Um. Your situation is your situation, of course, but let me point out a couple-three things.
Back in the day when the house was being built, the SO and I, both engineers, sat down with a few web-based tools (njcleanenergy.com, at the time), figured out how big a set of panels and inverters we'd need to power the house. This was back in 2004. Although there were incentives from places, we didn't know a Thing About Them, so just ran with how much we'd save on electricity. Careful calculation revealed that it would take fifteen (15)
years. We might have done it anyway, but the builder had a covenant in the contract: No "ugly" additions until two years after the last building got sold. So, we sighed and went our way.
2008 rolled around and we ended up at a home show. Solar was still expensive, but (a) the State of NJ was throwing in 20% of the cost as an incentive and (b) the Feds then, as now, was throwing in 30% of the remainder as a Tax Credit. (That's not a deduction: Whatever you owed in taxes, you simply reduced that by 30% of the cost of the solar system. And if you hit zero (which we did), you get to use the excess that you
didn't use in the following years, for as many years as it took. That was nice.
In addition, there was (c), this Solar Renewable Energy Credit. One got one of these for every MW-hr of energy generated by the panels, whether or not the energy thus created went to the power company or not: The only requirements were (a) it had to be a grid-tied system (no free-standers, thank-you-very-much) and, in NJ, the calculated total amount of energy generated per year had to be less than or equal to the previous amount of energy sucked down from the power company. (That was put in there so power companies wouldn't go broke.)
The SRECs are.. interesting. By public law:
- A power utility in the state was required to generate a certain percentage of their power by "green" means. For every MW-hr of energy that they missed by, they would have to pay something called a "SICL" payment to the State.
- The percentage would go up year on year.
- The SICL payment amount would go down year on year.
- The utility could pay that SICL payment - or they could hand the State an SREC. The SRECs were tradable. There's a platform called GATS that, amongst other things like controlling power flows across most of the eastern half of the nation, they handled the creation, sale, and retirement of these SRECs.
- Initial percentages were in the low single digits, now in the medium double-digits. SICLs started off, I think, around $800/MW-hr; they're now around $220. Small companies would scurry around and get SRECs from homeowners and the like, buy them, and sell then en masse to the utilities, for less than the SICL payments.
As a result, in the first year, the SO and I were getting $600 or so per SREC. We're getting around $198 now. The SRECs continue for fifteen years after the solar installation.
Now, the funny bit: Back in 2008, an installed solar system was about $8000 per kW of solar panel on the roof. As I said,
without the incentives, paying that off in reduced electric bills would take about fifteen years. The last time I checked, that number is now about $2000 per kW of solar panel on the roof - a factor of four reduction,
not including inflation.
For that reason, the original SREC program was discontinued in NJ
years ago: No more grants. And, while there is a bit of an SREC program, it pays far, far less then the old one.
If it took, using prices (and lower electric bills) back in the day 15 years, with a factor of four reduction in cost, it's going to take less than four years. Even better, the cost of electricity has gone up with inflation - so it'll take even
less time to break even.
That's nice for those that have the capital to just Do The Install, which, as you noted, is around $20k for you. But it gets better.
Say one takes out a home improvement loan for a solar panel system for, say, ten years or something. Home improvement loans are backed up by the collateral of the house; as such, they're generally low risk to lenders and get mortgage rates for interest. Do the calculations: The Home Improvement Loan amounts will be about 1/2 the
cost of the electricity that one isn't paying for. This means that one is cash-flow-positive, from Day One. And, come the day that the loan is paid off.. Well, it's a-gonna take one whopper of a connection fee from the electric company to wreck them apples.
As far as hurricanes and such.. We asked about that. Building standards in NJ have lag bolts going into the attic rafters; they claimed that it was good for >120 mph winds, which is the same number for roofs in general up here. We don't get much in the way of hurricanes, although Sandy was fun, but Northeasters are a way of life up here, so we do get 70-80 mph winds from time to time.
As far as wear and tear on the roof: Well, it's a south facing roof where the panels are and, as near as I can tell, the panels are
protecting the roof shingles. From sunlight. Which does wear out asphalt tiles.
We do get significant snow up this way; there's been up to a foot and some of snow on the roof from time to time. Interestingly, given the least amount of above-freezing weather, the glass on the solar panels kind of melts the bottom most layer of snow, and the whole mess just up and avalanches off the roof, shaking the house and deck behind the house. We lost one deck table that way from a couple hundred pounds of snow falling a couple stories. But we start getting electricity right afterwards, no problems.
Had one (1) leak, about four years in. In NJ, to be in the whole solar installation business with the SRECs and all, everything had to be warrantied for 15 years. So the guys showed up, saw the leak where I pointed it out, got on the roof, moved panels around, and fixed it. Dry since then.
I dunno. There's not a heck of a lot of argument
against solar panel systems. Money in one's pocket and all that.
