Replies

"My electric Co-op will buy power from home solar panels at the incremental cost of the power that the Co-op would then not buy. There is no net metering. Therefore, I would still buy 100% of the power from the Co-op at retail and sell back what I make at wholesale essentially. This would be an amazingly poor return project and use of my limited capital."

I agree 100% with your sentiment. However there are a couple of corrections to know about in case it impacts your decision on gaining a little bit of energy freedom from heavily gubment regulated utilities.

1. You can opt to not put power onto the grid (don't do "solar buyback"). In fact, I paid a little extra for my inverter (now two inverters) just to have the "no output" feature (some inverters call it "zero report"). Thus I don't pay the large monthly "solar fee" (as it's called among solar folks) to the utility just for the privilege of them paying me next to nothing for the power I'd sell them. Thus I don't pay the $129.84/month I'd have to pay for solar fees (on top of the $15.60 flat fees and taxes I and everybody else already pays in Alabama).

2. Whether or not you do the solar buyback, with solar you don't buy 100% of your power from the grid -- you buy only the power your solar and/or batteries don't provide.

End result for me: as far as my utility is concerned I'm not a solar user: I'm not charged any fees nor does the utility give me money nor do I have any weird regulations (all because I don't put power onto the grid). To them I'm a normal power consumer like you and everybody else except that I consume a lot less power from them. Only 8.6% of the power I need comes from the grid, I'm expecting my next bill to show I bought 164kWh from them this month -- the power company has no clue that I will have consumed an expected 1907 kWh this month. Over 1,800kWh of the power I consume this month is completely off the radar of my power utility -- I'm in no way charged for it nor is it regulated by anybody but me. It's analogous to friends I know living on the river saving on their water bill by watering their lawn with water from the river -- the water company doesn't see, regulate, or charge their river water use in any way.

Thanks for the ping - a couple of questions?

With your inverters, do you have to have batteries also? If so, how many and what kind?

Why two inverters instead of one, is one just a backup / stand by? Or, two inverters are needed for the number of panels you have?

How many panels does it take for you to generate ~1800 kwh/month in the summer?

Thanks - I always want to understand things. One cannot make a good decision without quality data!