501–510 of 510 posts
I've just installed solar & batteries (not 2 weeks ago we turned them on!). Be interesting to see how things will unfold and I love reading stories on how people have got on with theirs. It was roughly ~£12,900 installed (in the UK) and we pay 32.596p/kWh & 42.290p/day standing charge... Will either pay off well or be an expensive lesson
How much did you pay for the installed kwh?
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How old’s your roof? Just wait until it’s time for new panels. You’ll want new panels after a couple decades and change for the significantly improved performance. Panel work will be routine for roofers in the 2030s and 2040s. If you installed them on an old roof, you made a mistake, and your municipality probably shouldn’t have approved the work in the first place. Your replacement inverter should only cost $1-3k in…
12 year roof. Older than I would have liked.
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Going from, say, 3% to 4% on a $20k 10-year loan would cost him about $1100. He squeezed them for $5k.
Interest rates increased by 4 basis points from Dec 2021 to Dec 2022.[1] So a 3% loan then would be a 7% loan now or a 5% loan then would be a 9% loan now. The starting rate would depend on your credit score or other factors. Citation: [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDSLa
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That's how my distributed generation contract with our Rural Electric Cooperative works. We pay $50/month for the connection, but the actual use/generation is 1 for 1 net metering. We are limited in how much generation we can connect to 105% of our average annual consumption, so over the course of year, on average, we zero out energy costs. If we want to connect more distributed generation than that, the tariff shift…
Is the $50/month prorated into the cost if you end up net consuming for the grid? Or are any costs on top of that?
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Perhaps, but if we want to dis-incentivize usage as a political policy, we can just increase the usage charge above from "next to nothing". For power, generation costs in California run from $150/MWh to -$150/MWh: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx $0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.
So we’re going to reduce the hourly rate and charge a base fee, and then increase the hourly rate back to the old value? So you’re asking for a regressive rate in electricity. If your solution to a public policy issue is “why don’t we just” then you don’t understand the issue. I’m just pointing out externalities that you guys aren’t thinking about when shooting the shit about upcharging low income families and allowi…
Using usage as a proxy for value-received from the grid worked fine when there was a monopoly provider, but with distributed solar being a thing, we have to move off of the model, or we end up with an even more regressive system. As I noted before, we use these systems for water, gas, and other utilities, so we have methods for addressing their natural regressiveness.
Alternately, if you feel (and this is reasonable) that power should be a ubiquitous service provided to everyone, take over the grid, pay for maintenance and development of the grid with tax dollars, and bill only for generation/usage after a reasonable base allocation.
Can somebody explain where the return on investment comes from in residential solar? It just strikes me that if there was easy money to be had on solar installations, we'd just get tons of utility scale solar installs (which would likely by more capital efficient) and my utility bill would over time converge on the expected total utility bill for a home with residential solar. Is it just because we're in that transit…
I would say most people can't afford 25k$ investment cost for something relying on governmental decision that can change on a whim
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If you live in a place that does net metering, it truly just is as simple as generated kWh * utility rate. That's what net metering means. Each kWh you provide via solar offsets the cost of a kWh from the grid. Additionally, if you live in a place where power is $0.20-$0.30/kWh, then $233/mo is not a particularly large amount of electricity, especially for a single-family house. At $0.30/kWh, that's only ~775kWh of e…
There are a few different forms and a few different rules surrounding it. I can probably assume what he means, but a more direct comparison would obviate any of these factors. Right.. but that's not his total cost, that's his total savings. So, with those factors; which make sense for New England, he's got a 7kW system getting light for about 3 hours a day on average to net that 775kWh to earn the $233 savings in a m…
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In the Netherlands you a fixed price for being connected. The amount varies on the size of the connection. Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. Aside from this you have net metering still and you pay for what you consume. No “usage bundle” is included in the connection fee. Also, the companies for infrastructure and that provide the actual energy are separat…
> Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. That's...not a lot of power. O_o Is it common to get that little amount of power? I have 200 amps going to my house, but the master breaker on my panel is 160 amps. My car charger alone is 48 amps. When I had an electric stove, that was on a 40 amp breaker.
Only recently, with the introduction of climate goals and ditching gas, houses are getting heavier connections. Electric ovens are typically 16A, although induction cooking stoves are getting 32A or 3phases.
The 22kW car charger is by far the most power hungry device and needs 3x32A.
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Why are the leases so problematic? If you don't have the funds nor credit score to finance it, why not just rent out the roof space so to speak? Any return you get from it is better than nothing.
We got a house in San Diego near the bottom of the last market (2012) and I was a medical resident at the time with two school age children. The previous owner had installed electric everything (even had to get a larger trunk line run and breaker panel). So our electric bill was a little nuts, randomly hitting tier 3 pricing and landing $350+ electric bills. For a household with negligible marginal income, that was u…
I just wanna chime in and add: PG&E got rid of the third tier (unsure when) and, in the Bay Area, we're looking at around $0.35-$0.40/kWh at the upper end of the rate schedule (plus an explosion in natural gas prices on the West Coast). $350+ electric bills are pretty much now the norm for anyone who wants to heat their house up much past 60°F.