Goal: Net Zero - Companies Suggesting Widely Varying kW Systems

[aleenoor]

Hi Nether, Congrats on your decision to go Solar. I am in Central FL as well and just finished up with my 11.6 kW install. Waiting for OC to do the inspection and Duke to swap out the meter. I have to say Magius was great help. Close to $2 / W is really good price. What kind of financing rates are you getting and whats the service warranty period ?

[Magius]

If you have a Google/Gmail account you already have a Google Drive. Just click on my shared link and from the file menu choose copy to Google Drive, or something like that. Then you'll have your own copy that you can edit, and you can always get back to it at drive.google.com.

I appreciate your suggestion about building tax liability in to the financial returns, but I'm not a financial person and I'm not sure how to do that. This tool was intended as a quick sanity check for homeowners vs installer proposals, which typically claim a 16%+ rate of return and that you're doubling or more what an investment in the stock market would do.

Please let me know if you have other issues or suggestions for the tool.

[brucet9]

Either way, I'm happy to share it, and I just remembered that this forum doesn't do PMs, so I guess I just have to drop the link here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m05RqDZ2hSzxSfd-1SmF7n4zKLZyPsq_kvOjNYs5MEI/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you for sharing. I assume that it is easy to set up a Google Drive?
Will I be able to see the formulas for the cells, so I can substitute SCE rate data and expected rate increases for your OUC values?

One thing that you might want to include in your ROI somehow, is the tax effect when comparing with other investments. 10% ROI earned as utility cost reductions is tax-free, therefor = 13.3% to 15% taxable investment return. It's an even bigger difference here in CA with the nation's 2nd highest state income tax rates and cap gains figured at ordinary income rates to boot.

[Magius]

I am starting to build a spreadsheet for evaluation of proposals for my upcoming PV project in SoCal. If you are willing, I would like to see your Google Sheet, or is it so tightly tied to Florida PoCos that it couldn't easily be adapted to SCE?

My sheet is very specific to the central Florida area, as it contains a solar production model based on data extracted from PVWatts. In addition, the financial model is based on OUC's net metering policy, which is much friendlier than any other utility around. That second part doesn't really matter unless you're going to produce a lot more power than you consume, in which case it will significantly overestimate the financial benefits of doing so. The first part though, with the weather data, pretty much makes my sheet useless outside of central Florida.

Either way, I'm happy to share it, and I just remembered that this forum doesn't do PMs, so I guess I just have to drop the link here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m05RqDZ2hSzxSfd-1SmF7n4zKLZyPsq_kvOjNYs5MEI/edit?usp=sharing

It's shared read only, so just make a copy on your own Google Drive and see if there's anything of value you can borrow from it. If anyone else wants to give it a scan and give me any feedback I'd appreciate it. There are likely to be a couple bugs left, so if you find one please let me know. I created this to help a bunch of my neighbors who are interested in going solar. I had my own sheet in Excel that I used before buying my system, but it was complicated to use, required a ton of data entry and had zero instructions. I had to manually create a new version of it for each neighbor that I was helping. This one was built to be much more user friendly and require far less input, at the expense of a little accuracy. For modeling my own solar installation, the Google Sheet comes out to within 1% of the original Excel, so well worth the ease of use IMHO.

[Nethers]

Absolutely would be willing to fill out your sheet. I don't mind sharing my info and the original solar city proposal was a pretty poor effort at $136/mo for 8.4kW. I found out that the salesman can submit counter company proposals to a best value guarantee from corporate and renegotiate the numbers.

The final pricing was a tad higher than ESA.

[brucet9]

Seems I'm late to notice this post, but maybe I can still help. Nethers, do you happen to be in OUC territory? If so, I have a calculator in Google Sheets that you could use to estimate your production, payback, and other financial metrics for both purchase and loan options. Message me and I'll send you the link.

I am starting to build a spreadsheet for evaluation of proposals for my upcoming PV project in SoCal. If you are willing, I would like to see your Google Sheet, or is it so tightly tied to Florida PoCos that it couldn't easily be adapted to SCE?

[Magius]

I actually contacted ESA about their COOP to get that pricing, but Solar City countered another competitor's bid, so I went with them. As I will be financing it for 20 years, the 20 year full coverage seemed preferable to a 12 year with ESA. I am in Duke Territory. I plan to be within 5% of my bill.

I figured that ESA quote was co-op pricing. I'm surprised you were able to get that from them so long after the co-op closed, but good to know. I'm also surprised that you found the Solar City option to be cheaper than that offer, but it sounds like it must have been a great deal. Congrats! I've been helping a lot of my neighbors plan for solar, sanity check quotes, negotiate w/ installers, etc. and I've only ever seen one Solar City proposal, but it was by far the worst proposal I've ever seen. It showed (by SC's calculations, which in my estimation were somewhat optimistic, like most proposals) that the homeowner would actually pay *more* for the solar loan than they would save in energy costs, so for the first 20 years they were just going deeper into the negatives. Then in the 21st year, she would start making money for herself, and eventually break even around year 25-26. These are the kind of traps unsuspecting homeowners tend to fall into, and I'm not trying to single out SC as the only purveyor of such schemes.

If you're interested, I could still shoot you a link to my calculator and you can plug in the values from SC's proposal to get a (more realistic IMHO) second opinion on your expected benefits from going solar. You wouldn't be sharing any data with me, you just make a copy of my Google Sheet on your own Drive and play with it to your heart's content. Most solar proposals use highly optimistic figures to exaggerate the rate of return and such, and most homeowners don't know how to double check the figures. For example, SC's quotes do not account for panel degradation over time, so your production in year 25 is assumed to be 100% of your production in year 1. This is not realistic, and while it's a "small" effect, it adds up quite a bit over that time scale. In any case, congrats again and I hope it all works out!

[SunEagle]

I actually contacted ESA about their COOP to get that pricing, but Solar City countered another competitor's bid, so I went with them. As I will be financing it for 20 years, the 20 year full coverage seemed preferable to a 12 year with ESA. I am in Duke Territory. I plan to be within 5% of my bill.

So what is the estimated final installed cost and how many whats is this Solar City system?

[Nethers]

Seems I'm late to notice this post, but maybe I can still help. Nethers, do you happen to be in OUC territory? If so, I have a calculator in Google Sheets that you could use to estimate your production, payback, and other financial metrics for both purchase and loan options. Message me and I'll send you the link. You just plug in some simple data from those quotes you got and it does the rest. If you're not on OUC, but you're in "central Florida", it will still work well enough, *unless* you're looking at a system that regularly over-produces power. If you're going for a system that only offsets say 90% of your consumption and you still pay a small bill every month the calculator will be alright, but if you expect to run a negative electric bill for months at a time, then the calculations are grossly different between OUC (who is awesome) and the other greedy utilities

BTW, the quote you got from ESA is quite good ($2.12/W). It appears they extended you something similar to OC co-op pricing, even though the co-op closed out months ago..? In comparison, every other quote you got is particularly high ($2.61 to $3.50). I wouldn't pay more than $2.25/W in this area for that equipment, but you have to be prepared to negotiate heavily for it. You should be able to get a great ROI from the ESA price, if you size the system correctly. Let me know if I can help with anything.

I actually contacted ESA about their COOP to get that pricing, but Solar City countered another competitor's bid, so I went with them. As I will be financing it for 20 years, the 20 year full coverage seemed preferable to a 12 year with ESA. I am in Duke Territory. I plan to be within 5% of my bill.

[Magius]

Seems I'm late to notice this post, but maybe I can still help. Nethers, do you happen to be in OUC territory? If so, I have a calculator in Google Sheets that you could use to estimate your production, payback, and other financial metrics for both purchase and loan options. Message me and I'll send you the link. You just plug in some simple data from those quotes you got and it does the rest. If you're not on OUC, but you're in "central Florida", it will still work well enough, *unless* you're looking at a system that regularly over-produces power. If you're going for a system that only offsets say 90% of your consumption and you still pay a small bill every month the calculator will be alright, but if you expect to run a negative electric bill for months at a time, then the calculations are grossly different between OUC (who is awesome) and the other greedy utilities

BTW, the quote you got from ESA is quite good ($2.12/W). It appears they extended you something similar to OC co-op pricing, even though the co-op closed out months ago..? In comparison, every other quote you got is particularly high ($2.61 to $3.50). I wouldn't pay more than $2.25/W in this area for that equipment, but you have to be prepared to negotiate heavily for it. You should be able to get a great ROI from the ESA price, if you size the system correctly. Let me know if I can help with anything.

[J.P.M.]

When we bought the house I upgraded pool pump to the variable speed (Pentair 011018, highly recommend) and switched 90% of the lights to LED starting from 'high traffic' ones first. Both of them paid for themselves within 4-8 months: our bill varied from $300 to $500 in AC months. Now it is $100 to $300 respectively and I don't hunt anyone to turn off the lights. LEDs and pump contributed probably equally to the savings. Making computers go to sleep if not in use for lengthy periods of time also saved a piece. Now I'm at the point where further savings would make life inconvenient and there's no 'low hanging fruit' left so to speak.

Nicely done. The ROI or payback on what you did is most probably a lot better/sooner than a PV addition and so good first steps to consider prior to any solar energy efforts. In the long run, not using power is almost always less expensive than buying or supplying more of it.

[max2k]

My system is a 10kW and my annual household electricity consumption is about 15,222 kWh. As far as reducing my current consumption, except for the crazy pool, I think I do a pretty good job of considering ways to save electricity. My Dad used to brow beat my sister and I to turn off light switches back in the 1960s. You don't grow up with that and not consider how much power is being used for what purpose.

When we bought the house I upgraded pool pump to the variable speed (Pentair 011018, highly recommend) and switched 90% of the lights to LED starting from 'high traffic' ones first. Both of them paid for themselves within 4-8 months: our bill varied from $300 to $500 in AC months. Now it is $100 to $300 respectively and I don't hunt anyone to turn off the lights. LEDs and pump contributed probably equally to the savings. Making computers go to sleep if not in use for lengthy periods of time also saved a piece. Now I'm at the point where further savings would make life inconvenient and there's no 'low hanging fruit' left so to speak.

[sensij]

Your idea about self-installing sounds like a great one. You know equipment well and you probably already know some online suppliers that offer terrific pricing. Where I live, there is no permit fee for owner-builder solar, but you must have a licensed electrical engineer wet stamp the drawings. If you need it, I have a contact who can do that for less than $250. You probably already know to check the main panel before you buy to be sure the bus bars are not center-tapped and that there is enough capacity to meet the 120% rule.

That is a great price for permits. For the city of San Diego, the difference in permit cost between plans submitted by someone "certified" or not is $175, so the net difference working with your guy is only $75... totally worth it, except for those with a masochistic streak who refuse to pay for anything they can do themselves.

I have a thread going on the installation, here:

https://www.solarpaneltalk.com/forum/solar-panels-for-home/solar-panels-for-your-home/345967-diy-self-install-in-san-diego-7-84-kw-for-1-30-w

[brucet9]

Maybe, but last year, I unexpectedly moved less than 2 years after putting up my first array, and was given $0 for it in multiple appraisals performed to establish the property value at that time. My buddy put up a system the same time I did, his plans changed even sooner and he moved out less than 1 year later. That first system is a big loss for me, but I still love and believe in the technology... I'm self installing on my current home, to further reduce the cost and lower the financial risk.

I see where you are coming from now. It appears that appraisers are supremely lazy where it comes to solar. I talked to one who said he applies a fixed $10,000 for solar. When I pointed out that solar arrays differ in value due to varying outputs, he just said "it's too much trouble to calculate that." My realtor friend said that owners have to spoon-feed the information to appraisers, or even better, find their own appraiser who understands solar. Several realtors I have talked to all agree that solar properties sell much faster than similar non-solar ones.

Your idea about self-installing sounds like a great one. You know equipment well and you probably already know some online suppliers that offer terrific pricing. Where I live, there is no permit fee for owner-builder solar, but you must have a licensed electrical engineer wet stamp the drawings. If you need it, I have a contact who can do that for less than $250. You probably already know to check the main panel before you buy to be sure the bus bars are not center-tapped and that there is enough capacity to meet the 120% rule.

[sensij]

That isn't at all a like comparison. I'd never suggest an old system should add value to a property but to say a 10% return on PV is the same as only earning back the initial investment is a bit hyperbolic.

Maybe, but last year, I unexpectedly moved less than 2 years after putting up my first array, and was given $0 for it in multiple appraisals performed to establish the property value at that time. My buddy put up a system the same time I did, his plans changed even sooner and he moved out less than 1 year later. That first system is a big loss for me, but I still love and believe in the technology... I'm self installing on my current home, to further reduce the cost and lower the financial risk. I'm hoping that I stick around long enough to sort of dollar cost average my whole solar investment across both properties into the black, but we'll see. There are already some new paths opening up that could result in another move in a year or two...

Planning on 7 years or 12 years into the future invites a lot of unknowns. For some, it works out in the long run, but I bet there are a lot of systems that have gone up in the past couple years whose owners would have been better off financially putting the money somewhere else.