Sam, I agree with everything you said except this piece. There is no significant Care and Maintenance for PV panels. Once a year tops.
I cannot emphasize enough, Solar Panels are not a good Fiscal investment, they are strictly a social investment at this point.
You will not lose money on them, but do not invest in panels if you are doing so only to save money.
Jim
Right. Silicon is, very literally, dirt cheap. It’s just purifying it (and impurifying it) to the standards needed by electronics that’s expensive.
I cannot emphasize enough, the OP is NOT paying for (most of) them - we ( the tax payers) are - they are subsidized. And it’s Ok, as society needs power, and more power on sunny days in the summer.
This is normal and as you said it protects workers from comming into contact with a line that should be deenergized (main reason). It also prevents the issue of power restoration out of phase with the inverter.
Besides solar electricity, there’s solar hot water heating, which I have heard does pay for itself in many sunny areas.
The best application of solar I think I’ve seen is Burt Rutan’s house (those those that don’t know, Rutan is a famous aircraft/spaceship designer who designed SpaceShip One.
Anyway, Rutan lives in the desert, where it gets really hot during the day, and really cold at night. He’s built a house with a passive solar design. As I recall, he has a huge rock formation that has tremendous thermal mass, and was engineered to take about 12 hours for the temperature to rise or fall to ambient. So what happens is that during the day the rock inside the house is cold from cold desert night, so it cools the house (I think he runs a waterfall or something over it to help cool things, or maybe runs pipes through it to radiators in the house). THe sun begins to heat the mass, but the temperature increase doesn’t get through the rock to the inside surface until the sun goes down. So now the rock in the house is warm, and keeps the house warm. Eventually, the cold desert night chills it, and by the time the chill is felt in the house the sun is up and it becomes passive cooling again. basically, it’s just smoothing out the temperature extremes from day and night, keeping it at one moderate level inside the house.
But tends to be probamatic. Having plumbing exposed to the elements on top of a roof is a harsh enviroment and leaks are commom.
Even with the State support, which I mentioned was 70% for my install. The Panels will not be a good investment. The payoff if rates go up an average of 3% per year is around 12 years.
Now if my selling my energy credit continues at $650 per year and electric goes up at a higher rate, the system will pay for itself in as little as 7-8 years. Not too bad, but as **Sam Stone ** pointed out it is easy to make a better Financial investment.
My wife just pointed out, that a good way of looking at the investment, is you put the money up front and basically forget about it and **just enjoy ** the low electrical bills you get from that point forward.
Has anyone else installed a large Solar System? If you are interested I would recommend checking out http://www.nesea.org/. It is an excellent resource and Site. If you live in New Jersey, you have to check out http://www.njcep.com/, New Jersey’s Clean Energy Program™. I got my 70% rebate* through them.
Anyone who is interested in seeing the complete installation, should Email me and we can arrange a visit.
I live in Central Jersey. You could even combine it with the Jersey Dopefest I will host on September 16th.
Jim
You can find some good information from the North Carolina Solar Center. Some of the information is NC-centric, but they do a good job of linking you to information elsewhere.
The application you’re referring to is a photovoltaic application (as opposed to passive or active solar heating.) I’m sure you’re aware of that, but I’m seeing confusion of the technologies elsewhere in the thread.
As you know, in a photovoltaic application, you have the choice or running on batteris (a DC application) or AC (a grid connected application). As you’ve noted, the DC application is best suited for areas where you’re located off the grid, and this is the only way/most economical way to get electricity to a remote site.
A big part of the question is how experienced and willing your power company is to work on this with you, and how electricity you provide back to the utility will be paid to you.
Safety is the primary issue when dealing with the utility, so they will specify what kind of switching equipment you will need to have in order to supply power back to the grid. As others have mentioned, it would be very hazardous for them to work on lines that were “dead” on their end, only to have power coming back onto the grid via your site.
Power companies have long been required to buy power from small generators (such as you would be here) by the Public Utilities Regulating Policy Act (PURPA). However, it didn’t require them to buy your electricity at a very attractive rate. They would normally use the “avoided cost”, or the cost per kW generated at their plants. That’s why individuals haven’t gotten into the solar power generation business for profit. However, some states have passed green power legislation that require “net metering.” In the case of net metering, the price they pay you is the same price that you pay them.
The DSIRE maintains a database of government incentives on a state-by-state basis.
This has been hashed out before on the board. sailor and Una Persson had lots to say and you can search for the posts if they’re still there. But they agreed that it just isn’t economical yet.
I didn’t see it in a Search, and I am not sure how old their posts are. Did they address Inverters opposed to batteries?
Anyway, those cites are great, thank you for the answers. 
Keep em comin’.
Cartooniverse, has the guy told you what size array you would be getting for that price?
After hearing that you have electric heat, I would expect you would need a whopping big array. I’m skeptical that you would get what you need for $9,000, even after taxes. Has the guy done a load estimate on your house to see what size array you’d need, or does he just have a set package that he quotes? I doubt that the typical package in the northeast is sized to meet the heating needs of an electrically heated house. (And is that electric resistance, or a heat pump?)
On the plus side, since you’d be hooked onto the grid, you don’t necessarily need an array sized to meet your peak demand. It’s perfectly OK to size your system to meet typical demands, and know that you have electric service from your service provider when your system isn’t capable of meeting your demand (and, if you don’t have batteries, that’s what you’ll be doing anyhow.) In any case, don’t go planning to drop your entire $4,000 electrical bill.
Also, how unobstructed is your view where you would plan to mount your solar panels? I’m a little wary when I hear that you have trees that will be obstructing the view in summer. If you have enough trees to obstruct in summer, it’s very probable that just the bare tree will be doing significant shading in winter as well.
Good questions. He is going to come down and do a full site survey. ( for about a hunnerd dollars ).
This includes a load estimate, examining electric bills for as many years as I can provide ( I have the last 12 years worth 
), and taking a cleverly designed overlapping time lapse photo of the area where I would possibly put the array. In this way, and with examining surrounding trees ( over 90 % deciduous, which is fortunate ), determine the hours of exposure per season.
There was a lot of other stuff he mentioned doing, but I got fixated on this really boss calendar on his wall and kind of zoned him out in a bad A.D.D. moment…
No seriously. He will come down, about an hour’s drive, and spend time laying out the elements, costs, and so on. I am not sold on the idea and not a millionaire. I want to do it for a long-term cost savings as well as the tiny but real environmental impact. There is no disputing that conservation starts at one’s own front door.
It should pay for itself in 7-12 years. So if you can do it without taking out a loan, it would be a great thing to do. Your last sentence is just great so I bolded it.
If you need to take a loan to do the install, I would recommend against doing it.
In my case, I drive a Ford Focus Wagon I bought in cash and my Solar System cost almost as much and I paid for that in cash. So my wife and I felt it was well worth doing. Instead of driving a $30,000 car, I drive a cheap car* and have low electric bills.
Jim {Check your Email}