Quote:
Originally Posted by gregpark
Solar is certainly not for everyone.
It only makes sense if your electric bill is sky high, you live in a year-round sunny State, you don't have trees blocking the sun, your roof has 15 years left, you don't plan on moving soon, you do it before before the tax rebates end and before the new net metering law to tax the sun takes place (March in CA). And then it only makes sense to own and not lease. When you let a solar company put a system on your roof at no cost you're basically giving them free rent on top of your house to make money for themselves.
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Solid observations, Greg. And deschodt also touches on a couple more gems, like quality of siting/installation (especially re: water intrusion & wind damage), and properly sizing your system -- not just for your use, but generation vs storage (get enough battery).
One observation I'd add is that a savvy shopper will research the various time-of-use (TOU) rates offered by their utility. Knowing rates is important, but what's
really important is to understand when the peak, off-peak, winter, summer, etc. rates shift over and how those overlay your daily solar production and your patterns of use. This will help you figure out how much storage you need and when, for example, you might want to run equipment like pool pumps that don't necessarily need to be on a daily schedule like AC. The switchover points between rates are designed not to help consumers but to help the utility smooth out (remove the peaks and valleys) of energy demand by disincentivizing use during peak times.
Also, several of you have mentioned using batteries to draw electricity from the grid at night using off-peak rates and either supplementing solar during the day or selling back the excess to the utility at on-peak times. This is essentially energy arbitrage, and IMHO conceptually, potentially a good idea. The customer gets a smaller bill and the utility benefits from extra storage capacity on its system that customers pay for.
Technically possible, and works for the benefit of a single customer but scaling up that opportunity isn't likely to be broadly implemented though. The utility needs to be able to monitor and, more importantly, predict how much of this stored energy will be released back to the grid at any given moment. This is incredibly difficult and complex. From a system perspective, residential rooftop solar is incredibly complex and inefficient; adding residential storage into that mix would make the monitoring and predicting the combined inflow/outflow of energy an order of magnitude more troublesome. Again, from a systems perspective, large-scale installations on commercial properties (like those giant distribution warehouses) are far more efficient and allow every customer -- not just owners of single-family residences -- to benefit.