Some friends of ours are getting solar panels, and I was considering getting a quote. I know that the federal tax credit expires December 2016, and there is also a state credit.
I think we’re pretty good candidates - we have a large south facing sunny roof. I sure would like cheaper electric bills, but I am suspicious about some aspects of solar panels.
Like, evidently our friends were told that even paying off the panels it’ll be cheaper than their current electrical bill. Really?
And what happens if their estimates are low?
What about repairs? What if we get a hurricane, are they insured? What if they just plain fail? Will they make my homeowner’s insurance go up?
How long are the panels expected to last, and will they really last that long?
If technology improves, can they be upgraded? Easily replaced?
Generally speaking, with the tax rebates in place, is it worth it? (This is South Carolina, FYI.)
I looked into it a tiny bit when we were building, and wasn’t sold. The ROI was too far out, and I felt the tech was progressing fast enough that anything we got now was likely to be obsolete in a few years. Not very helpful, I know.
Planet money did a podcast pretty recently on the current state of solar. it’s worth a listen, I think.
The way it was explained to me, you have two options. One is paying for it all out of pocket and owning it. The other is having a company install and own it, usually on your roof. The former is very expensive and you might not see a profit on your investment in your lifetime.
The latter seems very reasonable & profitable… until you understand the major flaw in it.
Question: How often do you have to replace or re-shingle your roof? Under the company-owned plan, every time you have to re-shingle your roof, you must repair / replace 100% of the damaged panels at your own cost while they retain full ownership.
If you don’t, then they will come after you for damages to their property.
Look, some of my info may be dated… some people [del]are smart enough to[/del] erect poles on their property and put up their solar panels like billboards. Its not all that pretty, but its doable. If you have the property… if you have line of sight to the sun without other houses
and trees blocking the sun… and if you put up enough solar collectors to meet your needs then you are set.
I’m only posting this so “oh shit, the roof is leaking…” doesn’t also become “oh shit, I’m already broke from the roof, how am I going to afford repairing and replacing all these new solar panels!?”
I would worry about the subsidies disappearing. Solar only makes sense when some other customer pays for it. Right now, utilities have to buy the excess electricity that your panels produce, and at a favorable rate (to you). If this changes, and you are trying to sell electricity at 4 times the market rate, your investment will not pay off.
also, if your panels deveop bad cells 9shorts or opens), will the installer fix it?
I am planning on doing this (I’ve signed a contract, but not installed yet.)
Their estimates seem pretty fact-based, and friends who used the same company say they are accurate. The major variable is that they assume electric company rates will continue to rise as they have in past years. Frankly, I find that pretty believable.
Once installed, they are considered a part of the house (just like siding or roof shingles), so your homeowners insurance should cover them. None of my friends have reported insurance costs going up. Since they cover up the shingles, possibly the reduced risk to them balances it out.
My panels come with a 20-year guarantee, and the company says that they will do any needed repairs under warranty.
Each panel contains an electronic converter box, which converts low-voltage DC into 120V AC power. It’s possible that those could be upgraded or replaced with newer electronics. The panels themselves aren’t upgradable, only replaceable. Much of the installation work involves wiring from the roof down to the electric meter location, adding a new meter, etc. All that part would likely still be used if you replaced the panels themselves with newer ones. And there would probably be a market for selling used solar panels, so you would get at least something for them. But it would have to be a greatly improved/much cheaper technology to make it worthwhile to replace them before the calculated payoff period.
SC recently reached a grand bargain last year with the utilities, commission, and solar providers that was a pretty good compromise for all parties. If you have decent solar characteristics for your house I would call a provider for a quote. They should be able to answer all of your questions.
The only crapshoot is if the rate schedules you’re provided will be grandfathered-in in the event of future rate design changes. Solar providers are lobbying pretty hard for this and I think it’s generally worked out well since solar adoption has been small, but if solar takes off it’s going to be hard to argue solar homes shouldn’t pay it’s share of T&D and backup power, so this is a non-trivial issue.
If you’re being served SCANA the demand rates are going to skyrocket once VC Summer Nuclear Plant ($10B+ cost) comes online in about 5 years. You can bet they’re not going to let people get out paying that cost by going solar after-the-fact with a kwh-only net metered rate. Still being an early adopter you’ll probably get grandfathered in somehow.
People always want to say the utilities are the bad guys in these discussions, but they fail to acknowledge that solar providers are absolutely brutal capitalists who have little incentive to be completely honest when they make 15-20 year projections assuming net metering and kwh pricing that can frankly be changed at the drop of a hat.
That’s always been the weak link in the solar equation for me. If everyone puts in solar, then the utility just changes rate design to include a higher fixed monthly fee and a lower kwh fee. You can’t require the utility to provide T&D and power at night or in cloudy weather and not pay for the cost of that service at the end of the day. Plus arguing other people should pay for it doesn’t fly when solar is basically a middle-to-upper class luxury that isn’t widely available to low income folks with rentals or smaller homes.
But yes, I would call and get a quote and ask all of your questions.
I would consider doing your own install. If you buy the parts from a website like sunelec.com, you can get the high end panels for 58 cents a watt. (Sun brand, 20.5% efficient, which is exceptional)
There are these new micro inverters that you install 1 for every 2 panels, and they output up to 500 watts. (so you would use 1 for every 2 250 watt panels, the APS YC500). They are the same 50 cent a watt cost that the big inverters cost.
So, in principle, you just order a couple, go up on the roof, install the mounts, using plenty of sealant, and bolt down a panel or 2. Then hook up the microinverters (make sure they are off, these things energize the wires with 240 volts AC). Then you just have to get the wire from the roof to next to the breaker box, then pay an electrician to do the connection to the actual box. You also have to pay the power company in many cases a fee for checking to make sure their system can handle the power you send upstream, and to install a meter that is bidirectional.
I think this might be a wise way to do it. You could do this “pilot install” for less than $1000. It isn’t a positive investment, but you’d get an idea of how feasible a larger scale system would be, and if you had an electrician install connections to a combiner box that can handle a large system, you’d be able to expand the system to full scale yourself. Also it’s not a whole lot of labor - just 2 small panels, a few anchors, and a single microinverter.
We looked into it a few years ago. Our big problem is that we aren’t going to be in our house long enough for it to pay off for us, and it was not at all clear if solar added to the value of the house. And it seemed that if you leased it you were stuck with the lease, which the purchaser might not want. (That was before the market here was so hot it wouldn’t be an issue.)
Another new problem is that the utility companies are striking back, and proposing fees for connecting to the grid that pretty much wipes out the cost advantage. It is not clear they will get it (PG&E is in ill repute in California) but it is another risk factor.
If you don’t tell them, how would the supplier know you had a solar array and a battery/inverter?
If they try to change their price structure to make the ‘delivery fee’ applicable to all customers, the PUC (regulatory) will have their asses.
If you don’t tell then you want to sell them electricity, how would they determine you had an array and add the connect charge?
Sooner or later, they are going to need serious approval to build new power plants - having the entire state against you (CA - land of the Proposition!) would be long-term suicide.
And they are replacing meter-readers with ‘smart’* meters, so they lose their built-in spy network.
how many more devices need to be hacked before the term ‘smart’ no longer applies to ‘secuity risk’?
The PUC is charged with maintaining a healthy electric utility and ensuring everyone pays their fair share of the cost of electric service (including delivery costs). Starving an electric utility of revenue to needed pay back debt and equity holders would be a breach of their responsibility, as would allowing higher income folks to bypass the cost of T&D while still enjoying the benefits of on-demand power when the sun isn’t shining.
Neighbor 1: I have solar, my power bill is zero!
Neighbor 2: Then how come your lights are on at night?
Neighbor 1: Because you’re paying for my backup gen and T&D service!!
Neighbor 2: And this is fair how?
The PUC has a duty to see that Neighbor 2 is treated fairly. (Not saying there aren’t compromise positions, but Neighbor 1 shouldn’t get a complete free ride)
Because the battery/inverter setups are not affordable. They cost a fortune compared to straight panels. Also, panels and the accompany inverters routinely have 10-25 year warranties, which means the manufacturer expects for them to last at least that long. Batteries…well, they measure battery performance in cycles.
Typical batteries may be able to do 1000 cycles to 80% DoD, and 2000 cycles to 50%. This is about what the lithiums in your laptop can do. If the battery cycles daily, that’s 3-6 years of life. Lead acids are cheaper but die even sooner.
You don’t save a penny this way.
Now, if you connected an array and an inverter to your house, without telling the power company, and your inverter quietly synchronized itself with the power company grid and the power is flowing to the circuits inside your house, then it might work.
Standard meters don’t run backwards so you aren’t selling any power to the power company, you just aren’t paying for as much power.
This is illegal though because even though every UL listed inverter cuts off instantly the moment it stops detecting the sine wave from the power company, the power company still wants to know about it, and they still want to be able to go to your house and turn off a breaker labeled “co-gen” to guarantee your equipment won’t energize the lines they are working on.
You have to tell the power company so that they will have your house on a list of co-gen homes. Of course, in 10 years or so, those things will be so common that it’ll just be assumed probably, and there are these shorting electrodes that the linemen can use to protect themselves from equipment like this, and they will just always use them.
In my opinion the Solar Energy will become The Power Source in 2040s or 2050s. Then there will be a new Industrial revolution due to availability of greater amount of energy.
In my opinion, human labor limits production more than energy. (and my opinion is backed by facts…).
So I think the revolution of 2040 or 2030 or whatever will actually be from semi-autonomous robotic factories, where the robots can make a large variety of goods with little programming required. A 3d printer right now can make any solid object a 3d printer can print without needing programming, it figures out the head movements from the design. But you can’t build a device that uses two 3d printed parts and they have to be assembled, you have to pay a human to do the assembly or program a robot to do that one task. Similarly, you can’t automate the computer controlled lathes as easily.
By the “revolution date”, that problem will be solved, and factories will be able to make goods with almost no human intervention without having to program the robots to make that specific product. And, some of the goods the factories can make will be the precision parts you made robots from…
I just signed a contract to put solar on my roof in sunny California.
Thanks to my plug-in hybrid car, it will pay off my investment in about 7 years, even if the power company doesn’t raise rates.
If the utility drops to 80% reimbursement on my generation, but doesn’t raise rates, it will take ten.
If you have to finance it, the payoff will be longer.
It’s not an “investment”, as I can get better guaranteed returns from a bank, but it feels good.
