[Evans, Marv]

Masraum and Cafundaddy's comments are spot on. I consider my situation as good as being off grid, with a little bit of luck. When I originally priced a system, it was $55K. By the time I had one installed in 2016, it cost $19K+ with the federal tax credit. Last year it generated 14 megawatt hours which equaled my useage, so I didn'r pay anything for electricity. The other lucky part was I got in on on the "Net Metering 1" program, where you bank your excess generation to be credited against times of lower generation, which is why I didn't pay anything. You need to know your usage over a decent period of time (the company that installed mine looked at my consumption over the past 3 years and sized the system to that plus 10%). The cost of that per year against the cost of the total system you install will tell you the economics of it. Having the grid as a backup or supplement to yours is also a good thing.

In response to masraum's comment about power: my house is all electric, & my usage is 1 1/6 megawatts/month.