Electric-Car Owners Hard Hit by Massive California Power Shutdown

I bet they do.

 

The BrightSave Monthly plan is a 20-year lease agreement with, you guessed it, monthly solar payments. During those 20 years, Sunrun owns and maintains the solar panels, but your utility bill reaps the rewards of solar production. However, since the company owns the panels, you are not eligible for tax credits.

The BrightSave Prepaid plan is a solar lease you pay in full from the get-go. It comes with a 20-year solar panel warranty as well as Sunrun monitoring and maintenance. Once again, since it is a lease, you are not eligible for solar tax credits.

When you opt for the BrightBuy plan, you purchase the solar system in full – this makes you the sole owner of the system. With this plan, you qualify for all solar tax incentives, and you don’t pay monthly solar installation payments. In addition, the solar panels are under warranty through their manufacturer.

The BrightAdvantage plan is a solar loan, which is often a more feasible way to own your solar panels. This loan allows you to apply for tax credits, and as with the BrightBuy plan, your solar panel warranty period is set by the manufacturer.

Note one must have enough of an income to be able to use the tax credits and in many cases homeowners are not eligible for tax credits, they are not rebates, also with a 20 year lease, if the home is put on the market the new owners must take over the lease, if it can be transferred, or else it must be paid in full before closing.

On top of that the system must be covered by the homeowners insurance with the solar company added as an additional insured which raises the policies premium, then there is the cost of permitting and the installation of a grid tie meter, both of which must be paid by the homeowner.

Once one cuts through all fine print, solar in many cases has negative ROI and I'm not into tossing money down the tubes more so out here where subscribers are members of the cooperative and being as the cooperative is non-profit are electricity is already very inexpensive at, $.13 per KWh and being a nonprofit, at the end of the year we get a rebate if they overcharged us for power throughout the year.

 

Unless it is converted to D.C. and then back to A.C. the loss's would be massive.

 

Crescent Dunes if filing for bankruptcy and Redstone hasn't been fully funded yet and for what it is worth most all of the DOE projects in the U.S. have either gone into bankruptcy or shut down.

 

While not applicable to AZ, in Florida one of the major problems with solar is algae growth under the panels due to the panels blocking the UV from the sun, after a few years it really gets into the shingles and destroys them causing the roof to leak and a lot of homeowners are discovering their roofing warranty doesn't cover the damage the panels are causing.

So down come the panels and a new roof gets installed.

 

Nobody said it was easy.
When I listen to you I can't figure out how a million homes have solar.

 

Even the mold has mold in Florida.

 

It comes with the tropics or swamp.

 

And you're back to the full blown power plant that only sells electricity 25% of the time.

 

I'm on the Gulf Coast and my wind coverage alobe cost $2500 a year. How much is that gong to increase with $40,000 worth of solar panels up there?

 

Pay me for what and what does that have to do with the standby power generation that is not selling electricity as it stands by, how is that paid for?

 

Which from what I read is not the exception for these HUGE power generating projects. They are proving to be to inefficient and too costly and still cannot provide steady reliable power. That new projects are turning away from such schemes to more specialized and localized systems. We are NOT going to power our cities and manufacturing and transportation with solar.

 

All money exchanged for energy is "tossing it down the tubes," you realize.

If you want to make money generating power, you are out of luck. It's not something you can easily do. If you need power and want to exchange money for it, then solar or a local utility hook up is what you need. I get what you are saying, but looking at solar panels as an investment, which may be your point too, is dumb. They provide value in that they generate power than consumers demand. They are a consumer good, not an investment.

 

That's one of the problems with solar which is commonly left out by those promoting it, by the time a system owner breaks even the panels have nearly reached the end of their life and will need to be replaced, and in areas like South Florida rooftop panels take lightning hits and that can wreck not only the panels by fusing out the jumpers between the cells, but also burn up the inverter(s).

Utilities avoid as much as possible buying on demand, as it is very expensive to do so, most power is bought on long term contracts designed to backfill plants that are scheduled to go offline for maintenance, and by far the most common method for backing up solar and wind are peakers commonly installed at the farm which requires bringing a pipeline for natural gas or fuel oil to the farm.

 

It's still an investment, if I am going to put $15K into a system I expect that system to supply me with more than $15K in one way or the other over a reasonable amount of time, if that's not going to happen I'll take my money and invest it somewhere else.

 

So anything you spend 15k or more on you treat as an investment? I bought a car for 30k and it's no investment. Your expectations will preclude you from buying solar panels and possibly many other things as well. Do you put the same expectation on a gas furnace or any other energy type appliance? New windows? Few of these things pay back your money if any. They are all goods you purchase and used thus decreasing their value.

 

For the most part yes.

It's wise to view them as such, I buy a vehicle based on what it will do for me, in 2011 I decided to replace my truck it was 10 years old and had 175K miles on it, my choices where refined by what could I get that would last another decade or so for the least amount of money, in the end the decision was a E-350 extended van, it will last another decade has the capacity I need for hauling and a reasonable MPG. We considered a Transit Connect but I decided it simply wasn't going to last long enough to pay me back what it cost and then some.

Which is good it keeps me from buying things I really don't need.

Yes, two years back I decided to replace my A/C unit, the old one was a 5 ton R22 with a low SEER, it was replaced with a Rheem 5 ton with a 16 SEER, plus a Rheem propane fired furnace, my summer savings are $300 per year for electric and having gone from a electric heat strip to propane saves me $375 in electric, in the end that investment of $3700 will pay for itself in just under 6 years since these devices have a normal lifespan of 15 years that investment will pay me $6K over the life of the system.

Same method, switch from single pane to double pane solar reduction windows and here we get the benefit of lower electric bills and hurricane protection which qualifies us for a reduction in our homeowners insurance.

Only if one buys junk with little or no residual value.

 

And in the end it makes little difference when you look at the bigger picture.

This is a screen shot of the 13 state SE grid, solar is barely a slice of the pie.

Coal, gas and nuke make up the lions share of power being moved around on this section of the grid.

 

That's why people are working on storage. I mean really the problem is really pretty simple, the only challenge is cost. It wouldn't surprise me to see some power company to use it's excess to heat the salts instead of the sun. They will figure it out.

 

Half a tank of gas in a regular car will get you somewhere with electricity. A 35 hour charge of a Nissan Leaf might do that same. Not quite the same boat son.

 

Different in California.

 

It will factor in certainly but so would anything you added that increases the homes value.

What state are you in?

Wind prices have dropped considerably in Florida, I can't speak for other states but it pays to shop around. I'm in the business and only those on a barrier island are getting hit with higher/separate wind policies, everyone else is getting pretty favorable rates. With that said I pay about $2400 total for wind/hazard/flood for 280K dwelling. (a wind/hazard package and a separate flood)

 

Can't tell, there is no legend posted.

 

Alabama and yes they have dropped it used to $3600. My other coverages are $500. My wind has to go through Lloyd's of London and increasing that for the $40,000 is going to be a chunk of change that has to added to the cost of recovery and ongoing cost comparisons.

 

They haven't and the attempts they have tried have not panned out, sorry but "oh we'll figure it out" is the the basis for future planning. The challenge is cost that does not increase cost and use up valuable land resources. And you're back to fossil fuel with your plants that somehow have all this excess capacity just sitting there waiting to heat up salt.