Finally getting solar for charging my Mustang...

[RicoSuave1911]

I'm so jealous of you guys. I want solar so bad for our house, but the wife won't sign off on it yet. Please help! What are some data items that I need to build my case? She is scared that our breakeven time will exceed 10 years. Are there still tax incentives for the installation?

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[bruceski88]

I'm so jealous of you guys. I want solar so bad for our house, but the wife won't sign off on it yet. Please help! What are some data items that I need to build my case? She is scared that our breakeven time will exceed 10 years. Are there still tax incentives for the installation?

It really depends on local conditions, available rebates, electricity rates, weather, and your site solar exposure. It could be 20 yr payback if you do not have net metering and pay $0.06 per kW/hr. There are websites that can help you figure things out.

 

[kindofblue]

We've had 5kw solar panel systems on our homes for 15 years and haven't had a single electric bill during that time. And it's more than just the $$$ saved. It's clean energy that makes your EV driving from 100% renewables too.

And yes, there's still a 30% fed tax credit as well as state and local incentives. Same goes for the 240v EV charger you install.

 

[Reign of Ravens]

I'm so jealous of you guys. I want solar so bad for our house, but the wife won't sign off on it yet. Please help! What are some data items that I need to build my case? She is scared that our breakeven time will exceed 10 years. Are there still tax incentives for the installation?

There are tax incentives at the federal level, and there may be some in your state - I'm not sure. For certain driving electric can help with the payback period, since you're trading in a gas bill for upping your electric bill. In my state, which I believe has the highest or second highest electricity rates in the country and tons of sunlight, this one is a no-brainer. In Georgia, I'm not so sure.

There are some arguments to be made for it:
1) Federal tax incentives are supposed to be going down each year. I believe the phase-out was paused over the past two years, but it probably won't stay that way for too long.
2) Nationwide energy costs are going up; producing your own power can protect you from that.
3) This has the potential to guard against natural disasters (grid goes offline for a few days? I feel for my neighbors, but between my solar panels and my batteries, I'm not worried about food spoiling in my fridge, I can still charge my cars as well, and since my appliances are all electric, I can even boil water if I need to).
4) It's an investment in your home. Why put money into a stock market only to watch losses? Solar panels will literally save you money, while increasing the value of your house.
5) The world is burning. Green energy isn't the cure, but it contributes. This is investing in humanity's future.

Arguments against it:
1) Economic payoff may not make sense in your area.
2) It may not save you as much as you think, depending on your power company. For example, my local power company used to keep a 1:1 tab, crediting you for what you sent back to the grid. Now they keep track of the credit, but what you send back only applies to the energy you use. There are a lot of generation fees and other fees that come into play that the credits do not apply toward, and my bill can rise quickly as a result. I have three Tesla Powerwalls specifically for powering my home and charging my cars, because I usually can't charge during the day when the sun is up. The Powerwalls protect me from hitting the grid much, if at all, and so my bill remains the minimum. But that's yet another cost.
3) Technology is improving and costs are going down year by year. My roof has four facets and originally we covered the two facets that the company predicted would be the highest-producing. During the pandemic and when the stock markets were down, we decided to put our money into maxing out our solar array. Our first array was composed of third generation Panasonic panels; the second array is made up of fourth generation panels. The second array, despite being smaller and supposedly at less optimal angles, outproduces the first array; my production more than doubled. It's possible that my solar company got the angles wrong, and the differences between the generations isn't supposedly that big, but I wonder how much panel efficiency has to do with it. It's not worth replacing the gen3 panels with gen4, but you have to wonder what it'll be like with gen5 or gen6... and that's just the panels. Who knows how home battery solutions will change in time.

I don't regret buying in when I did. It is an amazing feeling to run my air conditioner, charge my cars, and basically do whatever, guilt-free and not worrying about how it's going to impact my electric bill. It was an interesting experience to have a power outage one night and be the only house on the street with the lights on.

 

[mikeinet]

I’ve been looking into this myself.
Few thoughts for folks:
A) because of my roof angle and configurations (dormers in front of house) they think I can only produce ~40% of my energy needs (with car). Is this worth it?
B) how does everyone feel about the “look”? Personally, I love the idea but the moon of them kinda drives me nuts.

 

[Vulnox]

I’ve been looking into this myself.
Few thoughts for folks:
A) because of my roof angle and configurations (dormers in front of house) they think I can only produce ~40% of my energy needs (with car). Is this worth it?
B) how does everyone feel about the “look”? Personally, I love the idea but the moon of them kinda drives me nuts.

Whether it is worth it or not is less a function of energy needs met and more one of cost to do so. Our estimate was only about 60-70% of needs met on our 11kW install and we are coming up on a year and I would say they were pretty dead on with that. If we weren't charging an EV it would be closer to 90%.

But it still makes our monthly energy bills less expensive even with the finance cost of the solar array, and even though we don't have "true" net metering in Michigan, because we switched to time of use pricing and get a significant amount of credit built up during the day which is also the most expensive time for time of use. Our electric company pays us the time of use rate and that helps offset when we aren't generating at night when the time of use rate is much lower.

So what electric bill we end up with, which is typically just the delivery charges (hence why we don't have true net metering here, we have to pay delivery charges regardless), plus the solar loan, is on average $50-75 less than our electric bill was alone before solar. Even though we aren't meeting our electric needs 100%, the structure of how we get paid solar credit means our financial cost is still far lower.

Once the array is paid off, then our electric bill will be far less than pre-solar.

It does help if you are pretty confident you will get at least 5-7 years out of the house. You don't have to hit your break even point on solar before selling. That is a common misconception. Solar arrays add value to homes in nearly every market. You won't get your up front cost back when selling, but on a $30k install, may get 10-12k in increased home value. So between that and the federal credit, you may only have $10k or so that you need to pay off before you could sell the home and break even that way.

Now obviously, home sale values aren't guaranteed, a buyer may not immediately place much value on solar, market conditions change, etc, etc. But all other things being equal solar increases home value and breaking even if you have to sell isn't as tough as some believe.

 

[dtbaker61]

The crew is installing our solar system today. I will likely add additional panels and batteries over the next few years.
I've been wanting to do this for about 20 years and have finally saved up enough to afford both the electric car and the electric power plant.
We will have about 7 hours of usable Arizona sun per day (winter and summer both, see attached image).
The attached image, taken from the roof, facing south shows:

• The path of the Sun during the summer solstice (top, orange line).
• The path of the Sun during the winter solstice (bottom, green line).
• The path of the Sun during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes (central, blue line).
• The analemma for the hours between 06:00 and 19:00.
  • The analemma is the curve that connects the location of the Sun for a constant time throughout the year. That is, if I were to take a photo every day at precisely 12:00, from the same spot and looking the same direction as when I took the photo in this image, the Sun would fall on that on the line labeled "12:00". You may have seen these in various astronomy photography albums.
  • This is useful to know what time of day the Sun may be eclipsed by a tree or other obstruction. At 15:00 time the roof is unshaded in the summer but shaded in the winter.

Specs:

• 8.2 kW of panels
• 20 kWh of battery backup (AGM, not LiFePO4, but costs are ridiculous for LiFePO4)
• 12 kW hybrid inverter with 2 AC outputs (one back to the grid and one to protected circuits), and includes a generator input

Anyway, I'm a geek about this stuff and am pretty darn excited.

I'm a lifetime solar/ev geek myself.... glad for you!

What Inverter did you get? SolArk? Generac?

Did you design ac coupled with PV backfeeding to grid, or dc coupled with PV charging batteries? I'm just wondering if you are set up so your PV will continue to charge batteries during grid outages.

Sounds like you designed with auto-transfer and a 'protected' sub-panel... how big does your hybrid inverter support? 50amp?

 

[AlpaChino]

Have had a 5.67 KWp system installed since Jan 20 2019 and have been using it for my house and with my wife's Leaf. My MME should be in this month. It is getting exciting.
I am thinking of RUNONSUN for a custom plate.
More importantly how did you make that picture you showed?

STARPOWR not available?

 

[mjs020294]

Just remember it is far cheaper to spend money of energy conservation projects than energy generation. For instance we switched to an heat pump water heater, multi speed pool pump and made some other minor adjustments for around $1,000 net. Those changes saved us over 8,500 kWH a year. A solar system to cover 8,500 kWH would cost around $16,500 ($11,500 after tax credit) in our area.

Rethink and Reduce before Replacing.

If you do go down the solar route these two tools will be helpful:

https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php

https://www.suncalc.org

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

I'm a lifetime solar/ev geek myself.... glad for you!

What Inverter did you get? SolArk? Generac?

I grew up on an off-grid ranch. Big time PV fan.

We got a Sol-Ark 12kW inverter. If I were to do it again, I think I would get two inverters, one for each leg of the 240V system.

Did you design ac coupled with PV backfeeding to grid, or dc coupled with PV charging batteries? I'm just wondering if you are set up so your PV will continue to charge batteries during grid outages.

The system is 48v DC until it feeds from the inverter to the house or grid. The batteries will charge even if there's a power outage on the grid.

I looked at microinverters, but (IMO) there's better tech available for dealing with series derating of a string when a panel is shaded or malfunctioning.

Sounds like you designed with auto-transfer and a 'protected' sub-panel... how big does your hybrid inverter support? 50amp?

That's right. There's a "critical loads" subpanel that hosts the circuits that we determined needed to be available when the grid goes down.

The inverter allows 37.5A continuous 240V AC current to the grid or load.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

Just remember it is far cheaper to spend money of energy conservation projects than energy generation. For instance we switched to an heat pump water heater, multi speed pool pump and made some other minor adjustments for around $1,000 net. Those changes saved us over 8,500 kWH a year. A solar system to cover 8,500 kWH would cost around $16,500 ($11,500 after tax credit) in our area.

Rethink and Reduce before Replacing.

If you do go down the solar route these two tools will be helpful:

https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php

https://www.suncalc.org

We reduced, replaced, and reconfigured before going with PV.
One of the reasons for going with a larger PV system than we needed to power our home was to be able to charge our batteries and run my servers for several days if necessary. My business is run from home.

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