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Oct 3, 2024
1:10:30pm
mang Redshirt Freshman
If you just care about costs, they're not worth it, but...

If you're looking at it from a "does it make financial sense?" perspective, the tl;dr: is that you should not get batteries. But, honestly, if you are just looking at it from a financial perspective and you're considering the typical route of getting a solar system installed by a door-to-door company and financing it, there is NO professionally installed residential solar system that makes sense financially.

Having said that, 

There is the obvious extra benefit of emergency preparedness, as any solar added to your roof that doesn't have batteries also goes out with all your other neighbors when the grid goes down.

As far as cost/benefit goes:
In Utah, with Rocky Mountain Power, they will pay you 5.160¢ (4.462¢ from October through May) per kWh for electricity you send them, that is called schedule 137. You have to pay them 11-15 per kwh you consume from them. so you're only making a fraction of what you buy it for when you sell it to them.  It used to be 1:1 meaning you sold to them at the exact rate you buy from them. Those were the good ol' days, and are over (unless you're grandfathered in).

But there is an EV time-of-use special tarriff where you have to pay them more for on-peak consumption (25.3532¢ per kWh) but only have to pay 5.2004¢ per kWh for all Off-Peak kWh. 

And this is where a battery would be helpful, if you can use the battery to ensure that all of your consumption from the power company comes during off-peak times and you self-consume your own solar / battery electricity during all the peak times then you stand to benefit. But even if you do that, when all is said and done, the price of the solar installation plus the batteries spread out over the time it is useful probably still doesn't pay for itself.

When I said above "NO professionally installed residential solar system makes sense financially" what I mean is that in the USA, when you look at the cost of a residential solar system, the vast majority of the costs go to the salesman trying to sell it to you, the permitting/regulations with the city/power company, and the financing. The actual solar panels are dirt cheap nowdays. The powers that be are all in a conspiracy to make residential solar so expensive that people just keep paying the power company. It is not like that in other countries though, and in places like Australia it costs less than 1/4th of what it costs here.

Which brings me to another option:

Solar Panels DIY installed on a shed or ground mount pared to a battery that takes care of ~75% of your consumption. With no net metering agreement or relying on selling back to Rocky Mountain Power at all.

This idea sidesteps the biggest costs of a solar system (the salesman and the permitting and regulations) and gets you the emergency preparedness and cuts 75% of your bill at a price that pays for itself in ~4-7 years. It would still be elegible for any tax credits you'd get with a solar company installed system.

The idea is that you'd install an offgrid inverter and place that in front of all your loads, and you'd never try to push power back to the grid (since you don't have a net metering agreement) but you'd use the power from your solar panels and battery all you can and only fall back to consuming from the grid once you're batteries are depleted. It would look something like this: https://www.mobile-solarpower.com/48v-complete-system-blueprint.html and you'd use those rack-mounted batteries that Tio linked to above. 

If you are interested in going this route I could talk you ear off about it as that is my nerd obsession right now, I'd even be willing to help you out with it if you are somewhere in Utah, just boardmail me.

This message has been modified
Originally posted on Oct 3, 2024 at 1:10:30pm
Message modified by mang on Oct 3, 2024 at 1:12:45pm
Message modified by mang on Oct 3, 2024 at 1:13:41pm
mang
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mang
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