18
votes
California solar installs down for 2024, but battery installs up
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- Title
- California is now a batteries-included rooftop solar market
- Authors
- Ryan Kennedy
- Published
- May 23 2024
- Word count
- 831 words
Following up on previous discussions about changing solar panel installation trends and billing for energy being sent to the grid in California, it looks like battery systems are indeed getting the expected boost.
I had solar installed around late 2022 and I very much like having it, even if it's not much of a bill swap and probably costs me some in the long run.
The next thing I absolutely want is a battery. I'd love to feel like I'm creating and storing all my own energy, because there's definitely occasions where I've needed to purchase energy back from the power company due to snow on my panels and whatnot.
Being able to feel like I'm a little more energy independent would give me peace of mind.
Woah so are you really generating all your own electricity for most days? What's the average temperature there for you atm?
Not OP, but our 60 panel system is about 1.5 years old and we haven't paid more than the grid hookup fee for over a year now. Average temp (western US) looks to be about 60F.
Generally, yes. February and March of this year I did end-up buying electricity, as my panels did get covered up pretty frequently by snow for several days at a time and we were running space heaters (aside from our normal furnace) in two of our rooms (my kids and my wife and mine) because they're poorly insulated.
Average temps for May so far are 52*F
February 33*F
March 33*F
It's a pretty dry state, so the snow melts quickly and we don't always have a ton of cloud cover, so the solar works pretty well a majority of the time. Even in the heat of August when we're running our AC much of the time, we're generating a ton of power that we're "selling" back to the energy company.
Of course, aside from the gas we still have to pay fees and stuff on the electricity, all kinds of "service charges" and the like, though they're only $10 or so a month.
Oh and here's a link for my generation YTD
Thanks for the info. I guess it's less surprising that you're able to generate all your own electricity with such reasonable temperatures
Where I'm at in TX, currently the temp is 89F, and during the summer I fully expect it to be in the mid 90's to low 100's :(
Still am interested in getting a solar system, because even if I could power my computer or 3D printer from something I captured from the sun, I think that would be super cool
You don't even have to go on the grid if you only want to power a few things with solar. Many of the portable battery "generator" brands have solar panel hookups on their batteries. You could always have a battery that you plug your PC and 3D printer into and connect a panel to the battery instead of the grid. You also get the benefit of having a way to generate and store some power in case of power outages.
That’s actually a really good point. How easy is it to switch from using a solar circuit versus AC outlet? Would it be like unplugging and plugging in?
Does the average temp have anything to do with function? As far as I'm aware, it shouldn't. We certainly see plenty of 90*+ days and several 100*+ days during our summers here and we haven't had any problems with our panels.
As far as getting one, the solar companies will figure out what you need and then give you a bit of headroom over that number.
I think the implication was that in higher (or just more extreme) temps, more electricity is needed for cooling (or heating)
Ah ok, I see.
Yeah, there's no reason an installer shouldn't account for all of that. As mentioned, they estimated our usage based on what I have (half a dozen computers running at any given time) and then gave us some overhead.
We're looking at solar for probably next year at our house. I'm just worried about figuring out who of all the local companies is actually trustworthy and whether it's actually a good deal for us. Any suggestions?
Your guess is as good as mine, really. The only thing we did was not respond to the constant door to door salesmen.
We looked up reviews, found a local company and went with them.
We still get cagey door to door sales too. You can usually identify them right away, so I ask them, "Are you selling Solar?" they usually say no and start talking around it until I interrupt them and tell them I already have it, then they stop and go, "oh", then usually leave. It's annoying.
I guess I moreso meant the AC energy usage would likely exceed the solar generation. But I guess that’s not a reason why I couldn’t power my computer and 3D printer off solar
Not OP either, but there are solar panels that can generate power from either side. Those can work well in snowy climates because it can collect sunlight reflected off the snow on the ground if the front face is covered.
Where I live we might get snow one day a year, that sticks for maybe 12 hours, but I had not seen double sided panels before. Surely those don't make sense to install right? Is the amount of reflected sunlight they capture really that beneficial? To me it seems like having an entire side that's not used for 6-8 months would outweigh the benefit of having it
It actually makes a big difference, but you have to have the panels mounted on posts on the ground instead of on rooftops. This paper found that monofacial solar panels in snowy regions lost 16% of their potential from snow and bifacial solar panels only lost 2% of their potential from snow.
You probably just don't live in a region where bifacial panels make sense if you haven't seen them around much. It's mostly an issue in places where snow will build up on panels for an extended period.
Solar will not make financial sense to install in the future without a battery install IMO. Monopolistic grid operators are lobbying to reduce/remove solar incentives nationwide, meaning without some way to actually store the energy you are producing, you'll likely not save that much on your electricity bill (unless you are using a ton of power from 11am-4pm.
That's unfortunate, because adding additional thousands of dollars of cost for batteries (which will certainly not last as long as the panels) will worsen the ROI for solar, and therefore reduce new adoption. The ROI for solar in my area is already bad enough as it is that I didn't bother investing in it, and that was before our utility forced new solar customers onto more expensive TOU rates.
I'm not entirely sure that is actually a bad thing though. Having a distributed solar generation network that produces excess power in the day isn't something that utility companies can use after a certain point. Incentivizing customers to store their excess generation is a real depiction of what the energy market needs.
In the long term maybe, but in the short term all it does is make the barrier of entry for residential solar much higher. There will be no incentive to install a regular solar system without battery storage, which can already cost upwards of 30-50k dollars. The whole point of adopting solar is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels to generate electricity (to hopefully stop our planet from becoming uninhabitable), not to give utility companies further dollars to keep lining shareholder pockets.
Utilities should never have been a for-profit venture in the first place, now we're letting them slow down our already too slow adoption of alterative energy because they can't build grid storage to deal with the excess energy generation? Its so frustrating that we let our world get run into the ground by corporations and don't even try to take a stand against them.
Net metering used to be much more common here in the US, but utility companies are working to kill it in as many places as possible.
Yep, our state (North Carolina) does net metering but then resets your credits in May, conveniently right before summer starts. So you end up losing all of the credits you built up during the spring when you probably weren't using AC or heat. It's such a crock.