That’s the 7-8 year estimate, and that is based on electricity rates staying constant. Rates will be going up, so the realistic expectation is that it will pay for itself sooner. It’s only been operational for since mid-February.
The wild card for me is how the utility handles excess generation. Right now, any excess I generate is “banked” and then I can use it to offset any electricity I use at night or on cloudy days. A virtual battery, if you will. If this gets changed to less than a 1:1 return (up to just losing any excess electricity), then that will increase how long it takes to pay for itself.
Changing regulation is a real wildcard. It’s significantly less lucrative now because of Federal subsidies going away and changing rules from the utilities. Older systems are grandfathered in but they could get screwed some day. You can (should) add batteries to help but they are expensive.
I replaced my gas furnace with a heat pump and bought an EV. When my clothes dryer and water heater die I’m going to replace those gas appliances with electric and then get an electric range and get off of gas entirely. Those last things don’t use that much electric though.
I’d love to go solar but there is no way it will pay for itself in my situation. I’ve run the numbers and my financial planner agrees. Especially because my EV qualifies me for a time of use plan so electrical is cheap during non peak hours. Electric is significantly cleaner now than in the past in my area so there’s not much of an environmental argument anymore either.
Be careful of the ROI estimates from the installation companies. They make assumptions like how much utility rates will go up in the future. Also I had three different companies submit plans that had a very different number of panels required.
Repair costs of solar panels is negligible from everything I’ve heard and from the experience of lots of friends who have them. Things like hail damage are covered by insurance if that’s even an issue where one lives.
They have long warranties. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but something like 20 years on the panels and installation, and 15 on the inverter. The most likely problem with all of that is any of the installer, panel manufacturer, and inverter manufacturer going out of business.
Any physical damage to the panels would have damaged the roof anyway (big hail, tree fall, etc.) so will be covered by insurance.
The panels themselves are reasonably cheap, so even being out of pocket to replace one would probably cost in the hundreds, not thousands. The inverter would be a few thousand.
Depending on where you live there are oddities. My workplace lost a couple of panels to falling spent bullets fired into the air on New Year’s Eve/July 4th (I had one co-worker that missed getting beaned in the head by about 5’ - put a nice divot in the concrete when it hit). I think under contract the panel company that maintained the system ate those, but I don’t know how private insurance treats such unusual Acts of “God” (and/or cretins).
Solar panels on apartment buildings are definitely a thing — in fact, a few years ago, California started requiring them on all new apartments: 2022 High-rise Multifamily Solar PV
But this isn’t really an electricity question… the difficult thing isn’t “will they work” (almost certainly they will, and they’re only getting better every year… the average single solar module puts out like 400W-500W now, not 100W). The difficult questions are about the locality-specific regulations and the complicated multi-family financials: whether you can get actually get this done without a nightmarish mountain of paperwork, and whether it would actually result in significant enough savings in a short enough timeframe. Something that pays itself back in 7-10 years might be fine for a single-family single-owner home, but it’s probably a hard sell if you have to try to convince each individual apartment unit to join in on, especially if they have to first pay upfront.
I think there are too many variables here to give you any sort of definitive or even reasonably confident analysis… you ideally need someone local who can come on-site and help you evaluate:
Solar access (space, angles, shading, above-the-horizon obstructions, etc.)
Your particular state, county, and local/municipal regulations about solar on multi-family dwellings
How your utility would handle these situations, and whether it would break any existing grandfathering your apt building might currently have (which would usually disadvantage you and put you on a worse rate plan, and possibly force you into time-of-use metering)
How your HOA, the apartment owner(s), and any renter(s) would divide up both the costs and the paybacks… both initially (capital expenditures) and an on ongoing basis (the decreased electricity costs, but also significant maintenance & replacement costs after 15-25 years)
Whether the climate in your area would require regular cleaning of the array (due to dust, snow, etc.)
Can it be done? Yes. But your situation is a lot more complicated than the standard single-home residential install. I think this calls for a few quotes (get 3-4 if you can) from local installers who’ve done multi-family dwellings before. Maybe look on Google Earth near you and find some apartment buildings that already have solar panels, and see if you can contact their management for an installer referral, maybe?
You can also search local news stories… often times developers will want to show off the solar systems they add to new buildings, and the solar company might be mentioned there. This is especially true if your state has any sort of solar incentive program and the city wants to highlight newer, energy-efficient constructions.
In Australia you don’t have to have your own solar panels, if say your building roof is too small to provide enough power to all the units. Alternatives are a community power setup, where other buildings in the area share their excess solar power with their neighbours
(virtual power plants VPPs)
Or just buying solar power from remote installations. You may find solutions like more practical that doing it all yourselves!
PS Generally this is good advice, and I’d say the same thing.
However, for this particular situation — a semi-commercial multi-family situation — AI says (and this is plausible enough I’d at least look into it, or ask a solar company) there MAY be state and federal incentives available to leases that may not be available to owners… which would let the third-party lesser own the system and maybe pass on the savings to you in a guaranteed-for-x-years lower rate scheme… maybe?
All of that sort of stuff is where the financial and regulatory complexities come in. You need someone familiar with all of that for your state in particular to properly evaluate it all.
My gut feeling is that if you’re mostly trying to lower costs (of what, exactly, like HOA fees? maintenance fees? rent?) there are probably better investments, either financial instruments or if it must be some sort of home equipment upgrade, often times conservation/energy audits and things like heat pumps could have a better ROI… solar is typically slow-and-steady ROI after nearly a decade, not any sort of immediate cost savings (unless you do find an advantageous lease structure that can take advantage of all those regulatory incentives).
There are orgs like GET Solar – Main | The Pennsylvania Solar Center that can help you evaluate the feasibility of a commercial or nonprofit system (and connect you to installers), but I am not sure how or if that would apply to your particular apt’s organization and ownership model.
When I think of getting solar panels I am thinking more about usefulness during grid outages than anything else. ROI is nice, but I want to keep my fridge running and maybe even wash some clothes.
In the context of a small condo building I would be thinking about the emergency lighting system and smoke alarms. In a high rise I’d be considering emergency elevator service during outages, especially to high floors or disabled/elderly residents.
It’s impossible to factor in the money saved when a freezer full of meat doesn’t spoil. But that really matters when it happens. And I strongly suspect we are headed to a time of super high electrical prices and grid brownouts in the next decade.
I’ll add, just adding a double skin roof can make a significant difference to your air-conditioning bills. If it generates power as well, that’s a bonus.
If that’s the main reason, then a solar+battery setup is what’s needed. There’s that thing about the sun not always shining that the FF FUD people keep bringing up. Adding a battery would increase the upfront costs significantly.
For elevators yes, but that’s a big building and should have some level of back-up generation anyway. For the smaller building, if you can run your freezer ten hours per day and keep it closed the other 14 you are probably going to be fine. And I think most people have a UPS for their computers these days, don’t they?
Most solar power systems won’t keep running during an outage. You need a special setup for that. Otherwise they’d turn themselves off so as to not keep putting power into a grid that’s supposed to be down, risking the safety of utility workers.
And I think most people’s computers have a “battery backup” only because they’re probably laptops now, but that won’t be of much help if the wifi router doesn’t have power.
When that happens, I hot spot the laptop to my phone and use cellular. I have a couple of batteries that will power my phone for around a day. Of course that won’t work if power and cellular are both down but fortunately I’ve never experienced that.
It’s much more likely with a battery, yes, but still not necessarily a guarantee. Batteries can also be used for time-of-use arbitrage, for example (hoard energy while the sun is out and demand is low due to overproduction, then sell it back to the grid when prices are higher). Or to just store energy for your own use at night.
Even when the battery IS configured for backup during an outage, it may only be connected to a few critical loads instead of whole house, and may only provide limited runtime (few minutes or hours, depending).
Systems both with or without batteries can be configured to provide backup power during a grid outage. But the main point I was trying to make is that you don’t automatically get backup power during an outage just because you have solar panels on your house — it depends on your equipment and configuration, and cheaper grid-tied systems with no battery will not usually have this configuration. It’s a common misassumption, but it’s designed on purpose not to be that way for utility worker safety: IEEE 1547 & Anti-Islanding: PV Shutdowns Explained - Anern
If ROI is the main objective (as opposed to resilience or autonomy or clean energy or whatever), then adding either batteries or an automatic transfer/shutoff system will add expense and worsen payback.
(I had one co-worker that missed getting beaned in the head by about 5’ - put a nice divot in the concrete when it hit). I think under contract the panel company that maintained the system ate those, but I don’t know how private insurance treats such unusual Acts of “God” (and/or cretins).