291–300 of 510 posts
> The unsubsidized all-in price for buying and installing the panels was $25,525.43... after counting this $6,636.61 tax credit, the subsidized price was $18,888.82 Looks like a 7 year return on investment after subsidies, 10 years without.
Price of electricity more than tripled in some EU countries in the last few years. Prices going up and OP reducing consumption will work towards reducing ROI period.
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>You don't ever get a few inches of snow on the top of the roof. The point of the aggressive pitch is so the weight of the snow pulls itself off the roof so your roof/home doesn't have to support 5 tons of water weight. This is definitely not how snow on roofs work. Here is an example with a roof with lots of snow on it: https://millworksconstructionservices.com/wp-content/uploads... Roofs in cold climates are design…
That's absolutely how snow on top of the roof works. Most building codes in snow heavy areas have pitch requirements. https://www.atozroofingdenver.com/how-does-roof-pitch-affect...
How do you explain that picture with ~1 foot of snow on the roof's peak?
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> Your panels can be destroyed by hurricane, earthquake, or falling trees, rendering them worthless, for example. That’s what homeowners insurance is for.
Good point! I guess I view panels as being especially vulnerable because of their fragility and exterior location. I've also heard that one way to get booted from your homeowner's insurance is to ever file a claim. I know several people who lost coverage after their first claim (decades after becoming a customer).
I am surprised at these power bills, at least in my area the implied "savings" are 2-3 times what my bill is on any given month. Huge house maybe?
I am too. My last energy bill was $39 for 174kWh for a house built in 1926. Considering that I pay ~$12 in grid connection fees, the payback period is functionally never.
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> You can still totally offset your own actual consumption at retail rate AFAIK, most home solar is not set up this way. You don't use the energy from your solar panels. The solar panels feed directly into the grid, and your usage comes directly out of the grid. So if you use 100kwh, and generate 100kwh, then you will pay 100kwh at retail rate, and receive 100kwh at wholesale rate.
Hm, while I understand what you mean about where the actual energy goes, my understanding of how the costs are accounted are that there isn't any separate metering for "electricity out" vs "electricity in". The Solar out actually runs your meter backwards, so does actually reduce the amount the meter shows you owing to charge you at the retail rate. There is no metering present to make it possible to charge you for t…
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Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway. Subsidizing solar is a perfectl…
Just be glad your not in the UK. I pay 35p / kWh down and get only 5p / kWh for excess I sell to grid through Smart Export Guarantee. Price down has doubled in two years and way up has hardly moved. I joked with my neighbour that we should wire up our homes and sell my excess to him at mid point and we would both be better off.
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Additionally, the worst strains on the grid are really measured by the peak loads, so if you change billing a way that makes the peak energy less expensive, and therefore disincentivize people to (a) reduce usage at peak times or (b) install solar panels/batteries to mitigate their peak usage, then it actually might make the grid more unreliable. Water is different in that we really only have usage concerns about wat…
I’m told that Industry gets charged not by how much current they draw but by how much it distorts the grid power waveforms. In fact there are experimental designs out there for power correction facilities that delay the waveforms by for instance 90% of a wavelength (so everything lines up again) and convert the delta to DC to store in batteries. The battery power can be used for their own purposes or to reinject in l…
Can somebody explain where the return on investment comes from in residential solar? It just strikes me that if there was easy money to be had on solar installations, we'd just get tons of utility scale solar installs (which would likely by more capital efficient) and my utility bill would over time converge on the expected total utility bill for a home with residential solar. Is it just because we're in that transit…
Considering that power generation depends on the cosine of the angle between the sun and the panel - angle matters a LOT. Efficiency falls off fast if your angle is bad.
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Sure but I don't want a bunch of random space heaters around the house. Regardless of whether they are safe or not it's a waste of space if there is an existing central heating system.
What about Electric Baseboard Heaters instead? They don't take up space like a freestanding space heater does.
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"The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.2 percent)."[1] How is that not paying their share? [1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
Well, given that the top 1% in the US owns over 43% of all wealth (numbers as of 2011), and who by definition are getting a bigger benefit from all the infrastructure and protections of the system than everyone else, not seeing how a 38.8% contribution of total tax income is anything but a distortion favoring the wealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... Particularly since you carefully…
Capital gains tax is a thing, and in most cases that capital is taxed multiple times through its "lifecycle". The reason capital gains are taxed at a lower rate is because we want to encourage capital investment. It's what makes things. Food. Jobs.
You're also following a flawed premise (many people do this) that wealth is a finite pool, or a zero-sum game.
It isn't.
There's no upper bound to wealth creation. It's not a limited pool. It's unlimited.
Wealth is created when a person, or group of people, create a product or service that other people desire. That's it. Anyone can do it, and successful people do - through a combination of work, opportunity identification and luck.
The ideology I see behind "wealth inequality" in the U.S. typically boils down to some derivative of envy.
The solution to "wealth inequality" isn't taxation - that only has the power to destroy.
The solution is individual, different for each person, their life goals and what sorts of things are important to them, but rests in creation and innovation.
That's what's created wealth through human history, and it's what will continue to do so, if we allow it.
Taxing others and giving it away is lots of fun until you run out of people to tax, and you've managed to disincentivize and destroy what wealth remains.
Take a look at Prodrazvyorstka [1] to see how that works out.