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Originally Posted by DallasGuy
I haven't priced out home solar systems at all. I was just curious, at what point will home solar systems be mass produced and marketed at an affordable price?...and there would be companies available to install them for the average consumer? (say, $10,000 or less for a system that would create enough electricity to run the average house and cover most of their electricity usage, assuming an area of the country that is fairly sunny) Are systems like this available now? At what cost?
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I looked into a home system about a year or so ago and found that it really didn't make sense economically for me to do one. I didn't run a sensitivity analysis, but IIRC the key reasons it didn't work for me were:
* Cheap electricity. I think I pay around 5 cents per KWH here in Idaho, and that's before the $21 in credits I get for letting the local power company slap a choke on my AC unit in the summer.
* Not enough sun. Which corresponds to not enough power generated.
* Too high usage. I'm fairly careful with my energy usage, and even with being careful I still use enough electricity to require about $15K - $20K in panels.
* Crummy tax breaks on the state level. I think the situation is better in CA and HI, and maybe elsewhere as well.
Also, I wasn't willing to scrounge for panels the way Nords was. I poked around on the Internet and found some reasonably cheap panels, but I priced things out based on buying new panels from the manufacturer.
2Cor521
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