Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022 | Hacker News Reader

Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

mattbruenig.com

340 pointsiandev493 comments

Assuming you are grid-tied, the reduction of electric bills is predicated on net metering, where the utility company gives you (ideally) 1-for-1 credit for the electricity you produce. In California, this was called NEM 1.0 and NEM 2.0. Every few years the California utilities lobby the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to chip away at the NEM program. This year the PUC voted unanimously to cut net energy metering and any new solar owner will fall under the NEM 3.0 rules. Net energy metering is essentially dead in California. In addition there are additional fixed fees customers have to pay. This will disincentivize solar-only installation. If you want fair compensation of what you generate you’ll have to store it and pay yourself.

PG&E will find a way to keep their profit margin.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1142927418/california-plans-t...

Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway.

Subsidizing solar is a perfectly good policy choice, but net metering is ultimately an unsustainable way to implement it.

That's how my distributed generation contract with our Rural Electric Cooperative works. We pay $50/month for the connection, but the actual use/generation is 1 for 1 net metering. We are limited in how much generation we can connect to 105% of our average annual consumption, so over the course of year, on average, we zero out energy costs. If we want to connect more distributed generation than that, the tariff shifts to we get wholesale for what we sell, pay retail for what we use.

Net metering means utilities sell the power your system produces at full price to your neighbor. They pocket the avoided cost of producing and delivering that power (and during price spikes the cost of fuel can be higher than the value of producing power).

Net metering does create stranded assets if everyone does it. But not everyone does. Further, the idea that the utility gains NO benefit from net metering is wrong.

The corresponding view that rate payers are subsidizing solar by paying additional grid costs is wrong. Solar reduces grid demand. This reduces required generation capacity. Capacity is very expensive.

Agreed, at some point the grid will need to spend on storage to enable more solar users. So either you need to have a fee to pay for that, or push the storage burden onto the end users. Make that cost apparent and force people to deal with it and we will find creative ways to do so (like more EV vehicles that can act as storage, as the Ford Lightning can)

Just be glad your not in the UK. I pay 35p / kWh down and get only 5p / kWh for excess I sell to grid through Smart Export Guarantee. Price down has doubled in two years and way up has hardly moved.

I joked with my neighbour that we should wire up our homes and sell my excess to him at mid point and we would both be better off.

In maine, CMP charges $11 a month for a "connection" to the grid and your first monthly 50kwh. Is that not the case in california or other net metering markets?

Most net metering does have a base connection charge. Mine is ~$35/mo, even when I have produced more energy in a month than we consumed, my bill was still about $40 after base fees and taxes/etc.

Isn’t there a base charge though? In my home town it’s around 25 dollars a month just to be hooked up whether you use anything or not.

What would seem logical to me would be a base charge, they net meter you to zero, but then you sell power at the wholesaler rate. If that wipes out your connect charge you still have them the value that they would have paid for the power you made.

Maybe the base charge would have to be higher for net metered houses, it might have some subsidy built into it based on expectations of selling power to the client.

In the northeast at least there are separate lines for supply and distribution. If your supply goes negative, you still pay the distribution fee....and if you supplied more than the distribution cost....why wouldn't you receive money? Unless the energy company is for some reason not charging properly for distribution, seems everything is already baked in.

This kind of attitude only really make senses if there is a carbon tax.

Net metering is as good a subsidy for green energy which we DIRELY need as any.

Making perfect the enemy of the good is bad enough as a general principle but is 100x worse when the future of the planet is at stake.

But that's why your bill has generation and delivery split into two lines. Net meter the generation line but don't touch the delivery line.

But you do pay for 'grid upkeep costs', the grid availability is a part of that connection fee, otherwise what would you connect to if not to the grid. Even if you consume zero KWh in a month you will still pay.

Even then, solar panels produce electricity when demand is low and supply is high. In the evening, demand goes up and solar panels produce a lot less.

I tend to agree, but the fixed $/kw monthly fees that utilities want is just about the dumbest possible alternative.

In Idaho at least, you do have to pay a monthly infrastructure fee even if you are using net metering.

No, you'd don't need net metering to make it viable.

In a typical grid-tied system, the setup is such that any demand is fulfilled first by solar capacity, and second from the grid. If your array can fulfill 100% (or more) of your demand, then you pull nothing from the grid.

If you don't have a net metering arrangement and you regularly produce more than 100% of your local demand, then your options are to simply throw away the excess, or use a battery system to store it for later use.

If you have a net metering agreement, then the grid acts like a giant battery, which may or may not have input and output fees (think of it very roughly like Amazon S3 pricing). Ideally you have a 1:1 arrangement, where you can feed energy into the grid for free, and pull back up to whatever you supplied at parity pricing (eg: for free). But, there is no reason a utility company has to offer that arrangement, they could charge you some fee to supply energy if they wanted, and they could charge you some fee to pull energy back.

For the most part, the most cost effective solar systems will supply about 75-80% of your average monthly demand. It almost never a good investment to overbuild your solar system on the premise of making money off of net metering, as the rate you are paid for production is essentially a wholesale price, making you a micro power plant, which is not a very profitable business. Covering the bulk of your energy usage with your own solar supply, and then pulling a minimum amount of power from the grid to fill the gaps will tend to keep you at the best supply pricing tier.

>… the most cost effective solar systems will supply about 75-80% of your average monthly demand

I am not so sure that is true. Seemingly a large percentage of new installation costs are fixed (paperwork, labor, inverters, etc) with only a smaller portion for the panels themselves. For a minor incremental cost, you can fully provision your house.

Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%. If you think that’s just too high I’m not sure what to tell you.

An alternate way to look at the CA rule change is that CA needs more installed storage to shore up the shitty grid, and incentivizing people to install solar alone via net metering isn’t a great idea anymore. Remember that peak power demand is right around and just after sunset.

Companies can keep profit margin flat by increasing operating expenses such as salary. For PG&E it looks immoral.

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2022/10/ratep...

> Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%

This is the trade-off you take when you become a quasi-government company. You get a low, but nearly guaranteed profit. Executives still get their bonuses, employees get paid, etc.

If they want more variable rates of return then they can drop the public protections and go full private like any other regular company.

3.25% of fifty bazillion ain't so bad.

Does that include all deferred maintenance they had to do after the massive wildfires?

> Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%. If you think that’s just too high I’m not sure what to tell you.

Profit margin is after deducting all expenses. A lot of corrupt spending can be included in expenses to reduce the profit margin at will while still raking in the cash. So yes, that's absurdly high given how they operate.

Because net metering is forcing the utility to purchase power at the retail rate. It doesn't make any sense. It isn't a profit margin issue. There is a massive infrastructure and expense to deliver wholesale power to an individual customer and it has to be recouped. Either you sell back your power at some percent of wholesale or solar installs need to get a corresponding increased delivery fee.

What we need is a fundamental change in electricity billing. The value in a grid connection is in its reliability, availability and demand response (you can demand anything from 1 Amp to 200 Amps at any time, with no notice). The current usage-only billing model is broken.

What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is how many other utilities (Gas, Water, etc.) are billed, and it makes much more sense. This would also line up better for people with solar panels, as those who choose to leverage a grid connection would lay in line with their utility, or could choose to go off-grid, if they didn't want to pay for the availability of the grid.

We need something that will incent home solar + storage because:

1) it increases resilience in disaster scenarios and a lot of high usage scenarios. I especially think back to Puerto Rico getting hit by the Hurricane, or the Texas icestorms or things like that. Having a lot of homes semi-independent of the grid would help people mitigate impacts, because you can rely on neighbors for certain things while the grid is down.

2) BEVs are going to introduce a huge additional burden on the grid. But if we couple it with a lot of home solar installations, it will reduce the impact to the grid and the grid can focus on more industrial tasks like highway supercharging for semis and those big challenges.

3) aside from the solar panels, home solar means a distributed storage for the grid too.

Net metering is flawed, but there's the baby with the bathwater argument. Let's introduce better incentives before chucking the flawed ones that are working, and I don't see that happening.

And it's hard to price the incentives. Home solar panels are going to change a lot with forthcoming perovskites, and home storage is going to drastically change with production Sodium Ion, high density LFP/LFMP in the next few years, and Sulfur beyond that.

What I think is ridiculous is the pricing of home solar+storage versus what the grid buyers get. If home solar programs could have their panels bulk-purchased along with grid solar purchases and then the grid providers have to get them installed to homes, it would swap the grid providers from opposing home solar to being incented to finding people to allow the installation.

This is all rather bizarre. If PG&E charges 30 cents/kWh for a marginal kWh delivered, then either something is quite wrong with the pricing model or it really does cost some respectable fraction of 30 cents/kWh to get a marginal kWh through their system into their distribution network where the customer is. If it's the latter, then reduction of 1 kWh delivered should save them the same amount of money.

I think the real issue is that the pricing is almost completely divorced from the actual cost structure, so the whole rate system is a kludge that gives everyone the wrong incentives.

Another option is to split the fee into a 'connection fee', 'transmission fee' and a 'power fee'.

Have the power fee set realtime by a market. The price might go to zero if there is excess generation.

Have the transmission fee capped by a regulator - and charge it for any kilowatt hours that enter the power network.

Allow third parties to arbitrage and offer 'fixed rate' deals, so consumers aren't at the whims of an electricity market with occasional sky high prices.

You have valid points. But it does make sense if you are trying to 1) incentive solar and 2) keep the pricing super simple for the average Joe customer.

> Because net metering is forcing the utility to purchase power at the retail rate.

No, it doesn't.

I have solar+battery with net metering. I buy from the electric company at ~11.5c/kWh and sell our excess to them at ~2.7c/kWh for a difference of ~4.3x

As the sole entity that you can sell to - short of regulators being involved - they set the rate. And yes, there's already a monthly connection fee.

PG&E is a designated as a Utility by law. This means that their profit margin is fixed (at 9? percent). Basically this is the discount they should buy the power from you, which should be fine.

What we need is a nationalism of the electricity grid and power plants. A federally owned and operated electric grid solves this issue.

No (potential) customer is required to make any company profitable.

Consumer rooftop solar is the most expensive way ever thought of to provide electrical power. Money is fungible. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar which can be done at a fraction of the cost.

With net metering, wealthier home owners are essentially paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme. I recall reading that with net-metering, non-solar households in CA pay an estimated extra $115 to $245 per year to cover the subsidies given to their wealthier neighbors.

> Money is fungible. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar which can be done at a fraction of the cost.

This makes the false assumption that those “fungible” dollars are somehow earmarked for solar and the homeowners wouldn’t just spend them on some other, non-solar, goods.

It's a nice incentive, but you shouldn't need to be paid the retail rate for solar when selling it back to the utility. Especially when the retail rate is from PG&E and contains a lot of non-paying-for-electricity things like covering past liabilities for wildfires.

And you can perfectly well size your solar appropriately so that you aren't net-positive pushing electricity back to the grid at all (or only a little).

This incentivizes storage and time-shifting usage to solar peak times, which seem to be needed in California. Does anyone know if there are pricing signals to help with that? For example, if I (as a power-plant operator or whatever) found a way to sell electricity right as the sun is going down, am I rewarded for that?

As an individual with a solar install, I think this also encourages people to use the energy they produce directly, which also seems beneficial. For example, if your house is well-insulated, you can probably pre-cool it a few degrees while your solar is producing so that you don't need as much cooling during the peak times. If you can be home during the day time, you could set your car to only charge during peak times.

> This incentivizes storage and time-shifting usage to solar peak times, which seem to be needed in California. Does anyone know if there are pricing signals to help with that? For example, if I (as a power-plant operator or whatever) found a way to sell electricity right as the sun is going down, am I rewarded for that?

NEM3.0 incentivizes exactly that. It prices exported electricity at the avoided cost rate. During the late summer and early fall, between 7-9PM that can be more than $1/kWh, or 3x the average NEM2.0 rate [1]. Of course to maximize that rate you need to store energy and sell it back at the optimal time.

The average rate with NEM3.0, however, is much lower.

1. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energ...

Net metering is a regressive tax on the poor, because when rich people get solar panels and sell back to the grid at retail prices, the utility has to raise rates on everyone else to pay their large fixed costs. It may have been a good idea at one point when residential solar was so rare as to be effectively nonexistent, but now it has to be abandoned.

In my state, generation is still pretty "regulated" and the cost of generation is a separate line item on my bill, technically from a different company, from distribution. There's no reason at all I shouldn't be paid the same price per kWh for generation.

If there’s no net-zero metering, aren’t they incentivizing people to be completely disconnected from the grid, or at least not incentivizing them to be connected? (Which is bad for the grid.) Why would I fuck around with the utility at all if I’m installing enough solar/battery to power my needs?

> Why would I fuck around with the utility at all if I’m installing enough solar/battery to power my needs?

What will you do when it has been raining/cloudy for weeks straight like it has recently in California? For this period, wind has dramatically outproduced solar [1]. Even in the summer/fall, when there was severe wildfire smoke in the area, my solar+battery barely produced anything.

Sure, you can set up a propane generator (very expensive at the size needed for a full house backup), but then you are dependent on the propane-distribution grid. The dirty secret of "no-sacrifice off-grid" lifestyles is how much they are dependent on propane for heating and electricity.

Also, the grid's up-time is going to be better than your home battery setup up-time both because it is constantly maintained and it has access to a greater diversity of energy sources (wind, nuclear, fossil, large-scale storage) that are firmer than anything you can attach to your house.

The fact is that modern living standards (cars, TVs, comfortable temperatures) require a much larger amount of energy and energy-availability than most people can produce on their properties with solar. The additional energy has to be imported somehow, either from the electric grid or as liquid or gaseous fuels.

1. See Renewables Trend at http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

"Why would I fuck around with the utility at all if I’m installing enough solar/battery to power my needs?"

This is exactly my sentiment and is the reason that we have made ourselves independent from the grid.[1]

However the math gets very difficult if you need to charge an electric car ... it's a tremendous amount of electricity to keep one, not to mention two, cars topped up after daily use.

The extra panel and battery requirements for cars are such that it really does make sense to be grid-tied and arrange your charging on off-peak hours, etc. That is what makes this so frustrating for typical homeowners - there's an obvious and sensible symbiosis here that would work well for (most people).

[1] That, and the fact that I hate PG&E with the burning fire of 1000 suns.

because very likely you won't have enough solar/battery to power your needs...

If the grid is smaller, then it is good for the grid because it reduces capacity and complexity requirements. Also if the net human experience is better, the grids can as bad as what enables that.

You may be able to afford a night time battery (several hours of power) but there's no way you can afford a winter battery (several months of power).

Was the California grid always private or was it run by the state government at one point? To me it makes no sense to privatize services where no competition is possible. You just end up with perverse incentives to do stuff like the above.

The vast minority of utilities in the United States, by number of customers served, are investor-owned; publicly-owned and co-operative utilities only cover 50m people.[1]

Theoretically, the grid is supervised by the California Public Utilities Commission, which has wide latitude to set standards and regulations for PG&E and others. The Public Utility Code is the highest law in the state of California[2], so IMHO a large part of the blame for PG&E's failures fall on CPUC's failed oversight[3][4]

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40913

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Utilities_Co...

[3]: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/CPUC-head-Michael-Peev...

[4]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/pge-probation-lift...

In the US, a lot of the electrical grids were corporations (e.g., Con Edison on the East Coast is from Thomas Edison's company). I'd never looked it up before, but the predecessor to PG&E in San Francisco was the San Francisco Gas Company [1].

Of course, in 1896 an Edison company merged with the derivative of the original San Francisco Gas, to become San Francisco Gas and Electric. By 1905, that merged with something else to become PG&E.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...

A few data points as the picture is murky and mixed:

The wider "grid" is managed by CAISO - the independent system operator.

LA's utility is municipally run, in contrast to the big 3 IOUs in the state - PGE, SDGE, SCE.

SDGE had a 50 year exclusive franchise agreement with the city of San Diego that recently renewed under slightly different terms. Notably, and I'm paraphrasing: the city has the option after 10 years to terminate under certain conditions. [1]

Enron lobbied for, contributed to, and profited off of utility deregulation over 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2020/07/27/sdges-50...

[2] https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/lesson-enron-el...

There is also the savings from the solar your house produces and uses directly instead of pulling from the grid at the price per kWh.

Does that also apply if you're not sending surplus energy back into the grid?

Would a good tl;Dr summary of things in CA be that if you didn't need solar before and got grandfathered, it doesn't make sense to get solar now?

How does that work with new homes being required to have solar installed? Is it just a net giant win for pg&e?

You need a battery to efficiently use your solar. Why should pg&e be forced to buy at an inflated retail rate when they can get wholesale electricity for 70% less?

I worked in the solar industry for years and this is a very good summary of the residential install process from the customer side.

I’ll also second one of the main points of the author: do NOT get a solar lease. Either finance it through a solar loan or pay cash. A good solar company will not push you into a lease. If they try, talk to someone else.

Also should be noted to get multiple estimates, even though that's kind of common sense. I had them vary wildly, where the most expensive one was literally twice as much as the cheapest one.

I got three estimates. Huge variety in price. All three companies sent someone out to survey the house. Two were very friendly salesmen who took photos of the roof and told me how much I would save, but couldn't answer technical questions. The third company sent out an engineer, who came into the house and talked me through where the inverter would be best situated, how the batteries worked, the benefits of a diverter etc. Third company instilled the most confidence and they were also the cheapest. Went with them.

Why are the leases so problematic? If you don't have the funds nor credit score to finance it, why not just rent out the roof space so to speak? Any return you get from it is better than nothing.

Solar leases are the problematic ones (where you pay a percent of the energy you generated). It sounds like a good deal, but the rates increase yearly and the compounded cost doesn't end up being worth it. The author was cash-flow positive on a fixed-rate lease immediately and it doesn't come with a contract with a 3rd-party provider, although I guess that depends on how much sunlight you have.

We got a house in San Diego near the bottom of the last market (2012) and I was a medical resident at the time with two school age children. The previous owner had installed electric everything (even had to get a larger trunk line run and breaker panel). So our electric bill was a little nuts, randomly hitting tier 3 pricing and landing $350+ electric bills. For a household with negligible marginal income, that was unpleasant. We had 0 capital to play with but switching to solar was a no brainer. Even the lease is cheaper than paying PG&E.

Would I do it that way again? Probably not. But I have more wiggle room now.

> hitting tier 3 pricing and landing $350+ electric bills

I just wanna chime in and add: PG&E got rid of the third tier (unsure when) and, in the Bay Area, we're looking at around $0.35-$0.40/kWh at the upper end of the rate schedule (plus an explosion in natural gas prices on the West Coast). $350+ electric bills are pretty much now the norm for anyone who wants to heat their house up much past 60°F.

> Even the lease is cheaper than paying PG&E

SDG&E provides electricity in San Diego

Hah! Indeed. We moved to Mountain View and that property is now a rental. Point stands.

So why wouldn't you get a lease now?

A lease just doesn't make financial sense for a long-term (likely permanent) asset.

My understanding is the leases are a challenge when you want to sell the house. New buyers would have to also agree to the lease's terms or you have to pay to break the lease and remove them.

I wonder what causes this high electricity use. Not because it's any of my business, it's just genuine curiosity.

He never reveals actual use, only savings. Still, at 0.25$ per kwh charged and an average monthly saving of 210$, we can work out that 860 kwh/month was saved, which amounts to 10,320 kwh per year. Actual use may be (far) higher, but we don't know.

Just these savings alone is triple my total electricity consumption (in the Netherlands) in a fairly similar weather pattern. And I'm not exactly frugal with electricity: big TV, washer, dryer, powerful oven, multiple PCs, and even a few small power hungry electrical heaters (due to very high gas prices).

I'm not exactly projecting a personal situation. Our government has established that median/typical use of a dutch household is 2,900 kwh/year in order to qualify for the new price ceiling, a temporary measure to keep energy affordable.

So here we're talking about 3 times more than an above average consumer (me), and what might be a factor of 4-6 more than our median. Yet the person is unlikely to live in a mansion as he can't afford to pay for the panels in cash. I don't mean that in a judgemental way.

Large scale permanent electrical heating/cooling in every room? EV car? What would cause such enormous usage?

Again, I don't ask this to justify usage, only to understand it.

We're a family of four in the Midwest (US), and we average about 40 kwh/day. Roughly 14,000kwh annually. The only gas stuff we have is our hot water heater and furnace. Our A/C gets a work out in the summer when it is pretty warm (at least this year). I do about 8 loads of laundry a week, and I'm sure that my dryer is a big user of electricity. We have a lot of computers in the house between the four of us; three desktops and four laptops. I work from home, so a pretty consistent use for at least 2 of them. I don't think the house lights or smartphones are worth even tallying. I bet A/C is a good 50% of our usage, and that's focused largely between June and September.

Biggest culprits in energy consumptions are heating appliances. To save some bucks I usually set my thermostat 1 or 2 degrees under my ideal temperature and wear warmer clothes and I never used a dryer, I don't mind having clothes hanging on a rack on a corner of my flat.

Thanks, always useful to hear about real world examples.

I have a house from 1909, with relatively poor insulation, by modern standards. We heat the house with a heat pump and a 100 m deep borehole. The heating of the house (180 m2 and a cellar) is the main energy consumption. The total was 22 000 kWh last year (including about 3 500 kWh for an electric car). An old house with electric heating and cooling could well be what he has.

When we moved in the electric consumption per year was way higher, 35 000 kWh. We have gone through and made the house more effective, better white goods, windows, better ventilation etc. We also sold about 2 000 kWh of excess production from our solar panels.

"An old house with electric heating and cooling could well be what he has."

Definitely could be the case. Your situation is interesting in that it is opposite to the order of transitioning towards a heat pump over here. Perhaps a heat pump was your starting point as there was no gas connection?

Over here we start with gas heating (almost every house) after which we try to transition towards a heat pump. They say you should first insulate your house to the maximum possible before even considering a heat pump. Fail to do this and the heat pump won't even be able to produce enough. This calculation is of course locally specific, unlikely to apply to you.

In fact, many houses will never be able to transition and will end up with a hybrid pump as the maximum achievable.

An old house in California wouldn’t have electric heating. Even new houses scarcely have electric heating.

These are good and valid questions.

Relating to our solar panel install (refer another comment of mine in this thread) we went through with one of those plug in power meters and identified about spot and average power draw for about 80 different devices, spreadsheeted those data up to try to get a feel for where our power was being consumed -- as often times we would hit 40-50kWh/ day consumption.

Predictably (in retrospect) the biggest culprit by far was the hot water system. While we couldn't conveniently plug a meter in-line, it was fortunately wired up on its own phase (we're on 3-phase), and with the solar system install came a smart meter, which then provided some hour-by-hour insights.

A timer in the circuit-breaker box for the HWS, along with an element change (replacing the 2k4 with a 1k8 element) massively reduced consumption there -- I expect very many people have inefficient, and/or poorly configured, and/or poorly serviced electric hot water systems that are chewing through vast quantities of power.

TFA seems pretty savvy, so you'd hope this kind of low-hanging fruit isn't their problem, but OTOH you're right that those figures are very high, and you'd expect someone looking in this much detail at their power profile would be off-peaking all the high-draw systems they could.

That's clever. We also have a central smart meter in the house. It has a standard port (I believe it's called "P3") that allows you to read out usage. There's devices on the market that plug into this port, connect to your Wifi and then make it available to a mobile app. It reports total power usage in real time and gas usage with a delay of 15 mins.

I would recommend anyone to do such tour of the house. You're very likely to learn a lot and be in for a shock here and there. Totally agree with you that most people are far away from a state of micro managing energy, there's big wins to be had with little sacrifices in convenience.

And yes, that was the background of my question: If I'd save 210$ in electricity per month, my very first question would be why I even use that much in the first place. Could be valid reasons for it, of course.

The average New Englander uses between 567 kWh/month and 711 kWh/month (different values for different states - areas farther south generally use more).

The answer is probably that you live 5-10 degrees north of him and don’t use as much air conditioning.

I don't use any AC at all, true. But would you say that explains triple the usage? New England isn't exactly in the desert.

Could be electric car(s) and longish daily commutes

That sounds plausible and I had not even considered the possibility of multiple electric cars.

It frankly worries me. Heat pumps and EVs are going to spike consumption dramatically, where even smallish price and taxation movements will have an outsized impact. Not to mention the grid being able to handle it at all, as most people can't ever generate anything close to that level.

Can somebody explain where the return on investment comes from in residential solar? It just strikes me that if there was easy money to be had on solar installations, we'd just get tons of utility scale solar installs (which would likely by more capital efficient) and my utility bill would over time converge on the expected total utility bill for a home with residential solar. Is it just because we're in that transitional period where utility scale solar _is_ being installed, but in the mean time residential solar install internalizes the savings to your own residence? Or is it because most of the testimonials are hiding the ball a bit (only net savings reported due to buyer's remorse, etc.)? Or is it because government subsidies for residential solar are distorting the true capital cost, and thus profitability, of solar at scale?

To be fair, there is a lot of grid scale solar (and wind) being built, largely because they are the cheapest way to add generation capacity right now. But they are not a simple pluggable replacement for gas, coal, or nuclear, because they deliver power to the utility grid when the weather dictates power is available, not when the utilities demand dictates they need it. Utilities struggle once the fraction of their power supplied by these "interruptible sources" gets over 1/4 or so of their total generation base. As far as I know, the only regional-scale grids that have gone completely to renewables are Tasmania and Iceland. South Australia is not far behind, and Scotland not far behind them. But each has special circumstances that make it an easier lift. Tasmania and Iceland have abundant hydro and geothermal, which are ideal complements to interruptible renewables, because they can be quickly throttled up and down as required, as the interruptibles wax and wane. South Australia has highly reliable sunshine and wind, and so have been able to bridge the stochasticity of these with relatively manageable sized batteries (and a couple of flywheel installations to provide very short term momentum based frequency control). Scotland has highly reliable wind, and is headed in the same direction as South Australia.

> we'd just get tons of utility scale solar installs

This is happening, in a big way: https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/

The main limitation AIUI is grid interconnections, i.e. there are a lot of projects in the backlog that can't be built until the utility approves and prepares for it.

https://emp.lbl.gov/queues

> The lists of projects in this process are known as “interconnection queues”. The amount of new electric capacity in these queues is growing dramatically, with over 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of total generation and storage capacity now seeking connection to the grid (over 90% of which is for zero-carbon resources like solar, wind, and battery storage).

Residential solar reduces retail power costs @ $0.30/kWh, whereas grid-scale solar supplies wholesale power @ $0.02/kWh. (Representative figures from California.) NEM (net energy metering) amplifies this effect.

If you look at a system-cost ROI analysis, the difference between residential and grid-scale is that the latter requires more transmission lines and provides fewer jobs (which is a key part of the political economics), but residential solar comes out looking very bad.

Explicit subsidies -- which pay a part of residential solar capital costs -- are a much smaller force.

We are getting tons of utility scale solar:

> Utility-scale solar power generation in the U.S. is surging. This year, almost half the 46.1 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity added to the grid will be solar, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and solar has contributed more than 30% of all new capacity in five of the last six years.

https://news.sap.com/2022/11/the-take-utility-scale-solar-su...

Residential solar has no complexity for siting, transmission infrastructure, takes different skills to install, and let's relatively wealthy people move fast.

Because with net metering you can generally sell at a much higher price than the wholesale rate. It was a loophole that is now going away.

Utility-scale solar is far more efficient than rooftop solar. With rooftop, the panels face whatever direction the roof does. But utility solar fields have panels that rotate to face the sun.

Considering that power generation depends on the cosine of the angle between the sun and the panel - angle matters a LOT. Efficiency falls off fast if your angle is bad.

This should be at least somewhat offset by the fact that you generate power approximately where it is consumed, so the grid doesn’t have to grow as much. Turns out it isn’t so simple due to peak demand vs peak production etc but still. I wouldn’t have a problem with plastering PV on half of Nevada.

Most solar panels are angled to the South to capture the most sun. I read somewhere that fixed installations are better because:

1) The money spent on panel rotators can be invested into having more solar panels.

2) Affixed solar panels are significantly more storm and hurricane proof. If there’s one bad storm with rotating panels, your investment principal is gone.

3) Maintenance costs increase when these moving parts eventually break. Fixed panels have no moving parts.

> Can somebody explain where the return on investment comes from in residential solar?

During the run-up on housing prices over the last couple of years, there was a belief that an owned solar system would raise your house's sale price in much the same way that a kitchen or bathroom renovation would.

Couple that with the supply and labor constraints, which made it hard to get the panels, battery, and installers you wanted in a timely basis - that raised the perceived home value yet again, because if you wanted to add your own solar later, it wasn't seen as easily doable.

I don't know that the ROI was ever great, but with both of those factors gone today, it's worse than it ever was. (Source: shopped for homes in 2020-2021, bought in 2022, tried to get solar installed, ROI made no sense.)

I would say most people can't afford 25k$ investment cost for something relying on governmental decision that can change on a whim

In California, there's no choice for new housing, where new single/multi family houses must have panels that cover 100% of energy usage for the year (or as much as the roof surface area allows).

> The unsubsidized all-in price for buying and installing the panels was $25,525.43... after counting this $6,636.61 tax credit, the subsidized price was $18,888.82

Looks like a 7 year return on investment after subsidies, 10 years without.

I'm not affiliated, but Solar Wholesale is a DIY that can be 1/4 the cost of hiring a contractor: https://www.solarwholesale.com

Even the wiring is DIY. Most people think this requires a lot of skill, but you are just adding an input to your panel board on your house.

I enjoyed working with Solar Wholesale, and they got me off to a good start. But there is a pretty significant markup even when considering they're giving you a "wholesale" DIY kit. I was quoted ~$35k pre-incentive for my project.

Also, be sure to do your own roof measurements when you look over their proposals. For my project, they used fairly inaccurate aerial/sat photos, which got the shape of my roof entirely wrong. Had I accepted their offer, I'd have ~33% too many panels / racking that wouldn't fit on the roof.

I ended up sourcing all the materials myself. I got much nicer inverters (1:1 Enphase IQ8+) and PV modules (455W LG bifacial) than what they were offering (2:1 APSystems inverters, 355W Bluesun panels).

The real kicker: I had enough budget left over to have a professional solar installer install all the panels for me, so I'm not the one that has to get on my steep roof, plus I have a warranty on the worksmanship of the installation. Pre-incentive, I'll have spent about $24k on my self-sourced version.

At some point I'll write up a blog post about the whole process - parts selection and sourcing, finding an installer, permitting, etc. It's really not that hard.

https://projectsolar.com is another DIY-able option, where they help with the permitting, etc.

It's nice they give you an instant quote, but they don't give enough info for me to be willing to take the next step.

Basic things like:

What is the physical size of the quoted panels?

The KW rating they give, is that actual power delivered, or rated power?

If rated power, how much actual power would they expect given my geographical location, and angle of roof.

How much of the roof are they covering?

They want $100 for the next step - presumably I would get those answers then, but I'm not willing to risk $100 without knowing more.

Unfortunately where I live (Belgium), this kind of options result in a disqualification of any subsidy. They always require that the install is done by a pro with some certificate (even though DIYing electrics is actually legal here).

I understand that there are reasons for this, but as someone with the qualifications but not the certification, I hate that I have to pay someone else to do things like this.

If the DIY discount (minus your time and risk) is greater than the subsidy, then doesn't it still makes sense to DIY?

Is this for 100% detachment from the grid? Otherwise you need to add cutoffs so you don't kill a lineman, right? Is that a DIY thing?

Different states have different rules but in some states you can just put a new breaker in your box that connects the solar output to the rest of your house and a mechanical interlock (literally a stamped piece of metal) that prevents both the main breaker and solar breaker being closed at the same time.

Ah, OK, so that would work for the "simple" systems, but not the ones where you can feed power back into the grid and get a credit.

I would love to DIY but that website is a complete turn off for me.

In my opinion, a good DIY solar company site would have transparent pricing and ability to buy components. I understand there are variations in installations and pricing may be different, but they should have a pricing catalog.

What's wrong with the website? You submit your address, within a short period of time a human looks at your rooftop using aerial photography, and sends you a quote.

I used them in the past, and they were fine to work with. I still ended up sourcing all my own equipment (saved an additional 50% from what they were quoting me, for a better system), but they're not secretive about what they'll send you.

What's so wrong with the website, that you wouldn't take 75% off?

Thank you so much for mentioning this. Their offering looks compelling and interesting.

I never usually see it factored in as a cost but if a roof is replaced or a leak forms under the panels (or a panel) then the cost of removing/re-installing the panel(s) surely isn’t free. So that cost should also be included

Cleaning panels also needs to happen periodically. That cost can be in the thousands, especially if your roof is hard to access (e.g. high off the ground).

There are so many ways a rooftop solar installation investment can turn against you. If regulations change, your net metering goes away. If electricity prices drop, your ROI goes negative.

Rooftop solar is a fun enthusiast project, but it's a lousy use of solar panels. Community solar or utility solar projects are far better for homeowners. And for the environment.

The only reason people do it is that there are artificial incentives; it's not actually efficient in reality.

I have rooftop solar - and eventually I will need a new roof - which will require taking the solar panels off and then mounting them back on again - labor costs. Additionally the inverter will fail at a certain point and that is not cheap. Given some ballpark estimates, I do feel like it could simply be a wash financially.

How old’s your roof? Just wait until it’s time for new panels. You’ll want new panels after a couple decades and change for the significantly improved performance. Panel work will be routine for roofers in the 2030s and 2040s. If you installed them on an old roof, you made a mistake, and your municipality probably shouldn’t have approved the work in the first place.

Your replacement inverter should only cost $1-3k in present money, depending on its size. You probably have a warranty on it for the first half of your panels’ life.

You also don’t need to pay for an expensive extensive cleaning unless something goes really wrong or you live under an HOA that is hostile to solar.

By far, the biggest factor in ROI is your generation relative to your initial installation cost minus tax credits and SRECs.

It's usually recommended to install solar panels on a relatively new roof (< 5 years), so that both the roof and solar panel lifecycles align. Since the panels act as protection of sorts, it also extends the life of the roof, and you can easily have both installations serve you for ~30 years.

There is typically a ten year warranty on the installation that covers leaks. An installer checks for roof age as part of qualification so you don't put panels on a roof that will age out before the panel warranty (typically 20 years, sometimes 25.)

Roof leaks that are accidental are covered by insurance, and the work to remove or replace the panels is part of that. Typically you adjust your home insurance coverage by the value of the panels when you install them to make sure everything's covered.

That just leaves the chance that the installer work will be good enough to make it ten years but not twenty, and the insurance won't cover the damage. I don't know the odds of that. It seems like it would be infrequent, but what numbers do you use?

I don’t use any numbers. Just wanted to point out there is slightly more to it than the upfront cost. As with anything there is an associated maintenance cost that is variable depending on circumstance.

To be clear I think solar panels can be a great idea, but it’s misleading to present only a single upfront cost when determining the years to break even

I understand. It's not bad to keep in mind (I made a spreadsheet with anticipated expenses before I got my panels), but I think it can be more misleading to dwell on small risks than not to if it keeps someone from buying an asset with a good lifetime ROI for most people.

7-10 years to break even. If the panels last 15 years you'll see a net return of $21,416 on investment of $18,888. If they last 25 years, that net return grows to $48,186. In either case it works out to an annual rate of return of 5%, assuming electricity prices stay the same (BIG ASSUMPTION) and also assuming the weather doesn't change to get cloudier or more violent (also a big assumption).

Is net return all that matters? Seems like with increasing heat waves, power outages etc, being able to generate and store your own electricity has value from a resiliency standpoint.

Note that merely having solar panels on your house doesn't automatically let you run your house off of the panels in the event that the grid goes down. Firstly, if you're connected to the grid, then a single house trying to push power into a downed grid would be like trying to refill the ocean with a super soaker. Even with lots of houses doing it, the frequency would be wildly unstable at best and cause damage to equipment. Secondly, it poses dangers for lineworkers who are probably trying to resolve the outage, by putting surprise voltage into wires.

It's certainly possible to have a solar installation that does let you disconnect from the grid, but it requires extra hardware (including a battery backup).

Exactly right. Typical solar installations keep you on the grid. And when the grid goes out, so do you.

To become grid-independent adds substantial expense. Having your own battery adds another $10-20k, along with whatever costs are associated with switching the grid.

Also, being off-grid is actually illegal in some places.

I'm not sure what kinds of hardware you guys have seen or been marketed. But from my pov, these are all pretty standard features of most hybrid inverters and come out of the box. The only extra expense to not be grid tied is needing a battery and maybe a tiny amount of extra electrical wiring. It wasn't even a question that popped up during my build.

Then again, we regularly have huge rolling blackouts here so we need the inverter to be a giant UPS for the house and be able to use solar and grid at the same time.

What's the math if we see annual electricity price increases? we've seen 2 hikes of 10-20% in the last 18 months here in Florida. Making me consider solar sooner rather than later.

If the savings is $2677 on year 8 (first year of profits after paying off the initial investment) and then increases 10% every year after that, the net return is $33675. This works out to an annual return of 7%, a considerable improvement! The same calculation with annual rate increases of 20% yields a net return of $53002 and an annual return of 9%.

Also there is a question if electricity produced by panels will match the peak demand or in general is utilized. Scenario where solar is overbuild and thus power generated by it has near zero price for large part of the day might happen.

I agree its a big assumption to assume that electricity prices will stay the same, my assumption is that electricity price increases will significantly outpace inflation.

Sounds great to me. Especially considering you aren't paying any taxes on your returns when they come in the form of deferred costs. That's equivalent to a pre-tax return in the mid-teens. You won't find that in most asset classes these days, and definitely not with the risk profile of solar.

Especially considering most modern panels are expected to still have a good amount of life left in them after 25 years. (80% or more}

AND considering that replacing only the panels has to be far cheaper than the initial installation, if they do drop too much in 25 years. So long as your roof is still okay, I suppose.

Just bake new panels into the cost of a new roof. It's probably time for both after 25 years.

Sorry, life after 25 years? That's WAY higher than I thought. That's incredible.

This is standard now. My REC Alpha Pure Black 400 panels are warrantied for 92% at 25 years.

The degradation is about 0.25%/yr. Assuming no exponential drop-off it would take >50 years to hit 80%.

Essentially no one has had to replace their panels due to degradation losses as of yet (since the vast majority of panels have been installed in the past ~30 years).

The idea that PV panels become trash in a decade is a lie promulgated by oil companies. According to NREL, reputable panels degrade as little as 0.1% per year, which means they will still be above 90% of rated output after 100 years. The trashiest panels NREL has tested degrade at 1.1% per year which would put them at 75% rated capacity in 25 years.

https://www.nrel.gov/pv/lifetime.html

Generally you can find the degradation curve in their datasheet, and yes, 80% after 25 years sounds possible. IIRC they fade faster with time, so it might be 50% after 50, but ... that's still pretty good.

you'll need to supplement with some new panels to account for the loss, but each new panel is more efficient than the one you're "replacing"

>Looks like a 7 year return on investment after subsidies, 10 years without.

Price of electricity more than tripled in some EU countries in the last few years. Prices going up and OP reducing consumption will work towards reducing ROI period.

That is technically true, but why is no one asking how and why his electricity bill is $223 at minimum, plied higher since the bill was only reduced by that amount.

Also, “subsidies” are really just a quaint term for “made the working and lower middle class that can’t pay for such exorbitant luxuries pay for it through taxes and inflation”.

I’m always a bit confused if seemingly otherwise smart people simply don’t understand something so basic, or if they simply just ignore and don’t want to acknowledge it as if that changes the fact.

Guess who else gets subsidies; someone who buys goods out of the truck of a car … wow, such a great deal.

Would anyone like to subsidize my next restaurant visit by paying for my entree? No? But making someone unknown working class person pay for my $25,000 solar install through inflation is ok?

How about we all just pay for the things we want I stead of making others pay for it? It’s immoral and evil, whether you call it subsidies or something else.

>Would anyone like to subsidize my next restaurant visit by paying for my entree? No? But making someone unknown working class person pay for my $25,000 solar install through inflation is ok?

It's amazing how ignorant people can be to the world around them. Let's assume you live in the US, since the article is dealing with those subsidies.

The food you're eating - c. 20% of US farm income is subsidies [0]

The employees of the restaurant - probably, at least one of them is on a government support program to augment their wages [1]

The car you drove to the restaurant in - the US Federal government subsidized your gas (ever wonder why US gas is cheaper than Canada/EU?) [2]

So maybe instead of spending your time looking down your nose and 'not understanding why people don't understand economics,' why don't you do research on the world around you?

[0] https://perc.tamu.edu/PERC-Blog/PERC-Blog/U-S-Farm-Subsidies...

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-45

[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

>The car you drove to the restaurant in - the US Federal government subsidized your gas (ever wonder why US gas is cheaper than Canada/EU?)

US gas is cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world because a) the US is self-sufficient in terms of supply and, more importantly, b) US fuel taxes are less.

If you actually read the EESI paper you cited, you see that the "subsidies", whether direct or indirect, are actually varying accounting treatments; basically, the same amount of taxes are collected but over a longer period of time. In any case, even if you were to remove all the direct "subsidies", the paper does not claim that tax revenue would rise more than about $40 billion over about a decade. $4 billion a year is a pittance for a federal government that collected $4.9 trillion in 2022.

Oh fun! I love when people Dunning-Kruger themselves on accounting (I literally just sat up straight in my chair!)

Let's go through your argument (would you believe I did both read and understand the document I linked!?), but before we do that, let's look at some more traditional subsidies that O&G gets in America: [0]

The GAO has reported extensively that taxpayers have not received a fair rate of return due to outdated fiscal terms. For example, Federal onshore oil and gas royalty rates are consistently lower than on State-issued leases and Federal offshore leases (see Tables 1 and 2); in fact, onshore royalty rates have never been raised. Likewise, bonding levels have not been raised for 60 years, and minimum bids and rents have been the same for over 30 years. If a lease is not sold competitively at auction, for two years it can be sold non-competitively for a modest administrative fee, with no bonus bid required. These noncompetitive leases are frequently less diligently developed as competitively issued leases. From 2013 to 2019, average revenues from competitive leases were nearly three times greater than revenues from noncompetitive leases.

Underpriced use of public land sure sounds like a subsidy to me!

Ok back to your comment, let's cherry-pick some arguments you made then get into accounting.

>US gas is cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world because a) the US is self-sufficient in terms of supply

Oh, I was unaware that the cheap gas phenomenon started in 2008 when we started approaching energy independence. Thanks Obama, I guess.

>b) US fuel taxes are less.

You're getting dangerously close to agreeing with me on the subsidy point, but I know we won't agree on the politics of pricing externalities, so I'll just move on.

> the paper does not claim that tax revenue would rise more than about $40 billion over about a decade. $4 billion a year is a pittance for a federal government that collected $4.9 trillion in 2022.

It's an amazing logical fallacy to say "one number is smaller than another unrelated number, so the smaller number is unimportant," but even ignoring that, its still a subsidy and that's my entire point. Subsidies big and small are everywhere and this is one of them. I nowhere made an argument that O&G subsidies are going to bankrupt the US, just wanted to make OP aware of the fact that their gas is subsidized.

OK, now on to my favorite topic: why GAAP and cashflow accounting are different and why that actually matters, especially in CAPEX-driven balance sheet businesses.

1) The Intangible Drilling Costs Deduction - You are 100% wrong here. Depreciation and Amortization schedules exist for a reason, it's not just made up to keep EY busy footing 3-statement models. Let's run with this hypothetical: a business looks to build a well when prices are $100/barrel. In that first year of pumping, they successfully discover that the well is wet and they pay way less tax than they otherwise would because they got to amortize everything all at once. Now in year 2, that wet well is still producing but oil prices fall and it no longer makes sense to keep pumping. So now they have a known wet well (a balance sheet asset that they can restart at any time) and all the retained earnings from year 1 that the government never gets to claw back.

Compare this to a world without this subsidy where those expenses are amortized on expected useful life of the well. In this case, not only does the driller have incentive to keep producing even if prices fall, they absorb some of the pricing risk that the US government currently takes on.

If the US government intentionally absorbing pricing risk (arguably free insurance for O&G companies) is not a subsidy to you then again, we just disagree.

2) Percentage Depletion - In contrast, percentage depletion allows firms to deduct a set percentage from their taxable income. Because percentage depletion is not based on capital costs, total deductions can exceed capital costs. << Enough said

3) Foreign tax - Instead of claiming royalty payments as deductions, oil and gas companies are able to treat them as fully deductible foreign income tax. << Again, maybe you're not following the language here, but this is not "basically, the same amount of taxes are collected but over a longer period of time" it's "less taxes vs. other industries" (if you actually don't follow, tax paid to foreign governments isn't treated as a normal expense, it's usually covered in treaty agreements and is treated as tax already paid)

So yeah, not only are these real honest to goodness subsidies, they amount to billions of dollars a year!

[0]https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/report-on-the-federa...

> I’m always a bit confused if seemingly otherwise smart people simply don’t understand something so basic

Are you surprised, truly? All right, I’ll play along.

We have a progressive tax system. So the majority of the costs are born by the wealthy and the well-off, rather than the working class. Some of the well-to-do got that way by grit and hard work; others by luck; and at least a few by fraud and worse. They’re the winners of a somewhat-arbitrary game, and I don’t see anything wrong with tweaking the rules in pursuit of a collective good, like wider solar panel deployment.

Meanwhile! We know that most industries have quite dramatic learning-by-doing and returns to scale. And yet in this fallen world transaction costs and imperfect information can prevent new technologies from getting enough scale practice to become economically viable. So temporary subsidies in the early stage have a good chance of bringing costs down for everyone.

I’m very glad to be the first to introduce you to these arguments, if I am. You don’t have to agree: I left my mind-control goggles in my other coat. But please, don’t play dumb.

Sort of. The literal tax bracket for earned income is progressive. But due to lower tax rates for certain other types of income, and the ability for the ultra rich to utilize the tax code to the fullest, the net effect is that the actual overall tax rates are progressive at the bottom end, and regressive at the top end.

Your restaurant visit is quite subsidized. Notably, both the labor and the materials used are heavily subsidized.

Unless you walk to that restaurant, it will absolutely be subsidized. 6 percent of all state and local spending is on roads. And that's not counting any negative externalities, which subsidies should be reducing (like, for example, a solar installation subsidy), not increasing.

There are a lot of subsidies in agriculture as well.

> Would anyone like to subsidize my next restaurant visit by paying for my entree? No? But making someone unknown working class person pay for my $25,000 solar install through inflation is ok?

Yes, it obviously is ok? Your next restaurant meal doesn't have a broad impact on the world we live in, whereas the deployment of solar panels does.

maybe that poster is a vegan locavore

Subsidies exist for many industries

You are incredibly ignorant about how the world works.

Perhaps instead of being angry that people are using taxes that come from the working class, instead you should ask why the wealthy aren't paying their share of the taxes?

And nobody pays for anything with inflation. That's not how inflation works.

> instead you should ask why the wealthy aren't paying their share of the taxes?

And what is the right share that the wealthy should pay, and how wealthy should one be to be paying that amount? I'm assuming it's some level of wealth above yours.

About half of the US doesn't pay any federal income tax, and a little over a quarter pays no net federal taxes at all, including payroll taxes. The labor force participation rate hit its peak in the 90s and has been steadily decreasing since then, with the last reading at 62.1%. Perhaps you should ask why two-fifths of adults aren't doing their share of the labor?

> Perhaps you should ask why two-fifths of adults aren't doing their share of the labor?

Careful that you don't cut yourself with all those edgy takes.

"The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.2 percent)."[1]

How is that not paying their share?

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...

Well, given that the top 1% in the US owns over 43% of all wealth (numbers as of 2011), and who by definition are getting a bigger benefit from all the infrastructure and protections of the system than everyone else, not seeing how a 38.8% contribution of total tax income is anything but a distortion favoring the wealthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

Particularly since you carefully ignore that income is typically small fraction of the wealth of the 1%, most of which is capital and which largely escapes taxation.

You're missing some "of"s.

It's the "top 1 percent of taxpayers". So the people who paid the most taxes, paid the most taxes. They also made 20% of the total income. Or roughly 2 trillion dollars.

So if you managed to make a lot of money but also managed to avoid paying taxes on that money, you would not be included in "the top 1 percent of taxpayers".

The bottom 50% of taxpayers only made 11.1% of the income.

And that's the problem with all of this, there are ways to slice the data to try and gloss over the very real problem of wealth inequality we have right now.

How much of the income and wealth did they capture?

"And nobody pays for anything with inflation."

other than inflation canceling the debt of the rich/government by moving to all of us.

I paid ~15k to install solar in 2019. After tax rebates it was ~11k. I’m generating ~12MWh per year. My break even period is less than 5 years.

I’m based out of California, and generate excess energy. My electric bill is now just ~$100/year.

Have you experienced any grid power outages where your solar panels saved your day?

Solar won't keep you online through a power outage. The inverter is required by law to cut power from solar panels when there is not power from the grid, so as to avoid feeding electricity back into the grid lines (which technicians may be working on!) - this is known as anti-islanding protection. If you want to be online through a grid outage you need a battery array.

No as I haven’t lost power since installation. However during a power outage I can configure the SMA inverter to detach from my breaker box and operate a single 15Amp outlet

Do you have a battery or are the excess directly dumped to grid?

Excess sent to the grid using the NEM 2.0 TOU-C rate plan.

if you generate excess energy, can you store it for a later time when you need more energy (presumably summer time)?

You would need batteries which are quite expensive at this time.

Why would I? I’m on NEM 2.0. The grid is my “battery”. Every KWh I generate that isn’t used is sent back to the grid. In exchange I get an IOU for the equivalent $/KWh price during that time. This is the retail $/KWh which includes transmission costs.

> presumably summer time

Assuming you have batteries, you discharge and charge them on a daily cycle, not a yearly cycle, to make the most money/have the most benefit. There are predictable time of day based troughs and peaks in the price that you can take advantage of.

It's a lot more efficient to sell back to the power company. I'd be more comfortable with having a dual fuel generator for apocalyptic situations vs a bunch of batteries.

Some (all?) electric companies in CA do net metering, where you can sell them your excess electricity at any time and storage essentially becomes their problem.

While you wait decades for home battery storage technology to improve, you can make a water battery in the meantime with a few things from the hardware store.

https://hackaday.com/2021/10/08/power-your-home-with-a-water...

~12MWh or ~12KWh ?

12kWh is what a typical rooftop solar system can produce in a day

so OP's number of 12MWh checks out for a whole year

I am surprised at these power bills, at least in my area the implied "savings" are 2-3 times what my bill is on any given month. Huge house maybe?

That was not takeaway as well -this person seemingly lives on an estate. I do not think most roofs even have the space for 21 panels.

Air conditioning dominates summer electricity uses anywhere that is hot and/or humid.

The electricity prices listed in the article are quite high, the US average is about half of that.

I don't find his methods particularly rigorous. He's just taking total generated kWh and multiplying it by current utility rates and then saying this represents savings.

Does it, though? We don't know how much of the generated power was actually used instead of sold back into the grid, or if this is even a grid tied installation, and what the return sales rate would be.

The only way to actually compare this is to look at the actual bills. What did you pay last year, what did you pay this year? That's _actual_ savings. This is calculated plausible savings. It's not at all clear they're the same thing in this scenario.

Finally.. if you're in a position to even say you're _saving_ $233/mo, then how inefficient is your home in the first place? How many people live there to generate this large of a bill? How much of a difference would it have made to make that house more thermally or electrically efficient instead?

I am too. My last energy bill was $39 for 174kWh for a house built in 1926. Considering that I pay ~$12 in grid connection fees, the payback period is functionally never.

My parents had panels installed on their house, it is a large single story house in Austin, Texas, which is pretty ideal (more surface area for panels, less volume inside vs two story). No trees in the way either. They haven't had to pay anything for electricity yet. And that is with an EV charging in the garage.

We have panels on our roof, a two story house, also in Austin Texas, not so lucky as my parents. With the area maxed out we still have to pay for about 25% of the electricity we use.

It sounds like they have a good net energy metering plan that is crediting them for their solar being put back to the grid. (So they don't have to pay for charging the electric car in the evening when solar stops working) I wonder if Texas is working to walk that back like California is right now.

I'm in the Austin suburbs on Pedernales Electric Coop (not Austin Energy as in the city proper). In 2022 they switched away from net metering to a scheme that pays just over 50% of the cost for power returned to the grid. So I now pay $0.090337/kWh for power consumed from the grid, and am credited only $0.05377/kWh for power returned to the grid.

https://www.pec.coop/your-service/distributed-generation/int...

This has changed the payback equation quite a bit. I'm now incentivized to do everything I can to use the power I generate rather than returning it to the grid, whether running more A/C during daylight, running laundry during the day, or storing it on my Powerwalls for using off hours.

Although the payback equation doesn't really make sense anymore, we're still happy with our decision to install solar + powerwalls because we can run the A/C as much as we want without feeling guilty, and also get a solid backup in case of major storm events like the 2021 winter storms. We both work from home and have an infant so keeping the house comfortable is important.

almost certainly. Net metering is ultimately unsustainable. Realistically we should be paying homeowners wholesale electricity rates + an amount to cover transmission savings + whatever incentive we decide on for the energy they produce (along with time of use based consumption charges).

This would likely incentivize storage, and could be extremely valuable with V2G technologies that are incoming.

In Austin I'd like to see some studies on solar vs tree coverage. My empirical evidence would suggest that great tree coverage alone keep the inside livable on 100f+ summer days. On my house without trees I could barely keep some of the rooms cool.

That makes me wonder if the installation of solar panels on a roof act as "shade" similar to partial tree coverage in some way, since in many cases they add a thin cushion of shaded air between the panel and the roof. I wonder if that provides any meaningful shade or temperature reduction.

Not making an argument either way, I just hadn't really considered if this was a factor until I read your comment.

I would certainly never cut a tree down to get more solar on my roof, even if the math worked out favorably from a cost perspective it just feels gross.

Awnings are a cheaper alternative which can block direct sun into windows, making a huge difference in room temp.

One side benefit of solar for me was reducing cooling requirements of the top floor, which I anticipated but didn't expect it to be this significant. Expectedly but interestingly, installing solar panels didn't make any difference, but starting energy production did. Physics is fascinating.

Aha! Did not think about this side effect at all. Interesting !

Interesting to see a post about this from someone else who I'm assuming is in a northern climate (they say New England).

One of my biggest questions about solar is, what happens when it snows? Do you have to get up on the roof and clean them off by hand? Or do they have built-in defrosters?

> One of my biggest questions about solar is, what happens when it snows? Do you have to get up on the roof and clean them off by hand? Or do they have built-in defrosters?

Nothing.

In northern climates rooftops usually have more of a pitch to them so snow doesn't accumulate (because you don't want the roof to collapse). The panels, because they are black, will generally collect enough heat to melt the snow in a day or 2 after a snowstorm.

If you want to clean the panels, you risk damaging them. So the common advice is don't do anything and let the sun do the work.

Northern climates is relative. I live in the north of Sweden and the solar panels here will be completely covered from December to February or similar.

It's true though that the snow will melt or fall off quickly when it's not that cold anymore.

In the yukon we brush them off. Still plenty of power generated at -40C.. though the days are not very long!

>The panels, because they are black

Doesn't seem like that would matter once covered by a few inches of snow. But otherwise your points seem solid.

All it takes is a little snow to melt or blow off and the exposed panel will heat and cause the rest of the snow to melt and slide off. The panels are relatively slippery so a little melt at a pitch will clear them in no time.

It somehow does - dark asphalt melts snow faster than grass even when not shoveled.

But once it’s deep enough it stops.

You don't ever get a few inches of snow on the top of the roof. The point of the aggressive pitch is so the weight of the snow pulls itself off the roof so your roof/home doesn't have to support 5 tons of water weight.

IDK if you live in a place that sees significant snow, if so, just drive around a neighborhood and notice what the snow looks like on the rooftops. Generally none on the top and some on the bottom. That's by design.

While the bottom of the panels aren't doing anything to melt the snow, the top portions are, and that accelerates as the snow melts.

How north do you mean? Solar panels are at a high angle, slippery and black. Snow generally does not stick for long. They'll self clear.

My brother's panels in Saskatchewan don't self-clear. But that's for an average temperature of -20C.

You don't produce much in the winter anyway, you can brush it off the panels with an extendable broom but it will naturally melt and slide off. Unless you have snow cover all winter you'd likely spend more on the extendable broom than you'd produce from the panels.

My brother-in-law's panels produce just as much electricity at noon in the winter time as they do in the summer time. Winter sun in the Canadian prairies is quite intense, and the panels are more efficient at -20C than they are at +20C.

But they'll produce for less time each day in the winter.

sure but the sun is going down at 3pm, canada gets 1.5 hours of peak sunlight at best in the winter… on a lot of houses the cost of removing the snow is more than what’s gained during the short daily window of direct sunlight… eventually the sun solves the problem for free :)

According to the folks on this YouTube channel that have an installation in a very snowy climate if you have two sided panels they melt any accumulating snow off much quicker.

https://www.youtube.com/c/ambitionstrikes

My issue with New England (I live there) is there that only 50 to 60% of the days are sunny - we get a lot of overcast skies. That, combined with the lack of available roof space on our Four Square style house, has kept me from thinking about installing panels.

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Massachusetts/sunshin...

Take most of the sibling replies here with a grain of salt. In areas where there are large snowfall events (eg Tahoe) the story is very different; panels can and do cause ice dams, dangerous snow slides, and even the panels can get ripped right off the roof.

I've lived in very snowy areas. Snow mostly falls off the roof because of the pitch, or it melts off in the sun. Its pretty much only in the absolute worst storms AND roofs with low pitches you need to get up there and clean them.

Usually if any significant amount of the panel is exposed, they will start to heat up from the sun and defrost the rest. Its a significant reduction in performance, of course, but still worthwhile if utility power is expensive.

The actual performance of the cells increases as they get colder. The attenuation due to ice or snow will, of course, reduce power generated.

I had them when I lived in Pennsylvania. The panels self-clear in a literal avalanche that destroyed all the bushes where it landed. It sounds like a freight train in your attic when it happens.

Had someone been standing underneath when it happens they would have been seriously injured.

Had the same experience in Canada - woke up thinking the house was collapsing. Found a mountain of snow next to the house the next morning.

Edit: There are "reverse" shovels called roof rakes[1] that can help remove snow before it builds up.

[1] https://www.thespruce.com/best-snow-roof-rakes-6830889

My system generated 14.36 MWh in 2022, which comes out to roughly $4,308 USD. The ROI is about 5-6 years for the system itself. But a new roof was also in order.... so more like 10-12 years. Still a great deal if you can afford to invest for the long term. Especially with a 30 year warranty on most of the equipment.

Another way to say that is that you installed solar panels and they paid for your new roof

How does having solar affixed to your roof affect or complicate getting a new roof on your home every 10 years?

Well you need to have the solar removed before you can get your roofing work done. Then re-installed afterwards. Typically roofing and solar work is very different, so two different companies involved - just makes things a little more complicated.

Most solar companies that I've spoken to won't (or will strongly recommend against) installing solar on roofs with less than 10 years of useful life remaining.

That being said, roofs typically have a 30 to 50 year lifespan. Depending on the material, location, etc. Most quality solar panels have a warrantied life of at least 25 years. So if you're like me and had an old roof, that gets replaced first before solar gets installed.

And by the time the solar panels are EOL, the roof will be close to it as well. So they'll both get replaced again. Assuming I'm still in the same house in 30 years time.

> Especially with a 30 year warranty on most of the equipment.

Warranted by who exactly? A 30-year warranty from a company that’s been in existence for 2-3 years doesn’t quite have the same weight.

Warrantied by the installer, whom has been around for more than 30 years. Also warrantied by the OEM. Which is small names like "Panasonic".

My mom tells me she's practically been making money with hers in the last years.

She had them installed when my parents were still running a GP practice together in a small village. That was only a few years before they retired though, so now half of the building is basically storage space that's barely used and unheated (also no sterilizing equipment in autoclaves, fewer fridges needed, etc). She also has a solar water heater, she cooks with gas, and her house is very well insulated. As a result of all this she ended up producing more electricity than she uses.

However, she's also still on an "old" contract with her energy provider that is quite beneficial towards her because they didn't anticipate this scenario - this will likely change soon when she has to renew it.

This is in the Netherlands, can't speak for other countries.

This was built by a solar company, not the author directly, but the actual parts making up this system are pretty damned cheap. ~$4200 in panels + $2000 inverter plus additional hardware (mounting, cables, fasteners). Then labor costs.

Net output was 10,894 kWh, inline with a 20 year estimate of 193,545 kWh. If we just divide $6200/193545kWh (ignoring additional costs!!) that'd be $0.032/kWh.

One other data-point: daily output averaged to 29.8 kWh, from this 7.56kWh array.

> One other data-point: daily output averaged to 29.8 kWh, from this 7.56kWh array.

This is useful information that is surprisingly hard to find: if I install panels with a nameplate rating of x kW, how many kWh will I generate per day? In Bruenig's case the multiplier is just less than 4x.

The linked page provides a widely available map for "Peak Sun Hours" (defined as average hours per day greater than 1000 W/m^2 of sunlight), but it's not immediately clear how this relates to the multiple. In theory, you could figure out the efficiency of the panels and their area, but this still doesn't account for the actual curve of sunlight intensity.

Bruenig is (I think) in Connecticut, which according to the map has 4.2 Peak Sun Hours, which is only a little greater the the measured rated kW to kWh multiplier. Is it safe to assume that the "Peak Sun Hours" is always slightly more than the multiplier? Or is there a more better map somewhere that shows this conversion directly?

What are you using to estimate the raw panel cost?

The author linked the parts. The link to the Longi LR4-60HPH-360M panels shows a $200 price (x 21). I had to google for the inverter, a Solar Edge SE6000H-USS3, to find a price ($2000 x 1).

> I ended up getting a 7.56 kW solar panel system consisting of 21 LONGi panels[1] and 1 Solar Edge inverter[2].

[1] https://www.solaris-shop.com/longi-solar-lr4-60hph-360m-360w...

[2] http://www.solardesigntool.com/components/distributeddcinver...

There might have been solar optimisers in there as well. They're one per panel, and they're expensive, but they tend to be pushed by installers.

* In USA / America

(At the very end of the article, some hint is given as to where the author is located.)

Those numbers - for USA, and for 2022 - seem very high.

Author obtained 7.56 kW of panels with a single phase inverter for a list price of USD$26k - which was reduced via subsidies down to USD$19k actual.

Here in Australia, 24 months ago I had 12kW of panels with a 10kW three-phase inverter installed for an on-paper price of AUD$13k (USD$9k), similarly subsidised with government incentives down to AUD$8k (USD$5k).

I'm about 200km north-west of Sydney ('regional' by any definition), and installation involved 3 guys for one full day (presumably they were a multi-day loop to customers in the area, as we're 3h from their base).

In any case, ignoring post-subsidy delta, why are the list prices so savagely different? I know all these panels and inverters come out of China, but I'd have expected stateside pricing to be much more competitive a year ago than rural Straya pricing two years ago.

In terms of finances / payback - author seems to overlook one (mostly positive) feature, which is the behavioural changes of 'free' power. It's summer here now which means regular 40C+ temperatures, and so the air conditioners (3 x 500W max draw) go on daily, automatically, for 10:00/17:00. This obviously improves QoL but also some non-obvious benefits - extends shelf life of food, takes a significant load off the fridge, etc.

Basically, a raw comparison of before/after often won't be as compelling as it assumes no changes to how you consumer power. I've got $0.33 export / $0.07 per kWh, so the trade-off is slightly simpler to calculate -- along with the installation of an $80 timer switch for the 1800W HWS (only draws power during the middle of the day) I calculate effective payback for me is in the order of 3-4 years.

Anything in the US that will reduce the profit of established players in a given industry is heavily taxed and very expensive. This is the results of decades and billions of dollars in lobbying (i.e. a legal way to give politicians money so they pass laws to help you make more money)

Your panels might be 3x more productive, being in sunny Australia. Where does the author live in the US? I either missed it or he didn't say. Even then, the layout of his roof could have a big effect.

Another point is that certain solar panel imports are tariffed as much as 30% in the US in order to protect the (non-existent?) domestic solar panel manufacturering industry. But it appears Biden temporarily suspended it about 6 months ago. Unclear whether this added to his purchase price.

Author mentions New England, which I gather is a large-ish area, but let's say about 44 degrees north.

I'm 33 degrees south, so obviously 'better' in terms of solar potential. We probably also have fewer cloudy days (though much hotter days during summer, I'm not sure how that compares out over the year).

My panels are not optimally installed, at least not optimally for capture - but definitely optimally for installation cost. I have a gable-roof shed facing roughly NW, with 22 panels on the NW side, and 11 on the SE side. Roof slope is about 9 degrees.

I just start to flat-line my 10kW inverter, fed from 12kW panels, about 3 weeks (on the winter side) of the equinoxes - so there's definitely room to improve the configuration there. FYI in summer I generate average ~70kWh a day, and in winter about 30.

It sounds like author put these panels on in late 2021 --which should post-date the worst of the COVID-induced shipping/trade bumps, and pre-date the Ukraine / Russia induced effects.

EDIT: You mentioned "... tariffed as much as 30% in the US ..." -- I agree that kind of figure could be explained by duties, tariffs, etc, but the difference here is actually 3x (26k vs 9k) for a system that's only about 60% the capacity of mine. A like-for-like system, extrapolating from TFA's numbers, would be US$35k, or nearly 4x difference.

>Realizing that the solar company was in quite the pickle insofar as repossessing the panels would require costly legal actions on top of paying people to take out the system, I just waited on the payment. They would contact me periodically asking me to make payment and offering to help me get approved for a new loan. But I just ignored all of that.

Seems pretty unethical tbh. The solar company delivered, but now this guy is going to refuse to pay? Sure he did later, but not without blackmailing them for $5k discount.

Author definitely took advantage of the situation to force a larger discount on the company, which I also consider a dick move. However, the situation was complicated. The solar company failed to install within the original timeline, so when they did, the original approval on the loan was no longer valid. It seems the interest rate went up during that time as well so the author’s new loan would have been more expensive to him/her.

The solar company messed up by not getting a new confirmation of loan approval prior to installation, and the author then leveraged that into a fat discount.

They took 7 months to install the panels. I'm sure times during all that the OP thought if they forgot about him, called them to ask for a installation date, etc.

As a way to curb any thought about undue wait time, the company made a contract guaranteeing installation between 6 month after signing. They didn't comply and the loan lapsed. Now the company needed to negotiate a new contract with OP or go for the legal route. There is nothing unethical about this.

The company had everything to lose going the the legal option, with all the long terms procedures, paying money for a pay back that may never come. They are probably grateful that OP just asked for a discount instead.

From my read, the solar company delivered late, causing the original loan to fall through and requiring the homeowner to refinance at a higher rate. Since that delay cost money it does seem fair that the company should bear the cost.

IIRC, the author is part of the so-called "dirt-bag left" so that's just connecting theory and praxis.

The solar installer wanted him to eat the rate change due to their own delay.

The discount was to offset that rate change.

Based on his explanation, the company has at least some level of fault:

> my non-payment would not be a default because default is defined by a breach of contract and no such contract existed. Indeed, if anyone breached the contract, it was the solar company by not installing in the six-month period.

I have a large 20kw system for an old leaky farmhouse and it provides me about $6k in energy and credits a year.

I like thinking about it as a near guaranteed, medium return long term investment that's good for the environment. Each year is roughly 13% returns and I should get that for at least 20 years or so.

This may change - California, for example, just passed an adjustment to the payback prices that will drop them by 75%.

Don't kid yourself that residential electricity prices have tremendous price jumps every year. Nationally prices have increased 2 cents per Kwh from about 2009 to 2021. That is a 1.47% CAGR, CPI inflation was 1.55% per year over that same time.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/7?agg=0...

Is this the normal price for a solar install in the US?

In Australia it's ~$7000AU (~$4000 US) for a system like this, unsubsidized - then we have a 400$/kWh subsidy.

Our 10kW solar system was $4000AU installed, and the payback period is 2-3 years...

We aren’t currently grid tied (we may eventually put in a line to reduce sun-drought generator set use, but at about 100 hours a year it’s kinda a tough sell)

Our little solar plant operates a small coffee plantation, 4 houses, 8 cabins, and several outbuildings , parks, and community spaces. When we do tie in we probably won’t sell power or do net metering. Instead we focus on robotic or mechanised industry where we can generate saleable goods using the excess power. (Computing power, 3d printing, dry ice manufacturing, foamed concrete block manufacturing, etc)

We also manage our utility loads like bullk water production and large scale refrigeration so that they occur during excess production periods and are normally suspended while we are operating on stored power. I’m thinking of implementing an anydrous ammonia plant and distribution system so that we can store more energy useful in air conditioning and refrigeration, which are some of our largest loads. It’s getting hard to find ways to store energy that work out cheaper than just buying more batteries though.

I’m really stoked about LiTo batteries coming down in price eventually (or similar tech not yet released) because they last 30 years + / 30,000 cycles…. And they can take a charge at a ridiculous rate, which solves other challenges.

I have a pretty ideally angled roof near Boston and was considering a solar setup. However as far as I can tell we won't get paid for excess generation in any given month, so since we don't really use much electricity it seems this is not a good investment. Are there any common updates possible to take advantage of the excess power? Before ETH switched to POS I thought about mining crypto... otherwise we could switch to electric heat but that is a huge outlay.

> otherwise we could switch to electric heat but that is a huge outlay.

You can walk into any major retailer, buy a space heater, and plug it into any outlet in your home. Keep in mind that your gas furnace is turned on/off using a thermostat and temperature setting, so if you reduce the set-point e.g. 1 degree, and then either locate the coldest parts of your home or areas you want to prioritize (e.g. livingrooms/bedrooms), you can then target space heaters into that location to offset the savings from gas.

In terms of deployment heating or cooling, electric heat is the cheapest and easiest. You're just thinking that it must be whole-home or nothing, which isn't the case, you can reduce your whole-home and spot-heat as needed.

That's a pretty good return. I paid around $20k for my system (parts and installation) and get ~$1700 a year out of it (I live pretty far north). After tax credits and other state incentives I break even in 7 years. Output is warrantied by the manufacturer for 25 years (there's a schedule, but should still be 85% at 25 years IIRC). It's a great time to get solar if you own your home.

"per-kWh price of electricity was around 25 cents"

This sounds like the total price of electricity, including distribution. However my understanding of net-metering means that you have to pay distribution fees to put your power on the grid, so you don't get back the full 25 cents, only around half that (the generation portion).

If the author of this post is on here, could you please clarify?

It depends on your state and the laws surrounding net metering. Some will let you put it back into the grid at the full per-kwh price, even if some of that is for distribution. California used to, but they're rolling this back (I think old installs are grandfathered in).

Hmmm.. I have a 2400 sq ft home in FL. The electricity portion of my utility bill averages roughly $150/month.

They must be in a really large home.

FL electricity is ~$0.14/kwh, compared to about twice that in New England.

There are more factors involved than home size

Does anyone have any detailed, up-to-date resources for personal solar use? I'd love to learn more, in particular the cost/output/lifespan progress by time. Last time I checked in my area it seemed that you didn't quite break even, but that was a while ago and my understanding was/is very limited.

It's fragmented information due to so much lead gen content out there, which is of course all very rose tinted. /r/solar is a decent community.

Damn, solar panels are expensive in the USA...

In Australia a 6.6kw system with 5kw inverter runs about 3500-4500AUD installed and grid connected.

The rebates in WA are fairly low for exported power (about 5c/kwh) but you can fully offset your usage during the sunny parts of the day running aircon/washing machine.

The price has gone up of late, you are probably looking 4000-5500 depending on inverter quality (that's based on 2023 STCs)

But that said, Western Power's inflexible blanket ban on any feed-in above 5kW (single phase) has had a wonderful side benefit of enabling solar companies to be ultra competitive with the 6.6/5 kW system installs because basically everybody wants the same equipment, allowing much greater standardisation.

Electricity is still dirt cheap in WA (30c/kWh) but that will soon change.

Interestingly, solar has penetrated so far in WA that there's almost no value to the grid operator of putting more daytime solar onto the grid.

"In Australia a 6.6kw system with 5kw inverter runs about 3500-4500AUD installed and grid connected."

*after subsidies.

> if you use a 5 percent discount rate, 20 years of $2,677 of annual electricity bill savings yields a net present value of $33,361.

Yes, but with an 8% discount rate, the PV is $26,283. It's true that the cost of electricity will probably rise over time, as he notes. But current interest rates make this a much less attractive proposition from a financial perspective (that is, assuming you don't care about solar generation for environmental reasons). The homeowner takes on significant risk, and the gain is not all that great. Your panels can be destroyed by hurricane, earthquake, or falling trees, rendering them worthless, for example.

I'm not saying this isn't worth doing, just that the financial calculations seem a bit flawed in today's economic environment.

> Your panels can be destroyed by hurricane, earthquake, or falling trees, rendering them worthless, for example.

That’s what homeowners insurance is for.

Any1 built their own battery-arrays? I am interested in solar in part to avoid blackouts. But for that I will need batteries. And my house being 100% electric, tesla's powerwall quickly becomes expensive. On a first glance, using lead-acid batteries appears to be straightforward, but I wonder what edge-cases and gotchas others experienced with it. How much time is needed to maintain it.

So far 10kW gas generator was able to power most of the house's essentials before resistive heater kicks in in HVAC system (two heatpump units, each has a 7.5kw resistive heater as a backup when outside temperature drops too much.) But I would feel better if I did not have to rely on availability of propane/gas and clean roads during periods like 2021 blizzard in Texas.

The DIY part of the solar market and now most none Tesla options have moved towards Lithium Phosphate batteries, particularly in rack mount format. They're denser and way easier to handle then lead acid.

30kwh of batteries is about $10k wholesale, and inverters run about $1500, although most of the time you need 2 if you want to supply 240v.

Sample system: https://signaturesolar.com/off-grid-eg4-system-13kw-120-240v...

Electricity from utility solar (large power plants) is about 2x cheaper than electricity from residential solar if you don't count subsidies.

So residential solar really doesn't make a lot of sense to me on a societal level, assuming blackouts are rare.

The conversation here seems a bit binary. Maybe I missed a few posts. The whole solar thing is not realized until cooperatives de-grid in favor of their own local grids, along with an arbitrage sharing model. That has the potential to to manage all power needs (including electrical cars). It's a scaling issue sort of in between entirely centralized and rugged individualism.

Of course the tech for this is a real threat for utilities, so it wouldn't surprise me if they would go to any length to stop such and effort. Same could be said for any deflationary tech like micro reactors.

In the UK, I've had a battery plus solar for just over a year.

its a 5kwp set of panels and a 13kwhr battery. From mid march to late November, we only drew from the grid once (that was because we had a portable hottub setup, which took ~28kwhr to heat up.)

Its raining and january and december are shit months for solar, well mostly because of the short days. December we were 45% independent from the grid.

Currently we do not have heating or cooling from electricity. If that were the case we'd need 10kwp plus more storage.

I was curious how this person was paying US$0.22/kWh when that is 2x Oregon, and found this interesting table:

https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/

Not sure how accurate it is, but what is up with New Hampshire at $0.32?!

Hawaii seems like it could knock it out of the park with wind and solar, but they're at 45cents. Ouch.

We had solar panels on our last house. Even in the cloudy PNW, we generated enough electricity to cover 100% of our electrical needs. And, the monthly cost of the loan payment was about $30 less than our previous cheapest monthly electrical payment.

Unfortunately our new house doesn't have a roof configuration that allows for solar panels. I wonder if new home architecture and alignment will change to make solar panels work better?

> Even in the cloudy PNW, we generated enough electricity to cover 100% of our electrical needs.

I'm curious, was your heat and stove electric or natural gas (or other)?

I'm always surprised about the price of solar panels in the US, I think we paid about €1.2/W. It's not like labor is cheap in Belgium.

It varies. A lot of solar installers will push the benefits of microinverters or optimisers, because they can make your system cope better with partial shading or panel failure. However, the microinverters or optimisers are expensive, and can easily double the cost of the system. They also have dubious merit, because if you design your system properly in the first place it will cope with partial shading and panel failure quite happily anyway. However, selling the units makes sense for the installer, because it's more money that passes through their hands. Remember, the installers are not necessarily working for your best interests.

You can buy panels off Amazon at about £0.73/W. Add in the various bits that you need to go along with it, and that probably pushes it up to around £1.10/W, if you're doing it yourself.

Australia is even cheaper, I paid around USD 0.6/W for my system (including subsidies, it's closer to USD 1.0/W excluding subsidies). Break-even will be in around 3-4 years.

I noticed (by following the solar sub-reddit) that almost every single US install has either Enphase or Solaredge inverters (which happen to be on the pricier side). I am not sure if that's an indication for the lack of competition but surely this seems like an industry where disruption is possible?

The US also bans a lot of Chinese solar panels, which are the cheapest on the market.

Surely you mean 1.2 Eur/W?

Is that the subsidized (ie, including tax rebates) price, or the raw cost?

I've just installed solar & batteries (not 2 weeks ago we turned them on!). Be interesting to see how things will unfold and I love reading stories on how people have got on with theirs. It was roughly ~£12,900 installed (in the UK) and we pay 32.596p/kWh & 42.290p/day standing charge...

Will either pay off well or be an expensive lesson

Can you share the cost brakedown ?

How much did you pay for the installed kwh?

This is interesting to me, I like reading people's experiences with solar panels since I'm waiting for the price to make sense for my own home. But as someone spending about $1,000/year, it's just not there yet. My options seem to be: diy, 20-30 year roi, find more ways to use electricity, or wait.

> find more ways to use electricity

I’m not sure if you were serious with this comment, but for the sake of other readers I wanted to point out this is a legitimate strategy. Many people tend to pair solar with installing mini splits, EV chargers, or some other home upgrade that will offer value at the expense or a higher electric bill. This can make the solar investment make sense where it previously didn’t.

Residential solar changes the calculus for some appliances. You can go with all electric appliances and have their use covered by your solar. Same with EVs, your solar can offset your charging costs.

Wow that is impressive! My electric bill in total is well under $1000/year... We average about $60-$70/mo

I looked into solar in 2022. The bid I got for a 9.5 kW system and one Tesla Powerwall ended up being right around $50,000.

No thanks.

That's an insane number. 25 solar panels + 9 kW inverter + bindings and wires would result in around 8000$.

Why a Powerwall?

There is an associated video where he goes through the article and answers many of the questions I see in the comments here: https://youtu.be/YWwJ-DsVT4A

Great summary of this man’s positive experiences with installing solar. Can anyone answer how having solar affixed to your roof affects or complicates getting a new roof on your home every 10 years?

if you don't have net metering you should consume as much as you can yourself, cook when the sun is out, run your washer / dryer / vacuum / dishwasher and whatever else you have when you have excess power and minimize during the times the sun is below the horizon. 60% self consumption is doable without too much effort, 70 is work and if you get to 80%+ please let me know how you are doing that.

Also: the big trick to running of renewables is conservation comes first, solar second and finally the grid as a fallback for the remainder.

Slightly off topic, but is there a service that would quote out a new roof + solar install? We're waiting on doing solar until we need a new roof as ours is ~9-10 years old, and not near EOL.

You could consider getting a solar roof! I have no particular expertise here, but a guy down the street from me got one, and he loves it so far (~1.5 years into it).

Here's an article about it with a few vendors, including Tesla, that might help: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/solar-shingles...

If you're interested in learning a lot about doing home/campervan installations, I highly suggest watching/reading everything that Will Prowse has published.

Weird question and probably rare but what happens if solar array is hit by lighting?

Are they insured?

Do they get damaged? Does the inverter/batteries get damaged or is there likely a circuit breaker?

My installation has separate circuit breakers for the various components (grid, home, backup that is on even if grid is off, panels), plus some extra protection against overcurrent in the inverter and batteries.

> Are they insured?

You are better off if you add them to your already existing coverage for your roof. So probably yes.

> Do they get damaged?

You typically don't expect trees to fall onto your solar panels. So where should any damage come from?

Does solar make sense for anyone in Seattle area?

Location is revealed only at the very end of the text:

> My residential-scale solar installation in New England

It's surprising that it's possible to produce electricity at home for a lower cost than the wholesale price.

I can't think of any other commodity for which this is possible. You couldn't make your own steel, bread or printer paper at home and beat manufacturing at scale.

Why is electricity different?

Because the cost of grid electricity includes the comfort of having it 24/7. Solar is damn cheap, but you can rely on it perhaps 10% of the time (0 hours in very cloudy days up to 4-5 hours a day in the summer). There is some way to do some arbitrage even without net metering (charge your car during the day, install batteries) but solar alone is by far not enough to leave the grid.

Largely it is because you don't have to pay for delivery. It is very similar to having a well. If the water is available at your house already it is most likely cheaper to just pump it versus paying someone to supply water to your house.

The short answer is delivery costs. And that's what makes this current era of solar power so exciting, in my opinion! The market is practically begging us for microgrids.

Subsidies, primarily net metering.

With panels on your house the grid is still providing you a key service, providing you with any power you need in excess of what you produce, and sinking any extra for you. But with net metering you only pay in proportion to your net usage, effectively compensating you at retail rates for the power you supply to the grid.

The equipment needed is hardly cheap though.

And bread is a bad example, you can easily make that cheaper than retail price at home.

It isn’t - other customers are paying for their ability to have electricity when (and how much) they want it, via the net metering subsidy. If you divide their cost by the lifetime expected generation, you get 9-13 cents per kWh depending on panel subsidy. This sounds great in California but isn’t far off from retail prices in some states. And the actual grid “wholesale” price is usually far less than that except at peak times or exceptional situations. You pay at retail to still have power in those situations. With net metering everyone else pays you that price for something you are not providing.

Grid scale solar is half the price of home electricity.

Also about half your bill is distribution fees.

And, BTW, making bread at home is cheaper than buying it. Get a bread machine, put in ingredients, wait a bit, and you have bread.

Subsidies?

Sounds like OP should have gotten a larger system.

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