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I also am in the process of completing a solar install to get the tax breaks expiring this year. Depending on total cost (i'm DIYing and didn't predict all expenses) I can pay it off in 5-7 years. My power bill is up 50% in one year, and has been increasing for years. With more datacenters taking up more power (which we pay for), the bill's only gonna increase. There is still time to complete a solar install yourself and get federal+state tax breaks. Call up your energy provider, get connected to their distributed generation department, and submit the forms/documentation/plans they require. Then you build your system, get it inspected, the utility approves it and completes the hookup. ChatGPT makes all this fairly easy. I can upload my forms and the process to GitHub if anyone wants to see the process for NY state. The simplest grid-tied system is solar panels + roof-mounting equipment + microinverters + a combiner box + a disconnect switch. This is enough to send solar power direct to the grid, assuming your microinverter supports the standards your power utility requires. You can do a PV+ESS (battery) system, but it's a ton more expensive (even assuming you DIY). It should be cheaper to do grid-tied projects, but many power utilities now mandate new standards for grid-tied devices that only the expensive inverters support. If you do off-grid (which I believe there's still some tax breaks for, depending), you can build a PV+ESS system much cheaper, as the off-grid equipment doesn't require the more expensive standards. We're talking $3.5k vs $9k for the same system. It would also be cheaper if we supported balcony solar the way Germany does. A big concern of mine is that poor people and people in apartments (~40% of Americans live in apartments) won't have the ability to supplement their bills with solar. If all the people with money and land/houses switch to solar, and the poor can't, the poor'll be propping up a big portion of the energy sector themselves, which is unsustainable. |