Ikea's New Solar Panels: Sunshine Optional, Subsidies Required

If they put as much effort into this as they did in the kitchen cabinet software they built I expect to see a lot of people using this.

IKEA has a knack for packaging things in such a way that works for people.

Although I can say that nothing I've bought at Ikea has lasted a terribly long time.

Tend to go for non chipboard and non UV sensitive plastic stuff now that you can actually clean and leave in the sun without destroying it.

This seems fairly straightforward to understand compared to the tax avoidance strategy Google employs in Europe ( http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/... )

The problem is that this is a tax dodge for rich middle class people - at one time selling your solar energy back to the grid you got 8% return for 20 years guaranteed by the government.

Even after the scheme was amended its a nice little subsidy for richer people it's the poor sods on key/coin meters that are paying for this.

I'm super excited about the promise of solar panels, because my house has unobstructed exposure to the sun, and I live in the Bay Area, so we get sunshine 300+ days per year.

However, every time I revisit the math, it never works out. Even if I purchase it myself, the payoff times are never less than around 17-20 years, depending on how aggressive I project the rise in electricity rates. Given that solar panels have a serviceable life about 20 years, it still isn't cost effective yet.

But I'm getting more and more optimistic that in the next few years, we'll reach a level where solar panels make sense.