15
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As rooftop solar debate flares, builders, landlords and renter advocates are taking sides
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- Authors
- Ben ChristopherHousing Reporter
- Published
- Oct 6 2023
- Word count
- 1769 words
The things they are proposing are exactly the reason why I only believe in having solar that feeds into batteries for my own use, not fed into the grid. Every time I look at the offers for rooftop solar its pretty plain to see that its set up to primarily benefit the electric utility, not the owner - and once they're installed a 75% cut to the amount you're getting paid back would be make the system prohibitively expensive.
We have a small hobby solar system with batteries and the electric utility doesnt even know about it nor will they. None of their damn business what we do with self generated, free power.
I’ve been wondering about how to make this work. I think the heart of it might be the battery? Maybe you don’t even need the solar panels to begin with? You can change the battery from the grid and run off that. What sort of power lines and electrical equipment does it make sense to run off a battery?
Then add solar panels as an alternative way to change the battery.
This is a great idea, where I grew up we had variable rate power, so it would be cheaper at night and more expensive during the day - you could charge the battery at night and switch over to it during the day
It'll take a very very very long time for that to even come close to breaking even. Batteries of any significant capacity are expensive.
Though the concept is sound, and is utilized by things like hot water tanks or electric cars.
That wouldn't be practical where I live. The reason that solar is feasible is that once you have the equipment set up, the source of the power is free, so you immediately start to replace all that expensive power with free power. If the grid was charging the batteries, even at a lower rate than what you're using it at, it would take so long to recoup the expense of the battery setup and chargers and inverter that you'd likely never get to break even. We also dont have lower rates at night - its one price per kW no matter when you use it.
Right now, with solar panels as cheap as they are, you can build a system, in some places that get great sunlight, that pays itself off with 'free' power in five to seven years. Just 15 years ago, that would take 30 years to do but solar has become relatively affordable.
The heart of it is that the electricity grid gets crucified politically for blackouts/brownouts, I.e. unreliability, so if you only use the grid energy in an emergency then they're basically an insurance company. So they want to charge premiums to everyone with solar/batteries.
Yeah, that could work both ways. When you have multiple sources, each is a backup for the other. But the infrastructure for both needs to be paid for, regardless of how much you use them.
It depends on the utility company and state rules. In Minnesota you get paid the same rate you pay for solar and there's no rate change throughout the day, so batteries are actually a bad investment for any reason besides stability.
Is your bill based only on consumption? Here in AB, we have relatively low per kW rates (like .07/kW) but there are so many add on fees for transmission, upkeep, administration, taxes that the kW rate is the least of all your costs. Eg. You might use $50 worth of electricity but your bill here will be $250 because of the fees. It's kind of ridiculous.
It's mostly based on consumption. There's about $10 in basic service charges/government fees every month, but everything else (fees & taxes) are scaled based on consumption, so in months where we're producing more than we're consuming, we have practically no fees & taxes.
From the article:
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I think a somewhat fair way to do self-consumable solar for renters would be to add some layers of abstraction.
All energy generated by the array is pooled. No time-of-day funkiness or anything. If the building generates 5000 kWh, the pool is 5000 kWh (no idea what a reasonable number is here).
First, apartments typically bill back the electric bills for common areas to the residents (hallways, elevators, etc): apply the energy generated by the array to this first. If it doesn’t cover the common area electric, divide up the remainder using the same algorithm as you used to.
With any energy remaining after deducting common area usage, fairly divide it among the residents (based on square footage, occupancy, or some combination of the two. this is already well-defined in billbacks like common area energy usage). Credit this amount to each account, and they pay the rest of the bill. I doubt this will cover anyone’s full bill but if it does, the landlord or energy company can just keep the energy/receive a payout (probably the landlord).
This effectively eliminates the privacy concerns:
Obviously there’s still some complexity here but it keeps some incentive to install solar for landlords while also passing some of that benefit to the residents (which is a nice marketing line they can use).
I can't speak to the scummy salesman tactics for rent-to-own solar as I bought outright but own solar and battery and wanted to share my experience. Honestly the battery has almost solely been for backup power, which has been nice but not that frequent, obviously.
However, solar has been doing a stellar job eliminating our electric bill. These past few years it's cut our bill about 90% due to the credits that we get back for feeding electricity back into the grid during the day. Since our utility pays us the same rate per kilowatt hour exported as imported, we've been able to amass a large padding over summer, even in the PNW.
It wasn't until recently our power company decided to have a battery backup pilot program that paid a really good rate for letting them use our battery on days the grid is stressed. Easy to opt out any day you don't want to participate and they give us ample notice before hand.
This has completely eliminated our electric bill, and that's after the additional electricity consumed by owning an electric vehicle. So I've also completely nixed gas costs.
My excess electricity being fed back into the grid is simply powering my neighbors. If we had solar on just one of every three houses, the houses that didn't have solar would still be mostly offset by their neighbors on most days. I really wish we had some kind of community push to help fund and pull this off. It would go a long way towards energy independence in the United States.
My father in law (living in central Europe) has installed panels, battery and an air conditioning system. Apparently has also cut 90% of electricity bills. It would have paid back in about 7 years, but he has received a subsidy that makes it about 5 years. Projected lifetime of the panels is about 20 years, but the batteries will probably need to be replaced in half that time. Still a win. Especially for a three story house with pretty small roof.
Some of the relatives are still not convinced, though.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Paying retail rates for sending electricity back to the grid is an unsustainable subsidy and it's over in some states.
Even if all electricity came from residential solar, someone needs to maintain the power lines, and that needs to come from the spread between producer and consumer prices.
Also, producer pricing should vary depending on supply and demand. There will likely be a lot of people with solar panels and that should drive prices down on sunny days.
When I had someone visit my home and try to sell me a solar lease, I felt really bad for people who just don't enough to realize what a shackle you're strapping on. As the guy laid out the payment over time, barely touching on the fact that my payment would go up every year, no matter what. I pulled my phone out and did some quick math. I might be paying 75 bucks a month at the start, swapping it for my $250 electric bill, but with the yearly increase, it would be over 200 dollars in less than a decade. I said that made it a complete nonstarter, because we were not planning to live in our house long term and he assured me that it was easily transferable to someone else. I scoffed and said "Do you really think someone else is going to buy my house if their only options are being shackled with a payment that's $200 a month and increasing or paying 8k to get out of the lease?"
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but wouldn't the 75-200 dollar payment still be much less than your electric bill? In 10 years your electric costs are going to be going up even more than inflation, so your $250 bill will likely be close to 300-350 or maybe even worse.
In most cases solar isn’t going to replace the grid. So it won’t entirely end your payments, just reduce them.
Still seems like you'd have to be using a lot more than you're generating for it not to be a good investment
If we extrapolate it out a bit, these leases aren't great if you intend to move. Let's extrapolate the numbers:
Panels start at $75 and over about a decade increases to $200. Let's say it increases by $1/mo so it takes 125 months to get to $200. Over that decade you'll spend $17,325 for the panels.
Average electric bill of $250 over the same period is $31,500.
Since it's not going to fully replace grid and the grid provider wants maintenance fees for allowing your house to be connected to the grid, we'll say it reduces the monthly bill by 80% to a mere $50 per month, that's $6,300.
$17,325 + $6,300 = $23,625
Less money spent, great!
Except it's dependent on the person they sell the house to agreeing to take over the ever increasing lease. If not they have to pay $8,000 to get out of the lease (I'm assuming this is all the costs and either makes them own the panels or includes removal).
$23,625 + $8,000 = $31,625
So they've lost $125 on the deal and had the headache of getting the panels paid off/removed while already under the stress of trying to sell the house.
It's not a stupid question. A couple things made it a scam imo
Had someone knock on my door offering a free quote and took them up on it. Their offer seemed to have some weird math but figured I could at least look around and get some comparison.
Got 3 more quotes and out of all of them only one didn't try to play games with the price and the rebates and everything. One standout among the bad ones was very proud of their $200/mo 'for the life of the loan' price, which reading the fine print would only stay at that price if you paid off roughly 1/3 of the loan in 15 months, which was an extra ~$15k or so above the monthly payments. (not exact, this was months ago, but you get the idea)
I kept all the info for the honest one because even though it's a bit out of my price range now it is an upgrade I'd really like to do at some point. But was really struck by what seemed like a super high percentage of bad actors.