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Comment by jhpriestley | Hacker News Reader

Adding $30k to your mortgage would cost like $150 a month extra or so. It will produce about 15,000 kWh per month, which is about $150 off your electric bill.

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So basically I give up $30K now (or pay that, plus interest) for no net benefit until 30 years out?

That sounds terrible. That $30K would turn into $100k if I put away for retirement.

No, it's vice versa, you put $30k more on your mortgage and pay it out over 30 years with lowest interest rate. So theoretically it should come at no cost to you since your additional mortgage payment will be countered by smaller electricity bill. But of course that depends on your electricity usage, pricing and how much money is required for maintaining the system.

But in the end, there is no net benefit to you. So why would you do it?

Support green energy, being more independent in case of grid electricity blackouts. That's the point of Tesla's roof tiles (at least how it's supposed to be), if you get same looking house and around the same net price, why don't do it?

> being more independent in case of grid electricity blackouts

That's generally not the case in California, as we're net-metering here. Very few people install storage and transfer switches to handle blackouts.

That's only a wash if you never have to maintain them in the lifetime of the 30 year mortgage.

You don’t have to maintain them. Their warranty is 25 years, they’ll produce beyond that. It’s a no brainer.

Ok, this isn't "the thing" with solar panels, but: they're going to require maintenance, be subject to wiring issues, and you have to clean those bad boys.

Roof work is notoriously 'dangerous', and impacts people with mobility/age issues differently than most of us. The maintenance burden is more than just the warranty, and any cost calculations of power savings should account for those costs as well.

[Oh, and we should all be god enough at high school level physics to solve the "climate crisis" in a few hours...]

I disagree with your argument that panels need maintenance except for replacement of failed components under warranty, which would be done by the installer.

You disagree that solar panels need washing and that electrical installations in houses require maintenance over time? ... okie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Solar Is NOT Maintenance Free" -- https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2014/02/accelerating-u... -- "We like to think PV is maintenance free but it is not ... if you don’t do the maintenance, you can have sub-optimal asset performance."

https://www.wikihow.com/Maintain-a-Solar-Panel

https://www.civicsolar.com/support/installer/articles/snow-s...

Very pro-solar, but lost in all this is that people assume an astronomical amount of electricity use. Am I just odd?

In winter in SD (so no climate control needed) my electric bill was $12 a month. Solar's great and all but putting a 15kwh a month installation on the roof would be crazy.

in CA you need to for air con

Yes? That seems extraordinarily low. I live in Massachusetts with oil heat and only rare use of one window unit AC in the summer and I’m a bit over $100/mo which the electric company tells me is about average for houses of my size.

> Solar's great and all but putting a 15kwh a month installation on the roof would be crazy.

Do you mean 15kw per daylight hour install, or a 15kwh total per month install? Because 15kwh per month is a really small amount of power, that's roughly equivalent to running a single desktop PC for one hour per day.

That's hobby-kit amounts of electricity. A single 100w solar panel could almost produce 15kwh/month on it's own, in ideal sunlight conditions, and you can buy that for roughly $200 USD at retail.

Sorry, I misspoke! what I get for writing without adding.

I averaged about 90 watts in winter, around 2kwh a day, so 60 ish a month, so roughly eight or so bucks for the power with the rest from the odd fixed charge.

In summer I had one efficient window AC and would use about five times as much energy.

Do you mean 1,500 kWh/mo? Generating 15 MWh/mo would be a very large residential system. $150 for 15,000 kWh of electricity saved/returned would only be $0.01/kWh.

Why isn't everyone installing then? There is a net cost somewhere.

A ton of people are installing them! Only on hacker news is rooftop solar some kind of horrible socialist boondoggle.

edit: to answer your question more directly: many people just won't be bothered to install them or don't think of it, or can't get the financing easily. For some people the numbers don't work out, because their roof is old or they don't get enough sun or their electric bill is already low.

On the flip side, if you bought a house from an old engineer who converted the entire house to electric appliances, and you bring your own electric dryer, and you have a family of 4, and a/c, in California, rooftop solar is dead obvious.

So then I guess we've hit QED - If all that is true why is a legislative mandate desirable?

Same reason most people in Canada weren't installing geothermal until the federal government started subsidizing them: Inertia.

Despite what they may teach you in Econ 101, the efficient market hypothesis isn't an actually useful way of looking at human behaviour. It might work for modelling some of the actions of Goldman Sachs, but actual people are squishy and irrational.

That's a misrepresentation of the efficient market hypothesis. It does not rely on the assumption that humans are rational.

No, but it does assume the irrationality maps to a random distribution.

How could it not?

Cultural prejudice?

I don't think that prevents a random distribution, only some kinds of them. But I'm not expert in statistics, let alone the EMH.

> Why isn't everyone installing then? There is a net cost somewhere.

Because it is damn close to break even and would you spend money on something you didn't need just because it was good for the environment?

Most people don't expend effort for $0/month to $50/month in returns. Despite all the solar proponents, once you factor in interest/maintenance/etc, its probably pretty close to that.

We are probably 10 years from it being 100% obvious that all homes should have solar.

Because lots of people have tribally motivated objections. Or they don't have the cash on hand. Or they are landlords and won't do so until forced to.

But the actual cost has never been lower and energy prices are falling. There are downsides but they're very different.

Opportunity cost and the time value of money. You would likely be better off putting that money to work elsewhere.

Adding $30k to your mortgage would cost like $150 a month extra or so.

So instead of having ~$1800/yr going to your energy company's coffers, where they might use it to innovate and actually one day make clean energy cost effective, it should go straight to your bank's bottom line in the form of interest. While it may cost consumers the same amount, that sounds like a net negative to me.

So... You think we should forego installing a clean energy source that is available today and instead give that money to a company that does not provide clean energy in the hope that maybe they will provide the clean energy that we could have had today at some point in the future.

And your argument for that is... banks?

Energy providers in California do have clean energy options. They are also more efficient than individual solar installs.

If you one day want financially viable clean energy, there are certainly better places for that money to go than into your bank's pocket - such as to energy providers, who could then use that money for R&D.

Tell me how many banks are spending their profits doing clean energy research.

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