What You Can Learn From My First Year With Solar Power
- by StreetsMN
- Oct 14, 2024
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David Brauer • October 14, 2024
We got solar power in 2023, but I swore I’d wait for a year of data before evangelizing in print. That day has come!
Highlights first:
Our installer (All Energy Solar) delivered the project on time and on bid despite unexpected obstacles.
Our system produced about 6% less than they predicted. I’ll explain why, and why I’m not bothered by it.
Payback looks like 20 years, maybe less, but it matters less than you think.
Batteries! Expensive, don’t help payback and you should strongly consider one.
Maybe do this soonish, because American politics is messed up.
A bit about me: I’m a former journalist, married to a lawyer, and I live in Minneapolis. Thanks to my wife, I get to spend money — but I was a hand-to-mouth freelancer, so I’m painfully careful about it. Let’s put it this way: I have 32 years of Quicken records.
I also believe climate change is the gravest threat to my newly born grandson. If I’m going to crack open my wallet, it’s to reduce my carbon footprint.
Some numbers: Power outages where the battery took over: Three.
The last time we paid Xcel was February 2024. Our 16 420-watt panels produce twice what we used before solar. We “oversized” so we can electrify our house. We don’t yet have an electric car, heat or hot water. We added an electric heat pump a month before solar, getting central air for the first time.
Buyers often focus on payback. Ours is roughly 20 years, if you divide $20,000 solar by $1,000 savings. You’ll probably be paid back quicker. Our installation was more complicated and therefore more expensive; 10 of 16 panels went on the garage, requiring a trench through our backyard. A neighbor’s perfect south-facing roof took two days to install; ours, six.
The dreaded trench, which connected 10 solar panels on the garage (white building) to the house. God willing, you will not need this. Photo by David Brauer.
We could’ve sought lower bids. You don’t have to go with our installer, All Energy Solar, which is competitive but not cheap. But then, the electrical inspector might not tell you, “You used All Energy? I almost don’t need to look at it.”
Despite sleek panels and cool batteries, it’s about the labor. All Energy uses its own electricians and installers; their robust customer-support staff was made for obsessives like me. I’ve general contracted two full home renovations, and All Energy was simply as reliable as anyone I’ve used. When trenching took days longer than estimated, they didn’t raise the price. Our inspector mentioned fly-by-night outfits from the South that breeze in on a hail of doorknob hangars, leaving shoddy work.
Inventory your own psychology going in. We weren’t going to be stupid financially, but we valued quality and trust and were willing to pay for it.
The Install Process
A disclaimer: If you use All Energy and tell them you read this, I’ll get a referral payment. They didn’t put me up to this. I mostly care about you getting solar if it works for you. If you call and don’t mention me, no guilt. If you use another installer, great — what’s best for you. But if you want to drop my name as sort of a tip-jar thing, that’s appreciated. It won’t raise your cost. It will shorten my payback.
In 2022, I asked a friend who worked in the business for recommendations. “All Energy,” he replied, adding one other company.
All Energy had signs all over my neighborhood — Harris-Walz levels. They responded to my email right away. I heard from the other company a month later. I didn’t wait.
An All Energy rep interviewed me via Zoom on April 3, 2023. A few days later, their drone was over my house. I signed a purchase agreement April 10. By May 12 we had an engineering plan.
Why a month? It’s a big project!
Does your sagging garage roof need buttressing? (Ours didn’t.)
How exactly will power get into your house?
Do the panels really fit where the drone says?
Where on the wall does a Borg Collective of inverters, control boxes and sub-panels go?
Tesla battery (lower left). If our basement floods, the battery works until water is above the logo. Smaller white box and gray box connect to main panel (right) for the whole-home backup. Photo by David Brauer.
Then there’s the power company, which signs off on everything. This might be the most excruciating part. You’re jerked from the warm bosom of All Energy to the cold reality of a utility that doesn’t love what you’re doing. Xcel requires an interconnection agreement to make sure you don’t fry the grid; All Energy prepares the filing. The utility gives itself 20 business days — a month to you and me — to deem it “complete.” They wound up taking three months, until mid-August, for reasons I still don’t understand. Then they gave themselves another five business days to email for my signature. From there, it moved quickly.
By September 5, 2023, the system was in. It took another two weeks for electrician tweaks and inspector sign-offs. On September 20, new smart meters told me exactly how much my house used and how much the panels generated. One problem: None of the juice went to the house or the grid. Xcel had to flip some last switches, called “commissioning.” I waited eight excruciating days to play with my new toy. I sent my first 16 kWh to the kilowatt commons September 28.
How it Works
The first year has been uneventful. No service calls. No screw-ups. Replanting a 75-foot-long 6-inch strip of our lawn and garden sucked, but we knew that going in. The panels are silent, and so is the battery. You stop noticing the wall of boxes and pipe. Xcel had three brief outages, and every time the battery kicked in seamlessly. Because I’m a geek, I enjoy getting the production and use numbers every day. Well, most days. Sunny days are even happier because LOOK AT THAT METER RUN BACKWARDS. Winter? Sadder because snow-covered panels produce zero.
Sales folk will tell you snow slides off panels relatively quickly. It will — if your roof is steep. Our garage pitch is quite shallow, so the snow and ice stuck around like a bad party guest. Winter production was the big reason All Energy’s prediction missed — off 25 percent November through March. The rest of the year was 4 percent more than predicted.
Snowy months were below predicted (black line); other months beat prediction by 4 percent.
Estimates aren’t perfect. If you’re payback-obsessed, understand your installer’s assumptions. Then back out 10 percent as a cushion.
Fortunately, winter production is at most a third of annual production — you make electrical hay in the summer. Veterans tell me this summer was below-average (rainy) so future years may come closer to that 7,000 kWh forecast.
Panels do lose efficiency over time, but only a few percentage points. I don’t hear veterans complain about this. My summer kilowatt hours are only 16 cents apiece, so if you’re 100 short, it’s only 16 bucks. (Electricity is a few cents per kWh cheaper in the winter.)
Your electric bill might be the most noticeable change. It’s longer, listing how much you send, likely ending in “credit,” not “payment due.” It adds up: As of September 2024, Xcel owes me $260. I’ll get an annual true-up check or the credit will offset wintry months where I owe.
Our August bill. We produced so much that Xcel charged us nothing except meter charges and a few fees — which the $54.92 credit more than offset.
We haven’t had our system long enough to experience regular maintenance, but a few notes:
Don’t get a roof rake. “Oh, if I just remove this snow, I’ll rake in the bucks.” No, dummy. You’ll scratch your panels, break your neck, and winter watts are paltry anyway.
How crappy are your shingles? If your roof is old, you’ll first want to fix it, because it’s more expensive to take panels off and reinstall them. We were seven years into 40-year shingles, so we went for it. A good installer will ask.
Do contact your insurance company. You’re increasing the house value, or at least what your insurance company must replace. Panels are tough, but can be damaged.
Does solar increase re-sale value? Fans think “of course,” but not every homebuyer agrees. A wise Realtor told me, “Solar is like a pool — some buyers are super-excited; others see a headache.”
The Battery Equation
Our greener-home journey began in 2007, when we ditched our asbestos-caked octopus boiler, a big dumb gas vessel that once burned coal, lit by a pilot light as eternal as JFK’s flame.
The new computer-controlled boiler boosted efficiency from 60% to 95%. My planet-conscious self was smug — until I realized wintertime survival depended on my electricity never going out. “Someone should build a battery backup for the computer,” I thought, but years of searching only turned up guys who daisy-chained car batteries next to the fieriest thing in their homes.
Over the next 16 years, we had a few teeth-chattering nights; I eventually bought a cute gas stove for the living room. The stove didn’t depend on electricity and would cut the chill if we were in survival mode.
So when I had a chance to back up my entire house safely and get a 30 percent tax credit, I jumped.
The fully charged battery — a Tesla Powerwall, #sorrynotsorry — spits out 10 kWh, about what we use in a day. If we turn off non-critical stuff, we can keep our boiler, freezer and refrigerator going for three or four days. (Lights and internet also can stay on — they use next to nothing.)
As we electrify our house, decisions will get tougher. Heat pumps are awesome, but heating swallowed 40 kWh a day when we played with it in November. In fact, the heat pump is the only thing excluded from the battery backup because startup draws too much. We stored a room air conditioner for summertime emergencies; it draws less.
Still, we’re not limited to the battery’s 10 kWh in a crisis. Solar panels charge the battery; this summer, production peaked at 36.6 kWh. Even with less sun, you could emergency-power your house for weeks.
A smart meter screenshot of our highest production day. The house used 7 kWh directly from the panels, and the panels sent the grid 29.5 kWh that the house couldn’t use.
Another smart meter view: When the sun didn’t shine, the house drew 3.8 kWh from the grid. From about 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., the panels produced so much we exported 25.7 kWh for the day.
I guess I’m an energy prepper. We haven’t had an outage of more than a day in years. The three outages since installation lasted 31 minutes total. Still, I’m not betting on continued reliability, with threats like climate change, public-sphere disinvestment, brain-dead energy sucks like bitcoin mines. Winter still exists.
And here’s the battery’s best use-case: In an outage, solar can’t power your home without one. “Wait!” you might exclaim. “I’m generating my own power. Surely I can use it?”
Nope. When the grid breaks, the utility breaks that connection, for safety reasons. (They don’t want home brew coursing through lines they’re fixing.) Your panels still produce electricity, but the kilowatts go nowhere.
A solar-battery system is more dynamic. The grid can feed the house, but the panels and battery can, too.
The dynamic battery system during regular operation. Software controls the flow based on your optimization settings. Graphic by David Brauer.
If the grid fails, you still have power. You’re literally off-grid.
When the grid goes down, power still flows to the house from the panels through the battery (or the battery alone, if charged enough). Graphic by David Brauer.
Batteries produce zero electricity, so provide zero payback. Think of them instead as a service, providing reliability, resilience and peace of mind. You might pay less than the $11,000 we did. We got a $500 rebate from Tesla, but Minnesota utilities are offering $2,500 to $3,500 in some cases.
Even better, your lithium-ion slab may yet contribute to the bottom line.
Utilities are experimenting with networked home batteries — known as a “virtual power plant.” They pay to rent all or a portion of your battery and coordinate power sent to the grid when they need it. You can still use your battery the rest of the time.
Xcel is on the verge of time-of-day pricing, with lower hourly rates during low demand and higher at peak (7 to 10 p.m.). Battery owners can avoid the grid during pricey times and recharge during cheap hours (midnight to 6 a.m.), lowering their average overall cost.
Right now, I use my battery only for backup, but it would probably power the house during the priciest three hours.
Today, when I send Xcel power, they pay me what they would charge if I were buying. It’s called zero net metering and incentivizes people to send as much power as possible to the grid.
Utilities hate it, claiming home solar is too expensive and wrongly timed. Solar-rich California recently slashed reimbursement rates 75%.
My battery is currently 100% backup; my panels feed the grid for the 16-cents-per-kWh bill credit. If I got 4 cents instead, I’d feed my home first. I wouldn’t earn the 4 cents, but I’d avoid Xcel’s pricier grid charge.
The top numbers mean the battery is only used if the grid goes down. If the battery regularly powered our house, we could control whether to tie it to darkness or hourly/seasonal prices.
Effectively, California solar buyers must buy a battery or sell excess power for a deep discount.
The other policy danger, I concede, is speculative. Joe Biden got the federal 30 percent tax credit that makes solar purchases pay off; it’s law until 2032. As I write this, Donald Trump and Republicans are demonizing alternative energy and vowing to undo any Biden energy policy. I didn’t want to gamble on this or any election — a small reason I jumped last year.
Perhaps — hopefully! — you’re less fearful than me. Everyone has different motivations, resources and psychology. But solar really has brought peace of mind, and I can feel even more joyful when I look at my grandson.
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