Saving $24 a month with solar panels seems hardly worth the effort. Why not just build nuclear plants and dispense with the tedium of house installed solar? Dealing with solar panels seems like such a such a pain.
I Bought a House with Solar Panels
251–260 of 298 posts
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. Ok? That is standard practice when you own a home. You are responsible for all the maintenance on your home. What is scary about solar panel maintenance? I assume they have to be cleaned every so often. Anything else? Maybe you have an electrician come and retorque the connections once a year? It's not like they have a lot of moving parts assuming it'…
You've got the weight of the things bolted to your roof. Is your roof new or less than new and needing replaced before the solar panels are paid for? Do you know a roofer who will touch solar panels during a re-roof? This doesn't even discuss the installer incompetence and the damage they'll do to your roof during install. Those panels are bolted to the roof and bolts cut through shingles and the sheathing underneath…
"Bolting solar panels to the roof is not viable in the long run, IMO. The damage and the advancement of tech means these things will be obsolete in the near term"
I work in Solar. Your efficiency gains on single-junction monocrystalline cells are on the order of one percent per half decade. Damage to bolting to a roof? Not very much at all if you actually use the included sealing gaskets instead of bolting it straight in like most idiot installers, and the framing, done right, actually adds rigidity to your roof frame.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#253DIY array with 17 panels should cost $5000 today with inverters and grid tie - thought I would forgo the grid tie and just get a shit fuck ton of lead acids (probably 30 for another $3000) and have energy for at least a day. Stop paying these racket companies and their dumbass contracts. The DIY is totally easy.
You're way overestimating.
I see a 6kWh system (that's 24-ish panels) with inverters for $3500. New runs about $5K from the company I produce panels for.
30 good SLAs, that's a bulk quantity buy and you can get them for about $30 each at that quantity, so $900.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have kept records of the power we've consumed, the power we've generated, the cost of the system and the cost of repairs/maintenance (one panel and one inverter so far over its lifetime). For the financial analysis we assumed the money would be committed to paying for power one way or the other, there isn't really an option for putting it aside in the mutual fund so the 'invest' option was off the table. With the…
What I mean is that your initial outlay either needed capital or a loan. This is money that could have been invested, with electricity bills taken out of that kitty. What's confusing me here is that you've said you've been saving $2600 per year in electricity costs but it took 11 years to save $20000 off your bills. Either you've averaged about $1800 per year in savings or you've spent more than $20k on the system +…
Thanks for that clarification, we did in fact finance the initial capital, we were re-doing the roof and as part of that we chose to refinance the house to take advantage of the lower interest rates. And yes, there were government rebates in force at the time, the actual system cost was closer to $40,000 but our part of that bill was half or $20,000. FWIW the refinance which only added the cost of the roof and panels to the balance and reduced the interest rate left us with a smaller monthly payment with a similar pay off date (replaced a 30 yr fixed with a 15 year fixed)
As for costs, maintenance included replacing a failed inverter, that was $3500, and a panel, that was $450. The way in which electricity has also changed, when we started it was just kilowatts in vs kilowatts out annual true-up, they dumped that and switched to time of day, but changed their mind when the economics didn't work out for them, and now they are on the tiered system. They also blew up the town of San Bruno and convinced the PUC that they should be allowed to raise rates to cover their costs, so the price of electricity has gone up. Net result is that we didn't save as much per month when we started, incurred maintenance costs above the original $20K, and PG&E has changed the rules several times on how the accounting works. Fortunately all of that complexity can be factored out just by computing the bills vs what we paid.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#255Earlier 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.
More efficient to produce a certain kW figure, but run for profit and at the cost of freedom for the consumer.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is funny because we get cold called by these folks probably twice a year, and once a rep came up to our house and wanted to tell us about solar, so I gave them a short tour of the 5KW system we installed 15 years ago. The one that has literally paid for itself (about half way through year 11) based on actual generation and power consumption statistics. It would have paid for itself sooner except that PG&E has twic…
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?
There are hundereds of different subsidies in the US across all the different states. Some vesting over time, valid from day x to day y, and all kinds of other scenarios. It's really complicated, but chances are high that there is a subsidy or grant somewhere you could take advantage of.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, don't get me wrong - solar power generation is fantastic in areas that can support it (Which is most of the world.) Rooftop solar power generation is what I have an issue with. Utility-scale solar has all the advantage that you cited, without the disadvantages of being incredibly labour-intensive, overcomplicating the electric grid, and offloading long-term maintenance to non-experts. If you are going 100% off-th…
It requires a grid, but maybe not a national grid? There has been a lot of talk about how we need more long-distance power lines for load-balancing solar and wind. However, the PG&E bankruptcy seems to show that we've been underestimating what it takes to properly maintain a grid. Are long-distance power lines more expensive than we thought? Or maybe rural, fire-prone areas would do better with more local solutions t…
PG&E is a pretty poor strawman for anti-grid arguments. CA pays 2x what neighboring states do for electricity, and despite having mild weather and high population density have unreasonably high levels of safety and reliability issues.
It’s probably second only to Puerto Rico on that front, at least in the US.
Having said that, I’m eagerly awaiting the day I can disconnect my house from the grid, and close my account with them.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like AOC love pushing these types of these well-intentioned top-down gov economic engineering policies which claim to help the little guy (or the environment in this case) but ultimately either do the opposite and largely just create inefficient systems, promoting graft and cronyism, and generally making us worse-off than before. Often they work for a short period of time before the entire marketplace figures…
As per the gp > There's no laws federally preventing corporate collusion and corruption regarding federal congress. And I would also make the claim it's also true for states as well. This is where the graft and cronyism comes from, and not just for liberal "over-reaching government" policies - graft and cronyism also infect regulations to enforce monopolies by people trying to downscale government protections, and th…
If you read the article closely SunRun entire business model is built off of buying up thousands of tax credits intended for regular America and selling them to mega-corps so they pay zero taxes. And in return it's thousands of loans directly tied to properties by selling short-term gains to consumer who eventually get burned by long term financial trickery.
I mostly agree with you but giant gov programs in 2019 are just setting you up for failure. This isn't patriotic post-war 1950s American in boom times ready to get to work.
There is a sophisticated highly competent industry set up around poking and prodding these deals inside and outside of government.
Private/public deals are cancer. Well intention gov mega-deals like California's massive tax credits and new solar-policy, etc, etc, etc are just bad ideas that keep working against the public interest while politicians get praised as helping the poor/middle class when it gets first released. There's no accountability afterwards. They tell us it's just a lack of gov interferring, which will solve all the problems they made.
Let markets do what markets do and only come in to regulate when there is a clear and obvious dynamic where markets simply dont work (military, police, health care, etc). Simply the tax code. Simplify spending. Stop pretending these grand social and economic experiments. Stop public/private nonsense and choose one or the other.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit disappointed in your response. Did you look up Shockley–Queisser ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi... )? The maximum theoretical single p-n junction efficiency is low 30%s. Sunpower is the best consumer grade product and they are in the low 20%s right now ( https://us.sunpower.com/products/solar-panels/ ). There is not that room for improvement. There are higher efficiency pv ce…
Residential-scale solar tracking doesn't really look that different from electric garage door openers, does it? Those seem to work pretty reliably for years with ~daily cycling.
It's tougher than that. They are outdoors and have to stand up to weathering and storms. In the case of dual axis trackers they have an additional degree of freedom.
Finally, an the toughest, in my opinion, is how little net energy budget they have to work with to be economical: they have to require less energy to build, install, and operate than the incremental solar energy they generate over their operation life. They give an approximately 40% production improvement (that's roughly the single/dual axis midpoint. towards the high side), so if you say a 10 yr life with zero maintenance and controlling a single 250w panel you're talking 9 mWh, or $1080 retail electricity value generated. A 40% improvement on that is only $440 worth of energy budget per tracker over a 10 year life.
That glosses over a ton of complexity like if area is amenable to ground vs rooftop, if it's higher latitude, high density panels, stationary panel/tracking mirror, and most importantly having multiple panels per tracker. Zero maintenance/replacement is not realistic, either, since it would cycling dozens of times a day and could be in hurricane/tornado areas.
But given a lower end garage door opener is $150 before installation costs, it gives an idea how tough that would in that price range. Consider that panels are generally engineered to withstand 100+ mph gusts, and this would be a relatively finely tuned machine attached to one or more 18 square foot kites that would be expected to withstand the same conditions.
https://news.energysage.com/solar-trackers-everything-need-k... was a pretty good article I found on it.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#260I get 3rd party solar sales calls nearly every day. I cut to the point and tell them my all-LED house plus new refrigerator averages 85 kwh month. That stops them cold because they require 1000 kwh to make a profit. Maybe if I got an EV I could crank up the usage a good deal.
I still dont know why they have called me several hundred times.