We’d heard so much great publicity about the new affordability of solar power we got a solar installer to give us an estimate during August this year.  Arizona’s sunshine seemed just too abundant to let go to waste.  Our house is roughly 3,000 sq feet, including a small, unfinished basement, so it’s a very typical, average sized residence.

The estimate for solarizing our house was $60,000.   We had to rub our eyes before reading  it again;  sixty thousand dollars and the word, “affordable,” didn’t naturally go together.    Plus, because of trees next to the house, we would need to set aside a piece of ground on the property the equivalent of the footprint of an ample  guest house to place the solar array.    Neighboring houses of the equivalent square footage have been on the market for $120,000, still unsold for two years, down from initial offers of over $200,000, $250,000 and $300,000.   How can anyone justify an outlay of $60,000 for house that might eventually sell for $110 – 100,000 or even LESS, when houses aren’t selling, and jobs are disappearing?

To further expose the problem, even with “sell-back electricity” sugar plum assurances, it’ll take far more than a decade to recover the cost thru “savings” – about the time the aged batteries will need to be completely replaced and well-advanced towards the end of the useful life of the solar panels, and the entire battery-panel combo also will have additional costs to be maintained and serviced, plus a weekly added chore to be kept clean of DUST – which in our Arizona region is pervasive.    And APS still will bill a fee because once on the grid, one stays on the grid, even if one isn’t using it.

If it was truly cost-effective, people would already be solarized without being forced to.  If it BECOMES truly cost-effective, not falsely thru subsidies, which don’t make anything cheaper, just shift costs around, people would be lined up to convert right over to it.   But it’s not, and it won’t be anytime soon.

How about a partial conversion?
$8,000 up front to solarize JUST the WATER HEATER.

What’s going to happen when people living hand-to-mouth in $120,000 homes are hit with higher electrical bills because they DO NOT HAVE THE MONEY to shell out $60 GRAND to convert their homes?   Or as the hopeful installer said, “It ends up to be only about $25,000 after tax rebates.” What? “Only?”

No one gets the tax rebate until the money’s been paid out.  Who is going to be able to get any energy loan approved when they can hardly meet their current obligations of mortgage, utilities and other monthly expenses, like … food?  Who is going to dare to stretch their shaky finances to take on more debt?   Scofflaws do it all the time, but more people who are more responsible than that will not add debt they think they cannot repay.

Solar rebates are ultimately funded through taxes, today’s reality is a shrinking tax base as people lose their jobs, so the government demands MORE money through higher taxes, a vicious cycle of increasing debt burdens on a public increasingly unable to pay.  Callously, the government, to force inefficient solar, is pushing punitive higher energy costs that the utility companies pass on to the consumer – people will be punished on both sides of the energy equation.   The sunny rhetoric for “sustainability” is eclipsed by unsustainable real-life costs.