A friend at work mentioned a few days ago that he was interested in getting some solar panels. He's already taken a few steps to make his family more self-sufficient and less reliant on public utilities, and this is the next step.
I began to wonder what kind of money solar panels were going for. So I hit up my trusty source: eBay.
I did a search for “solar panels” and checked the completed listings for items that sold. I sorted from highest total price (final bid price plus shipping) to lowest. Here's what sold on the first 400 listings last night:
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This is a very rough calculation, of course. I took new and used, monocrystalline and polycrystalline, with and without extra stuff, with cracks and without, all different brands, and just took the total cost and divided it by the total wattage to get the cost per watt. The average of the 84 auctions: $3.59 per watt.
How fast do solar panels pay for themselves? To figure this out we need to know how much electricity would cost elsewhere. For us, it's 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Let's say that my power needs are 1 kw, 12 hours per day. One kilowatt of solar panels will cost me $3,590, plus installation, which I have no clue, but let's say that it brings up the cost to $5,000. So, there I go, I've paid for my power needs.
If I pay 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, that's $1.08 per 12 hours (day). Diving this into $5,000 gives me a payback time between 12 and 13 years. It's a pretty expensive alternative at those prices. Plus, I'm not even looking at power losses, cloudy days, tree shade, aging of the panels, etc. It's likely a better deal for people in sunnier states (and higher metered energy prices).
But on the other side of the equation, will power prices go up? Will it be rationed? Will it even be available? This gets back to my friend's original motivation: self-sufficiency. In any case, this is something to keep on the radar.
My analysis might use a little fine-tuning. Any other things that are important to consider?
If it’s about self sufficiency, being off-grid, then you also need to add batteries and a drip charge controller to the cost. Not cheap.
If you’re away from power lines, the cost of running a line can be as much as an alternative energy system. In that case, the choice is simple – pay to be your own power company.
Generally, having commercial electric power is a much better alternative for several reasons:
– commercial power has always been a good value
– most alternative energy systems, as you have shown, don’t have a reasonable payback period
– reliability of commercial power is very good
If your focus is self reliance, then that adds an element that’s hard to quantify. In my quest for energy independence, my plans include solar panels and wind turbines because here in Wyoming we have lots of sunshine all year long, and we have lots of wind.
The advantage of solar panels is their long life, high efficiency over their life, and no maintenance to speak of. Wind power is a nice 24 hour source of energy, but it can be maintenance intensive. My plan for more self reliance in the area of electricity is to start with solar panels first.
My system will be grid tied to offset the electric bill (regardless of the rising costs) and allow me to use or sell excess power. One thing is clear, the higher the price of energy, the higher the price of alternative energy products. There is no way to get away from that old supply and demand equation (unless you build your own wind turbine).
Clair
There are of course many factors to consider, cutting pollution, and being self sufficient I think are the major considerations. You can make the panels yourself and cut costs drastically, and there is much information out there to do this, just do your research…
Small and Micro Hydro systems are a way good way to generate green power. All power sources out there have their pros and cons, but hydropower does have a high efficiency rate.
Hydropower sites average 80% efficiency vs. Solar at 25% if its a good solar plant. Otherwise its around 15% efficiency.
When my family were looking to get our home into the solar panel age, we looked at all the alternatives and found out that building one was not as difficult as we had thought.
We found some great advice, a step by step guide and put our first one together in a weekend. We saved ourselves a bucket load of money and had some fun too.
An 81 y.o. neighbor of mine from my former home town of Manitowoc, WI, recently spent $56,000 for a 7,200 watt PV system. I did some quick number crunching and wrote to tell him that even with the 30% energy tax credit and a generous subsidy from “Focus on Energy” it would still take 25-30 years for the system to break even. His response?
“I can wait.”
There are lots of other things that factor into an appropriate calculation for solar power costs. For example, you can’t really use average power consumption as the metric for the amount of solar power that your panels will need to supply. If you want the solar panels to meet all of your power needs, you need to be looking at peak power — likely how much power you use on the hottest day of the year, during the hottest part of the day, if you have air conditioning (since that consumes more power than anything else in a normal home). Otherwise you’ll be subjecting yourself to more brownouts than California on public power.
Then, solar panels only provide power during sunlight hours, and work most efficiently on sunny days. Just because your panels are rate at 1 MWh doesn’t mean that they’ll produce 1 MWh on an overcast day. If you want power day and night, you need batteries, which aren’t cheap and will need to be replaced over time. (In the alternative, you can stay grid-tied and overproduce, so that you sell power to the power company during the day and purchase it at night. If you do this right, you can end up with a zero balance.)
Finally, most of the dohickies around the house will require AC power, and solar arrays only produce DC power (unless they have an inverter built in). So you’ll need an inverter, which adds to the time it takes for the solar panels to pay for themselves.
For us, living in a cheap-power state, when I ran the computations, the math didn’t add up. Another consideration is that the panels degrade over time, and will need to be replaced. When I worked out the calculations, even assuming price increases in our public power, the solar panels barely paid for themselves before they would need to be replaced — and that assumes paying cash for them (so no interest on buying the panels) and no cost for maintenance and repairs. So we’re still on public power.
In our case, for self-reliance, it seems like getting a solar panel just big enough to run our refrigerator and possibly the stove might be about right — but then the cost calculations are more expensive per watt. Haven’t tried running those numbers yet. In the meantime, the Sun Oven works great (when it’s sunny).
I think solar panels ca reduce the energy consumption in our home.Also it is one of the safest energy sources.
I did the math for Oregon, and came to a similar conclusion. Even with our 70% subsidy, unless I install the panels myself, I would not be able to break even in 40 years. The problem here is that electricity is $0.09 per kwh, and we only get four to five hours of sun per day on average. I’m excited to see the price go down for higher efficiency cells. Once the high volume manufacturers get ramped up, I think prices will drop by 30% or more.
Never mind, I found someone to install the panels cheap, and ended up getting 95% of the cost paid with subsidy. I got this just before the Oregon energy trust dropped the incentive, and just after solarworld dropped their panel price significantly.
Florida had subsidies going and I know someone that paid a lot of money for them, expecting the subsidy. After getting the panels and filing with the State, they got back to my friends and told them that there were no more funds available.