So much for solar panels

It's been more than five years since I first started toying with the idea of putting solar panels on our roof. The first time I attempted to estimate the cost of a solar array, I found that it would cost something like $10,000, or a little over $7,000 with the 30% tax credit available at the time, and would take about 11 years to pay for itself. Given that we were already able to buy renewable energy through the NJ Clean Power Choice program for only around $5 extra per month on our electric bill, it seemed to make most sense to wait and see if the prices dropped.

A year later, I got some quotes on a solar energy system. The cost was still around $7,000 after credits, but factoring in the rebates we could receive from our utility from putting clean power into the grid, it looked like solar would be a good value anyway; if we paid for the system up front, it could net us around $11,000 over the course of 20 years. But we hesitated to take the plunge, because we knew that our roof was pretty old and would need replacing within a few years. That job would be a much bigger hassle if we had solar panels up there, so it seemed to make sense to wait until after doing the roof before looking seriously into installing a solar power system of our own. The prices were still falling, so it looked like we had nothing to lose by waiting.

Well, this past spring, after a contractor alerted us that our roof was on its last legs, we finally replaced it. (Turns out that job may not be done yet, as we discovered just this week that our brand-new roof is leaking, but that's a story for another post.) So when we ran into a guy in Home Depot last week who was keen to send someone to our house to give us a quote on solar power, we figured, sure, it couldn't hurt to take the meeting.

So, a week or so ago, a guy from Sunrun showed up at our house. After looking at our electricity usage, he warned that we probably wouldn't be able to save that much with solar panels, simply because our current electric usage was so low. (I had already told the guy we met in the store that our average monthly electric bill was less than $40, but I guess he was being paid based on the number of people he signed up.) But then he said, hey, many people did this just for the environmental benefits, and it wouldn't cost any more this way, so he might as well give us a quote. Except when he tried to enter our numbers into his estimator app, it didn't work. He called up headquarters and found out what the problem was: We did not meet the minimum size requirements for a Sunrun system.

Turns out, at least in PSE&G's territory, solar installers are not allowed to give a customer a system that provides more than 100 percent of their power needs, because then PSE&G would have to pay those customers more each year for their contributions to the grid than they could collect from them. (You would think they'd consider that a plus, since it would help them to increase the percentage of the energy in the grid that's renewable, as state law requires, but apparently that's not the way they like to do it.) And since our electric usage was so low, a system meeting 100 percent of our needs would simply be too small a system to be worth installing.

So this seems like a pretty simple and conclusive answer to the whole solar question. Even if a solar power system could save us money in theory, in practice, there's no way for us to get one. So I guess we can stop worrying about it and simply continue paying 12.85 cents per kWh to Ambit Energy, our third-party power provider, for its wind-generated energy. Or, better still, maybe we should go ahead and dump our month-to-month plan for a two-year commitment, which gets us a guaranteed 3 percent off the price per kWh we'd be playing with PSE&G. The only reason we didn't sign up with this plan in the first place is that we thought we might want to dump Ambit for solar panels within the next two years; if that option is off the table, we have nothing to lose.