Originally posted by dougdstecklein
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It's one thing to promote solar, but you don't want to use figures which can discredit your argument. The cost of coal, gas, oil, etc. will continue to rise and at higher and higher rates and that's an easy argument to make, but it's preconditioned upon a whole host of factors, namely that other cheap sources of energy will not come online.
Best practice is to use conservative figures. Typically, I'll use a utility escalation rate of .4% and the 10 year treasury as the discount rate. Additionally, I don't take the ITC into consideration when calculating ROI.
I've seen a number of systems sold with ROI projections that use utility escalation rates of 4%, no discount rate, factor in the ITC without even giving consideration to if the homeowner can use the ITC or not and a dollar for dollar home equity addition...these kind of practices will come back to bite the industry.
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