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I Bought a House with Solar Panels

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Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#231

Post by FiddlyPack »

dmix wrote: post #195
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Did you know you're a horrible looking person. You're ugly, and we can see your pimples. And your eyelashes look like thin straw. And your mouth and lips look dry and colorless. Your hair is a tangled dry-ends mess. But our products can make you look human again." This is what women are subjected to day in and out by all the media targeting them. They're told how ugly they are, how inhuman they look, how they stink,…

There are enough real world examples of women with and without make up on where it's obviously not entirely a manufactured cost/benefit ratio. There is a real ROI for women who purchase those products. Not to say there isn't real anxiety and pressures generated but at the same time it's not all some grand fiction created by the advertising industry like some Fight Club reductionist style ideologies like to promote.

At least from my perspective, the ROI is often negative. Lipstick looks varying degrees of clownish to me, and if I can’t see your pores you look like a robot. I don’t blame anyone for doing whatever makes them feel beautiful; I’m sure my choices look distasteful to some. But a look enabled by product works because it has been sold to us, men and women alike.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#232

Post by the8472 »

_gi12 wrote: post #173
kevin_b_er wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just a 20 year contract, but a 20 year contract that holds a lien on your home. This lien is great for sunrun. It has near zero risk profit backed by a lien on a home. The financial engineering at the expense of the public is quite good.

Without a lien on the property this type of business model, where the company pays for tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment up front to private individuals who may not have any other assets to be used as collateral, simply wouldn’t work. It’s not that different from a mortgage.

Except that they would still have the solar panels and the power generated by them to sell as assets.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#233

Post by iainmerrick »

vkou wrote: post #175
skybrian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without explicit subsidies, it seems like rooftop solar is still getting hidden subsidies? If homeowners were paid wholesale rates for the power they provide, with prices based on the spot market, would any of it make sense financially?

No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid. A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

Not necessarily. For household solar, economies of scale kick in at the manufacturing level -- if you’re producing lots of standardized units, each household’s installation costs can go down.

You’re right that there will be some distribution inefficiency, as some households will over-produce and some under. But it may not be that bad if most households size their installations sensibly.

The centralized utility can balance distribution across many households, but there are some extra costs too -- installation and maintenance of power lines, power leakage, downtime due to faults.

Edit to add: I suspect we could agree that district solar (small local utility companies) is an excellent compromise that gets most of the benefits of both types.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#234

Post by erobbins »

CydeWeys wrote: post #51
macspoofing wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the cost of solar panels at the time you were considering them was what it was. Someone needed to pay for them. If that someone is Sunrun, they need to recoup those cost and make a return. You can be as creative as you want with the financing, that reality won't change. You could have gotten a bank loan too.

No, someone did not need to pay for them. That's not how the market works. If no one is willing to pay the listed price then the product goes unsold. Sunrun has no right to paying customers at any arbitrary price level, same as any other business.

It doesn't go unsold, everyone pays via subsidies.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#235

Post by sokoloff »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #191
vkou wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid. A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

I like this argument but I disagree with it. I will stipulate that PG&E qualifies as a 'poorly run, centralized utility' and based on its billing it cannot provide power to residential homes for less money than a locally installed solar system can. The reasons for this are worth considering. PG&E has to maintain a power transmission infrastructure. That infrastructure has a high inspection cost, land use cost, equipm…

For 6-7 hours on most days, rooftop solar can provide power to residential homes more cheaply than PG&E.

For 12+ hours a day, PG&E is almost certainly cheaper I believe.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#236

Post by barkingcat »

CompelTechnic wrote: post #2

>Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn’t my idea of the right place to do it. That's a pretty strange sentiment. 20 years ago, solar was decidedly more expensive than it is now. A fair price would be higher than grid power. For the installation to have occurred at all, the up front capital cost had to be amortized by a…

This seems really suspicious to me since in the article they clearly stated that their electricity usage was much lower than the previous owner, who was running some kind of server farm there.

Of course someone needed to pay, but it seems wrong to pay extra for electricity they are not using to pay lip service for supporting a for-profit company who had locked in the plan with an earlier contract.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#237

Post by baking »

rconti wrote: post #65
CydeWeys wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premium PV panels can be worth it if they look better. My parents paid a bit extra for black rather than blue solar panels (said panels also have higher output), and the house really does look a lot better for it. This can matter come sale time; curbside appearance is very important in real estate.

Black backings produce ever so slightly less than white backsheet, and premium panels can technically be worthwhile if you have limited roof space like we do.

I think they are talking about the cells themselves. Black cells have higher light absorption than blue cells (which are reflecting blue light) but I can't speak for their efficiency (and I should note that absorbed light that doesn't generate electricity generates heat which is bad for PV efficiency.)

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#238

Post by chii »

erobbins wrote: post #234
CydeWeys wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, someone did not need to pay for them. That's not how the market works. If no one is willing to pay the listed price then the product goes unsold. Sunrun has no right to paying customers at any arbitrary price level, same as any other business.

It doesn't go unsold, everyone pays via subsidies.

Why can't the business suffer losses instead of everyone pay subsidies?

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#239

Post by baking »

astura wrote: post #178
georgeecollins wrote: post #148

An important take away from this article is simply the perils of home buying. People usually only do it once or twice in their life (I have done it twice so far) and it's really easy to make a very expensive mistake. Imagine this article with another property problem instead of Sun Run: a mother-in-law unit with a tenant, a disputed property line, a requirement to retrofit the house to make it earthquake proof, illeg…

>The realtor sounds extremely negligent to not correctly inform the buyer about the true situation until after offer is made. Its par for the course - realtors rarely know anything at all about the property they are selling other than what the MLS says (and the MLS is often inaccurate and/or missing information). I was looking at a house and asked if the fireplace was functional and the seller's agent answered with "…

Realtors know they are responsible for representations so they are very careful about limiting their knowledge of the property to exactly what the owners have stated on the listing. Playing dumb is really important to being a listing broker.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#240

Post by chii »

itronitron wrote: post #215
michaelt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're better off buying the system up front if possible When I looked into it in my country, the payback time for a solar system was 10+ years, and estate agents were reportedly estimated they added nothing to the value of the house. Buying is all very well if you're sure to stay in the same place for 10+ years - but if you move in that time, better hope you place a high value on feeling you've helped the environmen…

You don't want it to add value to your house because then you will end up paying higher property taxes on a higher appraised value. The benefit of solar can be stated to a prospective buyer as X dollars less on utility bills each year.

But if the panel doesn't increase the sale price, then you've effectively lost three investment in them when selling.
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