Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, of Solar
The Good :
I bought solar in May. There is a specific set of circumstances that made it worthwhile for me. I’ve been researching it for a while and the biggest mistake people make is to lease. Never, never, never, lease. All you are doing is renting out your rooftop. If you don’t own your solar panels, you will only lose money.
My salesman, let’s call him Angel Eyes, said it would take a 7.5 kWh system to cover my electric bill for the year. He also said they overestimate. I rolled my eyes to myself and let him talk. He started talking green and I stopped him there. To his credit, he did. Jokingly I said, I don’t care if I have to burn eagle oil, I want my electric bill to go down. I now have no electric bill plus a fixed loan payment, and for every sunny day I am producing about three days of power. I am using one and banking one to two.
Now staying positive, the best thing I can say about having these ugly rectangles on my roof (seen above with a slightly modified background) is they have been producing while we got the smallest bit of light. I have 24 panels and as soon as it starts getting light out, I am making at least 500 watts of power.
Even a dark rainy day still makes some power. The darkest days in the summer pretty much cover at least what I am using for that day.
I am going into ridiculous detail here because it’s the information I would have needed before making my decision. I just hope to help others like me who are doing it solely for the money, all the while knowing it’s at least neutral, or maybe even worse for the environment.
The Bad :
About 20 years ago I worked as a controls engineer for a wire equipment manufacturer. The economy was booming. I was purchasing controllers for machines by the skid. This was in the millions of dollars. Okay, it was a lot back then. From my controls supplier I would always get free Patriots tickets five rows up on the 50-yard line, and as many Red Sox tickets right behind the batter’s box as I wanted. These Sox tickets were so good that after the seventh inning the regulars would leave, and the fun people would fill the seats. One day Mo Vaughn was on deck and a guy next to me said, “Hey Mo, after this let’s go to the strip joint.” Mo really thought it was me and I almost died, again. That man was huge up close.
Soon, tickets were hard to get. There was another buyer bigger than me. The rejection still hurts. It was Evergreen Solar who had recently expanded with a new complex at Fort Devens in Ayer, MA. I was trading stocks back then and knew their rate of expansion and they were a publicly traded company. I tried to capitalize on this information and sunk a few too many thousands into it.
Controls is a very niche profession, but everyone needs us at some point. They convinced me to tour their facility in the hopes of joining their team. At the time I would entertain any job opportunity if the money was right. They had multiple shiny new buildings. From the office space, assembly, shipping, etc., it was gorgeous. I was only interested in what was going on in manufacturing.
The president of the company gave me a tour. When I walked in there was a huge array of furnaces about 18” in diameter by 12” high. There is a hole in the middle, and the solar crystals are produced on two reels like home movies, and about 1cm wide. Maybe they were 9mm reels who knows. They ‘grow’ through the furnace at a rate of about 1cm every minute. The feed rate is very important. What I know is it was too slow to see it move.
As he was driving me around in his Prius, he was telling me how they were going to save the world. Wow, Prius has been around for a long time. We can now get antique plates for a Prius. Who suddenly feels old besides me?
As he is yapping about nothing, I am trying to do some quick math in my head. It’s a long time ago but he said they put out about 400 watts per panel. Impressive, but I asked if that was forever? Well, no they do degrade over time. He wouldn’t stop talking about how the planet now has free electricity. I had to bring up the slow feed rate growing crystals. He said yah, but you’ve seen how many we have. I agreed, but had to say aren’t all those cherry red furnaces powered by coal power plants? What is the net surplus in megawatts between production and end of life of the panels?
I think he would have taken it better if I told him I had an affair with his wife and kicked his dog. He calmly said where are you parked? Then he said we’ll be in touch. I hit a soft spot. I never got the job at Evergreen Solar. They filed Chapter 11 and I lost 100% of my stock investment mentioned earlier.
Now I am investing again only on my own rooftop, so here is my best estimate on the energy it costs to produce one solar panel for you people calculating my green footprint. Don’t complain to me on my slight guesstimation, this is ballpark. From experience making fiber, that is the same size furnace and temperature used to melt glass making fiberoptic strands. It’s about 9000 watts. A 400w Enphase panel is 3’ x 5’. That is 13,935 cm^2. That X 1 minute per cm = 13,935 minutes, or 232 hours per panel at 9000w = 2 megawatt-hours in energy to produce one solar panel.
My most productive panel on its best day produced 2.47kWh. Let’s be generous and say it will produce half that every day year-round. 2,088,000 watts to manufacture / 1,235 watts per day = 4.63 years in the sun just to make back the energy it took to produce it. Now when it gets discarded because my roof needs to be changed or it won’t produce anymore, it becomes landfill. According to this article from the BBC it’s an eco-disaster waiting to happen.
I bought a 10kw system, which is 24 x 400w panels, for $41,000 installed. The feds give a 30% federal tax credit of $12,300 bringing it to $28,700. The payments are about $270/month. I said to my salesman, wow that’s expensive. If there wasn’t a tax rebate would your price be around $29,000? He said, “absolutely”. So, this huge federal rebate the feds are giving has driven the price up astronomically and the solar installation companies are benefiting from this plan, not us.
The Ugly :
Now for the scam. This honor will go to National Grid. Otherwise known as The Borg, or in this case Tuco. I wouldn’t even consider this if it wasn’t for net metering. Whenever I overproduce power it goes back to Tuco. Only a handful of states allow you to do this. If Mass didn’t have net metering, I wouldn’t consider it. For every kilowatt I push back
they give me a dollar-for-dollar credit. Sounds good, right? So, if I pay 25 cents for 1kw coming in I get credited 25 cents for 1 kw going out. It’s like free battery storage. Here is the scam, our prices change with the season. Back in May, I was paying 0.484/kwh. Now I am paying/receiving 0.26/kwh. They are stealing half the winter power I am saving up for now. When winter comes the cost will double and I will be producing less than half. Time will tell.
One thing that was impossible for me to find was someone’s actual electric bill. So, here are screenshots of my actual bills. April was my last bill before solar, and here is my September bill that I just got with a whopping $200 credit that I’m supposed to put toward my underproduction in the winter.
For years, I thought everyone in the south had it lucky. They don’t have to pay huge heating bills. I didn’t realize how costly air conditioning must be.
Because I am retiring in 5-10 years, I need to have as few bills as possible. Getting rid of an electric bill would be great. Has anyone ever heard a financial analyst say why don’t you just get out of debt? Not me. Only because we have net metering, I own it, and I plan to stay here until I die, is it worth it for me. I would have to say for the environmentalist and the average person looking to save some money I would say pick something else.
April bill right before solar:
Bill now:
I just love it when the customer is so much smarter than the salesman. You wait for the right moment to ask the question that generates a loud silence.
But the panels don’t just produce nicely until they stop. Degradation means reduction in output over time, until perhaps a significant drop-off to essentially uselessness at some point.
How long until then? And, Even if you can afford to install new panels then, will it be worth it?
What if you need a new roof? How much is it to remove the panels and reinstall? When will your costs break even with your savings?.
The house is only 3 years old. I got 30 year shingles. My builder was trying to sell me a 50 year metal roof. I said I’m almost sixty. Why in the world would I want a 50 year roof?
Payoff is about 9 years if I pay it off soon. Add 6 years if I keep the loan. I’ll be retired with no electric bill at that point. Yes they do degrade. That’s one reason why I went with a 10kw system instead of the 7.5kw system that was recommended. I didn’t want to make the story longer than it already was.
I find the bigger benefit of solar for me in the independent reliability. I haven’t had a power outage since I got my solar and battery backup system. It doesn’t cover my entire electric bill, but with neighbors having multiday outages and rationing because of the weakness of our local grid. It has been a big piece of mind for me. I agree though. I own my system outright. I didn’t lease or finance, I might feel differently if I had.
Brilliant analysis and presentation. Thank you especially about the primer in tax credits. Now cast the net out to all the tax credits you’ve ever heard of as incentives. That’s the way they all work. Says directly what our friend the electrician told me 20 years ago when I asked about the cost/benefit for panels to heat our seasonal pool. “You’ll never break even. Forget it.” I did.
Are you in a hot climate? Air conditioning means more panels.
Here in Mass you can’t get an occupancy permit unless you are tied to the grid. I’m a 1/4 mile off the road and it cost a mint to get power up here. I could have used that money and been completely off the grid, but no.
My sister-in-law and her husband have done very well with their solar. They live only about 20 miles from here, but the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles’ northern half) is consistently much hotter than where I am. If it’s 78 here, it’ll be 93 for them. Solar takes the edge off the air conditioning bill, and the rest of the year provides most of their power needs. They’re in it to save money and the investment was worth it. YMMV.
it would take a 7.5 kWh system to cover my electric bill for the year.
Did you mean a 7.5 kW system? If not, could you explain what a 7.5 kWh system is?
What a fantastic tale of interesting details about the current and historic world of solar. Thank you.
However you mention that you were told that the panels degrade over time. I knew a guy back in 1978 who powered various items with a small solar battery that fit in a suitcase the size of a backgammon set. His solar battery was projected to last some 150 years! So it seems that the engineers whose job it is to insert obsolescence into our needed products did end up getting employed by Big Solar.
Also the fact that you are selling the electric output back to a utility company indicates that you have a smart meter.
Has anyone explained that some individuals have their homes specially chosen to be used as the smart meter data collection point for a community? Then that residence’s utility bill can get slammed for much higher rates than would be in existence if it was an old non-digital meter?
If you have had the equipment for a while and your bill has been comfortably low, then I guess the utility company uses some other home owner’s meter to process the data for your neighborhood. In some cases the data collecting meter causes the home owner’s bill to be hundreds if not thousands of dollars higher than would be expected.
But just an FYI in case your bill ever gets seriously out of whack.
19 panels at 400 watts at maximum power would be capable of producing 7,600 watts. Doing this for a full hour would be 7.6 kWh. So both a 7.5 kWh system and a 7.5 kW system are essentially the same thing since we assume one hour at full steady power.
But isn’t it still true that “400 watt” panels rarely if ever actually produce 400 watts?
Absolutely correct. It will never put out 400w. I was surprised once when my 10kw system was producing 7.2kw. I didn’t expect that much in Massachusetts. I thought half would be good.
Thanks, it is clear now.
BTW, while asking for clarification of a trivial detail, I completely forgot to say something that I thought which is important to me: Great Article!!
* * *
Note:
The reason I was confused is that some people (like me ;-) always mean two different things by these two units: “kWh” and “kW”. But as long as you explain what they mean to you, I can understand what you wrote.
For you, “kWh” means the same thing as “kW”, at least some of the time, and in this case, it does.
Another reason I was confused is that based on some things you wrote, it was conceivable that when you refer to a “7.5 kWh” system, you really did mean it. You never said explicitly that your system could store energy, but a couple of times you sort of implied it, talking about “banking” excess energy. I suspect you meant “banking monetary assets”, rather than banking energy, but still…
If you were actually describing the specs of a system that can bank energy (which a lot of them do), then to say that it is rated at “7.5kWh” would make sense, taken literally: it would be the energy storage capacity.
So you can see why I was confused.
They probably store it next to the 100 mpg carburetor.
Those prices are outrageous! From my Jul 23 electricity bill:
Summer Energy Charge 800 kWh @ $0.086518 per kWh
then a higher rate after using 800 kWh,
Summer Energy Charge 491 kWh @ $0.104033 per kWh.
Most of my power comes from hydro electric. I had no idea what a savings that is. But now I do.
Great article – Thanks.
Awesome article. Thanks!
I like this more than one Like.
I remember the 100 mpg carburetor, and it is still the historical prototype that comes instantly to mind whenever I encounter an instance of a certain form of abnormal conspiratorial behavior.
Are you in the Niagara Falls region? A friend who lives there is charged 40 bucks a month for his utilities. He no longer has a washing machine or dryer. But the fact that I do and use it four times a week probably cannot account for the 250 buck difference in our bills. (I’m in Calif.)
…………………………………………….^^^^^^
There’s your problem…
I do get lazy in my terminology, sorry. Also, the solar lingo I have come to learn isn’t 100% accurate. If I had an air conditioner that used 1000 watts, that’s using 1kW while it’s running. It’s just the power it’s drawing. If it went on and off every 5 minutes for an hour it would consume a total of 0.5kWh. It’s just a unit of consumed energy vs. power draw.
I can ‘store’ the excess energy with the net metering. What I overproduce during the day and feed to the grid I can receive back during the night for a 1/1 kWh exchange. It’s essentially a battery. If I supply it and use it in the same billing period I’m okay. What I am disappointed in is I wanted to make excess power during the summer to use it in the winter when the panels aren’t doing anything. That seems to be the scam with dollar for dollar instead of kWh for kWh.
My all-in [total electric charges divided by usage] electric rate from Wisconsin Energy, including taxes, fees, etc has been in the 17-20 cent/kWH range this year. It was in the 15-16 cents range for about a decade until recently, but “renewables”.
So it looks like I’m getting shafted in Mass, again. My electric bill sent me over the edge in January which is why I went solar. I have friends that were paying $900/month last winter. And that was without electric heat.
So you have no batteries to store electricity from your side panels?
Graph of all-in electric charges for every month I had a utility bill in my name, going back to 1984 in college. [OCD, its a blessing and a curse]. The inflection points around the .10 cent and .15 cent lines on the graph are roughly 2005 and 2013.
There is no need with net metering. It’s a 1 for 1 swap during a billing cycle. If you look at my bill the two-way meter started at zero (100,000) and is running backwards.
When I loose power from the grid the panels turn off completely. For backup power I have a generator fed by my 1000 gallon propane tank buried in the ground.
So what happens if there’s a power outage on the grid?
The panels disable themselves and my generator kicks on.
Ok. So as I understand it, the power company is trying to go solar by incentivizing it’s customers to buy and maintain the generation equipment, so the power company has no start up costs. In exchange, the customers get greatly reduced electricity bills, and the electric company can claim to be converting to solar as we speak. People would complain about solar panels in their state parks, but they won’t complain about them in their own yards if they bought them themselves and are saving money on their bills.
Am I close?
Pretty clever system, really. I’d have to think about it a bit, but I think I like it.
Ok, that’s going too far. I was willing to let “kWh” slide, but no. The grid is not essentially, or even a little bit, a battery.
You should call it a “bank.” That’s how you’re using it, to store money.
[Added:] Electricity produced at noon is not the same thing as electricity consumed at midnight. At midnight, you are not taking out the energy you put in. That energy is gone. Too bad, it was cheap. The new energy you get at midnight is more expensive. The grid does not store energy.