It's been more than 5 years in view that I first started out toying with the concept of putting solar panels on our roof. The first time I attempted to estimate the value of a sun array, I determined that it might cost a few thing like $10,000, or a chunk over $7,000 with the 30% tax credit score rating available on the time, and might take about 11 years to pay for itself. Given that we were already in a function to buy renewable power through the NJ Clean Power Choice software for fine round $five more in step with month on our electric powered bill, it appeared to make maximum experience to be patient if the fees dropped.
A three hundred and sixty five days later, I were given some prices on a sun energy device. The cost became despite the fact that round $7,000 after credit score, however factoring in the rebates we may also need to collect from our utility from setting clean strength into the grid, it gave the impression of solar might be an excellent value except; if we paid for the device up front, it could net us round $eleven,000 over the route of twenty years. But we hesitated to make the leap, due to the reality we knew that our roof turned into pretty vintage and can want changing inside a few years. That activity might be a far bigger hassle if we had sun panels up there, so it regarded to make experience to wait till after doing the roof in advance than searching seriously into putting in a solar power gadget of our private. The expenses were nevertheless falling, so it seemed like we had nothing to lose via equipped.
Well, this past spring, after a contractor alerted us that our roof changed into on its final legs, we in the long run changed it. (Turns out that technique might not be finished but, as we located virtually this week that our brand-new roof is leaking, however it is a tale for each other positioned up.) So whilst we bumped into a person in Home Depot remaining week who was eager to ship a person to our residence to provide us a quote on solar energy, we figured, positive, it couldn't harm to take the assembly.
So, a week or so ago, a guy from Sunrun showed up at our house. After looking at our electricity usage, he warned that we probably wouldn't be able to save that much with solar panels, simply because our current electric usage was so low. (I had already told the guy we met in the store that our average monthly electric bill was less than $40, but I guess he was being paid based on the number of people he signed up.) But then he said, hey, many people did this just for the environmental benefits, and it wouldn't cost any more this way, so he might as well give us a quote. Except when he tried to enter our numbers into his estimator app, it didn't work. He called up headquarters and found out what the problem was: We did not meet the minimum size requirements for a Sunrun system.
Turns out, at least in PSE&G's territory, solar installers are not allowed to give a customer a system that provides more than 100 percent of their power needs, because then PSE&G would have to pay those customers more each year for their contributions to the grid than they could collect from them. (You would think they'd consider that a plus, since it would help them to increase the percentage of the energy in the grid that's renewable, as state law requires, but apparently that's not the way they like to do it.) And since our electric usage was so low, a system meeting 100 percent of our needs would simply be too small a system to be worth installing.
So this seems like a pretty simple and conclusive answer to the whole solar question. Even if a solar power system could save us money in theory, in practice, there's no way for us to get one. So I guess we can stop worrying about it and simply continue paying 12.85 cents per kWh to Ambit Energy, our third-party power provider, for its wind-generated energy. Or, better still, maybe we should go ahead and dump our month-to-month plan for a two-year commitment, which gets us a guaranteed 3 percent off the price per kWh we'd be playing with PSE&G. The only reason we didn't sign up with this plan in the first place is that we thought we might want to dump Ambit for solar panels within the next two years; if that option is off the table, we have nothing to lose.
