A follower on X told me to blog about this. So, I am. Yesterday, there were some very high winds in Nevada with rain. The monsoon season is normally in late July or August. But yesterday they got some early.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone in the comments if they have put solar in, what it cost, how it’s working, and what their calculations were. It truly makes a difference what state you are in, and lots of other factors. Given the proclivity of California power to be out frequently, I’d put a big system in if I lived there.
You do not need electricity to survive, but it sure is nice.
I have solar power on my house and blogged why I put it on, along with the economics, a while ago. Essentially, based on the way I use electricity, it’s a five-year payback with the tax credit. I can sell at NV Energy’s bid, and I purchase electricity at their offer price. At the time I installed solar, I used $0.12/kW to sell and $ 0.16/kW to buy. As any market maker knows, that is a nice spread if you can get it.
When I rehabbed my house in Nevada, I installed electric radiant heat underneath the tile of the house. Because of the solar power and my ability to sell it back when I don’t use it, I pay for the entire winter’s usage of the floors. Most people are surprised that you need heat during a Las Vegas winter, but you do. My forced air heat rarely, if ever, comes on. When we aren’t there, the air conditioning rarely runs. The house is extremely well insulated.
NV Energy limits the amount of potential solar power you can put on your home to 98% of your total electrical need. You’d think with “global warming,” you could put as much as you wanted since we are all in on clean green energy, but I digress.
I also calculated the degradation of the panels over time to model what might happen. I used the useful life of 30 years.
I didn’t add a battery backup to my solar at the time. Nevada is not California. We rarely have brownouts. I have a neighbor who has two Tesla Powerwalls. He never purchases energy from the grid at all. Self-sustained. His power bill is roughly the same as mine, $19/month. Because he has powerwalls, he doesn’t worry about brownouts at all. For all practical purposes, he is off the electric grid and selling back into it.
But, I have some stuff in my house that I want to keep at an even temperature, and given all the people moving from California to Nevada, I hope they aren’t bringing brownouts with them, too. I ordered a Powerwall yesterday.
Here is the thing that advocates of solar miss. It’s not scalable. Putting a bunch of panels in a field is stupid. They get dirty. You have to clean them with fresh water. That’s a big deal in the western US. Second, power degrades as it is transmitted, and moving it miles and miles from a solar field to the places it can be used is dumb. Solar also needs a lot of battery power to scale, and batteries have their own problems.
So, sure, the sun is “free,” but solar is not free. In fact, it is expensive to build and install. But, for a single dedicated site like a house, it can work.
The cost of the Powerwall, including tax and installation, is roughly $12,000, and that includes the expiring tax credits passed in the big beautiful bill. It will give me seven days of power. Power is never out that long in Nevada. But, like I say, this is basically an insurance policy for me.
Realtors in Las Vegas have told me buyers are looking for solar now. Sellers receive dollar-for-dollar the cost of purchase and installation. Crack finance geeks would see that as a net negative since there are opportunity costs to that money.
That’s the thing with solar. It is a very, very large upfront cost, even if it is practical where you live. Most people cannot afford to install it. Solar isn’t practical everywhere. We are going to a gym here in Grand Marais, MN, that is using solar to power the gym. I will be very interested to see how they do in the winter here, given the snowfall and cloudy days. Yes, it degrades over time, and so do the batteries. It’s next to impossible to recycle all that stuff, but maybe in the next 30 years they will invent a way.
Our cabins used to have a very, very small solar operation so we could turn some lights on. Electricity wasn’t hooked up to them until we rehabbed them both. For what it is worth, it probably would be about $15k each to install solar panels on both cabins to power all the stuff reliably, along with one battery backup for both at 12k. It was $5k to run electric from the road to each cabin, so $10k in total.
$42K vs $10K….but I could have virtue signaled. What’s that worth?
Time to split some wood. Up here, we heat with it.
I design products that use solar in the oilfields(with batteries). Solar panels are great for charging batteries. I have no beef with anyone that purchases their whatever with their own money. When the government awards 'winners' based on ideology, it is never good for a free market. Also, those panels are made with toxic materials such as Cadmium that were outlawed in industry in the 90s.
I really appreciate this commentary. Its hard for normal people to wade through the BS sales pitch on solar. I like it for camping and thats about it. Here in North Idaho, it would have been ok in certain places before they started spraying the sky so much. Id say around 65% or more of normally sunny days you can see the streaks that turn into a thin haze blocking sunlight. Ill say it does seem to be a bit cooler when they that just because the radiant heat from the sun is pretty intense here. But what is it, and how will it affect air quality? There is just generally not enough good sun here for solar to be anything more than a minor supplement for a homeowner, without massive battery banks. And they really do need to figure out disposal on these things.