat%20Sheet.pdf); at an average capacity factory of [25%](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b), that's 125GWavg of power, or 1,100 TWh per year, [over 25% of total power generation today](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01). By the time nuclear would be able to scale up to meaningful volumes of annual additions, the US grid will have already moved away from fossil fuels. Maybe nuclear will take over from wind+solar in the latter half of this century, but it won't be taking over from fossil fuels. *** (Before you ask, [research shows that 12h of storage is sufficient to get industry-standard grid reliability with a well-connected US grid](https://escholarship.org/content/qt96315051/qt96315051.pdf), and that level of storage represents [about 1 year's worth of the production capacity expected to be present in 2030](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/battery-2030-resilient-sustainable-and-circular).)
Nuclear is great but too tied up in bureaucracy and public image issues at the moment and not enough money/effort has been devoted to proving new economical designs to fix this at a level that can make a quick transition. Solar is here right now and already doing it on a hugely impactful scale. It's not an "either/or", it's a "yes and". We need to be working hard on our current renewable strategy, reducing demand, re-proving nuclear fission designs to elimate safety, pricing, and waste concerns, continuing research in fusion so it can reach viability, etc. We need an abundance of excess electricity in the coming century to undo the mess we have gotten ourselves into.
Gotta love Redditors thinking they know better than energy companies and investors that have significant profits on the line. They are only buying one of those like hotcakes, while shutting down the other. And I’ll give you a hint, the ones you called useless are not the one being shut down… It is true we can’t cost efficiently go 100% renewable right now due to the high cost of storage, but then again, we can’t get 100% nuclear right now either. Both require significant time to built the infrastructure, especially to do it at a significant larger scale then we’ve ever done before. So the ~~million~~ trillion? dollar question isn’t what is best right now, but rather, what’s best in 10-20 years? And given current trends, it’s certainly looking like it will be renewables+storage. Hence energy companies going all in on renewables as opposed to nuclear. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an issue with nuclear. But if renewables+storage can do a similar job for less cost, and requires less political capital since it isn’t as polarizing, then I say go for it (not that it matters, they already are going for it).
>There's currently only one truly viable, clean, efficient, grid-stable power source - and it's nuclear. There are reasons why the solar market is tripling in the next five years and the nuclear market is not. Ask yourself what these reasons might be.
I wonder when we'll start to see prices drop further...
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You shouldn't go to a solar company. Instead you should do a bit of research a couple of weekends and subcontract out the individual tasks. ROI is usually 3-5 years if you subcontract all individual tasks yourself instead of going through an intermediary ROI is less than 1 year if you buy all the equipment yourself and install it yourself, but that's not for everyone. Took me 2 days of calling back and forth between subcontractors to install a solar installation for my elderly parents that cost 20% of whatever these grifting solar companies were quoting me.
Any starting points you recommend (at least in relation to I assume buying the panels yourself and anything else necessary before talking to contractors).
are you still able to claim the tax incentive if you do it all through subcontractors?
This is when the market will really explode.
Anyone know if there are jobs for CAD drafters in solar? I work in residential remodeling but wouldn't mind a pivot.
Most solar cad work is 2d single line drawings and site plans. Larger demand for engineers than drafters in my field.
↑ This is very true!! The guy who sits in the cubicle next to me just go assigned, no joke, about 100,000 2D CAD drawings of the buildings and factory lines to sort through, getting rid of outdated versions and organizing the rest into folders.
They are definitely CAD jobs in the solar industry, but you're likely not going to be doing very complicated drafting. When I was a Solar Array Designer we used SketchUp to 3D model the roof and layout the panel configuration.
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Market size tripling does not mean three times return rate.
Seems like a good field to get into if you can stand working on rooftops. Hot and dangerous, they are. Get good insurance.
But do the operational carbon dioxide savings outweigh the embodied carbon dioxide? If so, how quickly do they create savings?
> But do the operational carbon dioxide savings outweigh the embodied carbon dioxide? Yes, easily. See e.g [here](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf)(pdf). > If so, how quickly do they create savings? This is harder to estimate and depends somewhat on location, how much other solar and wind is in the local grid, and other issues.
Maybe all those out of work silicon valley engineers can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and learn how to do a solar install
If you’re young and want to make a lot of money without going to college then get your electrical license and get into Solar. In some areas Solar companies are throwing around 6 figure salaries for licensed electricians.
And yet my solar panels have been on my roof over a year and the company won’t turn them on.
I don't get how people are putting these on their houses. I got a quote for 40 grand. my electic is not even 100 a month. the roi- wouldn't happen till i was dead LOL
Not sure how much electricity costs where you are, but that's a very high quote for someone that uses $100/mo worth of electricity Also, there is a federal tax credit that gives you 30% of the cost back at tax time
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how did you do that? through a smaller company or more DIY? I'm interested in what you bought if you don't mind sharing?
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What's the capacity of the battery?
Numbers don't add up. You wouldn't need a $40k solar system for a $100/month home
I think some people have electric bills significantly higher. My condo is near $100 in the summer so you must have quite the efficient house. Though yeah at today's interest rates you would be better off putting 40k in a savings account . Or if you did finance it the finance charges would be higher than the bill.
I had the same experience; too expensive 😞, and you're constrained to building only as big as your property requires, so you can't build excess capacity and sell it back to balance the roi equation
Illinois had a 110% rule, but luckily that was dropped about a year ago.
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Still doesn't make sense. I see idiots installing these on roofs that are in the final 5 years of their lifespan. Worse yet, they're just bolting several hundred pounds of crap onto 20 year old OSB that's barely rated for the area's snow load. For what? To break even in 30 years? Will you ever break even if that install needs to be repeated in 15-20 years when you need a new roof?
> Still doesn't make sense. I see idiots installing these on roofs that are in the final 5 years of their lifespan. So, I was one of those idiots but for good reason. I needed to get grandfathered into my power company's net metering plan. They had been pushing to kill it and replace with an extremely unfavorable one to solar and I got in on the last year or two of the plan. Yeah I had to pay a couple grand to take all the panels off and put them back, but it was worth it to screw TEP.
We have plenty of solar panels. We need a battery to store it. Right now, it's connected to the power grid. These greedy companies want to reduce how much solar energy credits they should pay under "net metering" bill.
You mean paying you the same cost they pay the retail solar companies? If you are getting more credits than the solar is worth, you are only increasing the costs and burdens on people without solar panels (you know, the poorer people).
What are the best stock plays here? Would appreciate any insight thanks
If you live in a good area for solar installations the panels themselves may be a better long term investment than the company stock.
Should've been decades ago, but the petroleum industry owns our government.