The rooftop solar industry could be on the verge of collapse

Those under NEM 1 and 2 get a lot of the electrical export back to offset import consumption, but those under NEM 3 are heavily penalized where export gives only around the wholesale rate that the only way a PV system makes sense is to pair it with battery storage so that export can be used during the night instead to offset generation during that time.

It just feels so backwards that NEM 3 discourages people to want to install a system.

I went with a local company. The owner was an electrician and knew what he was talking about. He didn't try to upsell me. He didn't claim to be the cheapest but the price was competitive and the workers were in-house, not subcontracted. It seemed like just what I wanted.

The installation day came and they arrived early in the morning, and spent hours installing brackets. The solar panels were supposed to arrive by 9am. By noon they were still waiting. Finally they gave up and went home, no answer on the panels. The next day they came back to keep working, still with no panels. I sent them home and called the owner, demanding an answer. Eventually I learned that the panels were damaged in transit and it'd be weeks before they could procure new ones. They couldn't guarantee a date.

They had already charged my credit card for the full amount of the install. I told them this was unacceptable, the law says they can only charge a deposit, with the balance due when the work was actually complete.

They stopped returning my calls, so I initiated a chargeback with my credit card company. That got their attention. They begged me to cancel the chargeback, which I only reluctantly agreed to after they hand-delivered a refund check to me in person.

It took me dozens of calls before I found another company willing to work with the half-completed install. Most companies didn't want to touch it.

In the end, I got the system I wanted and it worked great.

One thing I learned through this process is that there are a lot of companies who want to install solar, but none who want to service your existing solar installation, which is seen as a money-losing business. Lots of homeowners buy a system that supposedly includes an excellent warranty, but then their solar company goes out of business, and suddenly they have nobody to call when something goes wrong.

I don't really know the solution to that problem. It makes me think that if I had to do it again, maybe I should go with a larger national company.

I'm in San Diego, we were paying about 500/month for SDGE (fluctuating anywhere from 300-800 throughout the year, 800 because of gas prices last January).

We're paying Sunrun a fixed $300/month, with a 4% increase annually for inflation (presumably electricity prices will also go up during the same time).

Sunrun 100% paid for a main panel relocation required by our county to be to code, so we literally haven't paid for anything other than the 300/month bill.

So far I've only had a good experience.

I suspect rooftop solar only appears to work because the sales pitch sounds good, there are government subsidies, net metering is broken, and people don't consider depreciation and maintenance.

I live in the Netherlands. Sure, we have a reliable power grid that doesn’t go offline for hours or any frequently to make a case for grid backup, but the power companies here charge heck of a lot of money for power. Think about it. The utility company commissions a solar farm (lower cost than roof top solar), but surely hire a 3rd company to operate the farm ($), and then the utility company wants to make $ for their shareholders, therefore, we end up paying a lot of € to cover these.

Now, I have as manay panels as I could on my roof (10) that generates more than my average use in the Summer. I run a heat pump that can heat & cool and Ioperate it when the sun is shining. I do laundry when the sun is shining. Because of net metering, my grid usage practically cancels out against my solar energy production. When the net metering subsidy goes away, I’ll install a reasonably sized LFP battery at home to smooth out day/night patterns, and possibly covering the occasional cloudy days right after a sunny day. No power costs from April to September already pays the cost of my panels in just 5 years. It is free money(as in I save it from going from my pocket to the utility company and their shareholders).

So, it does make sense. Atleast in many parts of the world. If you live in a part of the world with super reliable grid _and_ low prices, or you’re so rich as to not care, then probably, it may not make sense to you :-)

I was just talking about it with some friends from South Africa. They said almost every household there sort of needs to be energy independent because the power company is in the ruin. So, solar + batteries it is. What would you do otherwise?

Basically, "how much would you pay to limit how much $powerco can screw you in future?". Human nature means a lot of people will willingly pay double for that.

I think it's in the big picture it actually does make sense. True it's not the cheapest, but it is the fastest way to actually get solar panels into sunshine and start solving our problems.

The additional cost is paid mostly by "volunteers" instead of having to raise taxes or wait for some corporation to make a move, there is no NIMBY-problem since it's actually the BY-owner who makes the decision. You can mobilize thousands of companies (solar panel installers) at once all around the country. Rooftop solar grows by about the same as a nuclear power plant per year in some countries.

Finally the resulting power generation is geographically distributed so that no single rain cloud can cover the entire "power plant".

I think larger projects run by governments and large corporations should be focused on generating gas or building battery storage, so that some of that cheap rooftop solar and other renewables can be stored for nighttime and winter, instead of being sold for negative prices at certain times.

1. they become single points of failure, and their risk tolerance for outages may not match yours, so you may end up either paying excessive costs for reliability you don't need, or experiencing an outage risk you can't tolerate. or they may have outage risks which you can't solve by dumping money on them, such as corruption

2. they sometimes try to extract monopoly rents

there are also coordination problems around things like time-of-usage billing. solar power is free during the day, but your utility provider may not be willing to deliver it to you for the extremely low marginal price of transmission and distribution; they may be legally obligated to charge you the same price as at midnight, for example

In other words, part of the payback/value is letting people say/think "I'm a good person."

We can argue about whether the additional solar demand due to virtue-signaling had good effects but it did produce additional demand.

Apart from raising the panels to the roof and fixing them in place (brother helped), we did it just me and dad. Panels are just too heavy/bulky for 2 people.

The terracota roof have 0 new openings, as the hooks are in the space where two tiles overlay, so there is 0 fear of long term damage trough water ingress. The hooks and aluminum wireframe fixture were the most expensive part of roof instalation.

So, cheap, fast (3 weekends total?), and fun. I am surprised some people have totally different experience

Can you provide any more details regarding your scenario? Is it a specific style of roof? Or material?

And what are the significant costs regarding roof vs non-roof installation?

In our situation the only suitable place to put panels was on the roof, so it wasn’t an option. But I’m keen to understand the factors.