Is Solar Worth It? My experience after two years owning Solar Panels

hey everyone after two years of owning solar panels i wanted to look back at my old estimates and my current bills and determine if it really was worth it financially to purchase solar panels and i figured what better place to do this review than up on my roof with my solar panels so before i go into the financials i want to first talk a little bit about how i got started and the installation process it was about six months after i purchased my house when salesmen started to come by and try to pitch me on the idea of doing solar because you know my house is a perfect candidate for solar and what i mean by that is that you know all houses aren't good candidates to have solar because there might be trees or other you know objects that block the sun from your house but my house is perfect because as you can see you know there's no trees anywhere blocking the sun and um yeah my house is also raised 16 feet off the ground so here's the frontal view of my house from the street and the best part is that you can't see any of those solar panels the third factor was you know being environmentally friendly and you know doing my part to i guess you know slow global warming down so if you look at my roof here you'll see that i have you know 28 panels up here on the big roof and then six panels down there on the smaller roof and the number of panels that you have is directly correlated to how much energy you produce for you know a given year so when the solar panel company comes out and does your estimate you typically give them your bills for the year and they see how many you know kilowatt hours your house uses for the year and then what they do is they try to match that amount with the output that they expect your solar panels to get so in my case i was using about 12 000 kilowatt hours for the year so that's the amount of solar that they wanted to generate for my house and how many panels that they gave me okay now let's get into the financial part of it so this is my contract with the installation company called trinity solar i think they're the biggest in new jersey where they were at the time and this is how much it cost but i financed through this company sunova so i had another another contract with sonova that you're looking at it right here um it was going to be 18 initial monthly payments of 180 and 77 cents per month over 25 years this beginning in month 19 is if an additional payment is not made so by that initial payment or additional payment they mean you get a tax credit from the government for 30 of your total cost so after my first year i received a check from the irs for 12 000 that goes to paying this off which is really nice so basically that check just goes directly to sanovo and it keeps my monthly payment at 180 so you do have to factor that into your cost and i have that in my spreadsheet but what's also nice is that they you know kind of give you an estimate of how many kilowatt hours your system is going to produce and then how many and then the yearly savings that you're going to have based on your bills so i also did this estimate and i'll pull up my spreadsheet now all right so here i have my google sheet and on the left hand side i have my costs and then column b is where i have my predicted which i did initially now is my actual so the first cost was just the total system cost of the 4120 the six percent interest there's that 30 percent tax credit that i talked about but what really matters is all of the payments that i have to sanovo so over the course of 25 years i'm making 300 payments of 180 77. so what that adds up to is this 54 231 so that's really what i'm paying and then you added in here is just that 30 tax credit which is kind of like free money so really what i'm paying to sanovo over the course of the 25 years is this 66 267. so that seems and it is a lot of money over the course of 25 years so now let's look at um you know what just my bill would have been over that same time period i calculated that on average my bill was 150 each month so 150 times 12 is 1800 so that's currently i'm not now i'm not taking into account what's probably going to happen as you know energy costs rise this will gradually increase as well over time but i didn't actually take that into account so if we take that 1800 and we multiply it you know times 25 we have 45 000 so you know what you're probably thinking is well you know if you it really would have only cost you 45 000 um over the course of 25 years and you're paying you know this 66 267 or you know without that tax credit you're really paying that 54 231 you know there's about you know nine thousand dollars so it isn't worth it and yes it wouldn't be worth it if it wasn't for these s-rex and s-rex stands for solar renewable energy certificate so these solar renewable energy certificates are basically an incentive for homeowners to you know have these solar systems because for every thousand kilowatt hours that are produced by your solar system you can get an s-rack and those s-rex can then be sold on an exchange for you know anywhere from 200 to 300 in certain states now why these exist is because certain states require a certain amount of their energy to come from renewable energy sources and a lot of the states don't produce nearly enough so what they need to do in order to meet their requirements is buy solar renewable or any kind of renewable energy from people who generate it so i'll bring up this illustration and says you know sarah has a five kilowatt solar power system so she'll generate five s-tracks a year or you know one s-rec per kilowatt then she sells them for two hundred dollars so she earns a thousand dollars you know selling those five strikes for two hundred dollars so she gets that money plus what she saves on her electric bill so i use this company or this exchange called flat exchange in new jersey and here you can see the prices that you can sell your s-trac depending on which year or month of generation if you look back at my spreadsheet here the state of new jersey when i signed my contract allowed for 15 years of you know selling these s-rex since then i know it's gone back down to to 10 i'm pretty sure murphy made it 10 our governor and yeah this is the average price that i'm putting in so i'm generating about 12 and a half s-racks per year so if we take that and we multiply 220 times twelve point six we get two thousand seven hundred and seventy dollars a a year um and you know that's not factoring if this you know keeps going up like um we saw in this graph here you see 2021 and 2020 i'm getting 223 which is nice so i just put 220 in there just kind of an average um although it's probably a little bit generous hopefully it'll keep going up but you never know so the amount of hysterex over the lifetime is you know that 15 times that 277 is 41 000. so now if i take that forty one thousand and i subtract that fifteen thousand uh which i calculated before i'm still getting a um a net positive of twenty six thousand dollars so you know i'm really saving myself twenty six thousand dollars by going with solar and you know it's all because of these these s-racks if you know these extracts you know we're in here it wouldn't even be close to um be worth it without the s-rex so it's definitely a huge factor in determining whether solar is worth it for you or not so that wraps it up i hope you enjoyed and learned something and if you have a similar experience please share it in the comments below or even if it's something different you want to add you have a different experience i'd be very interested in hearing from you have a good one

Channel: SuitTV

Views: 328,935

Rating: 4.6804261 out of 5

Keywords: Solar, SolarPanels, TrinitySolar, Finances, RenewableEnergy, SolarReview

Id: jUWheImfXo4

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020