I would love to have just enough solar to flatten my peak usage on the hottest days of the summer. They naturally coincide with tons of sun. I don't need a huge system to be all solar all the time or even care about credits from the power company. I just don't want a $300 bill in the summer and a $50 bill in the winter. Has anyone designed a good solution for this?
In Oregon we have the Community Solar program, which I've heard good things about - rather than building your own rooftop solar, you invest in a solar farm subscription as part of your electric bill, and receive credits for power produced. I haven't signed up for it yet personally but I've heard good reports from some other folks.
I have installed 200kw+ worth of rooftop (Florida) and ground mount (NorCal) resi systems (primarily Enphase, but I'm familiar with the operating requirements of other inverters), and am currently riding shotgun for a ~200MW solar PV project in the Midwest. If you share more details (general location, utility, and energy cost schedule [static, seasonal]), I am happy to provide some guidance.
With solar panels being so much cheaper than 10-15 years ago, it seems like installation costs are the biggest hurdle to wider adoption. Do you see anything reducing those costs in the future?
Maybe we need a push to make standing seam metal roofs more mainstream and people can install their own without having to drill into their roof
Soft costs are a majority of residential system cost [1], and there are some efforts to cram those costs down. One example is SolarApp [2], an automated permitting platform that directly integrates with local jurisdiction systems to streamline the permitting process (which was incubated at NREL [3]). Another are coop buys [4], where a community will open a registration window, and once a pool of buyers have committed, an RFP is put out of installers to bid to install the entire pool of systems. This drives down sales and marketing costs.
While I am a big fan of standing seam metal roofs for longevity reasons, they cost anywhere between 2x-3x the cost of a premium (architecture shingles vs 3 tab) asphalt shingle roof. This is due to increased labor costs to have the rolled steel cut and formed on site. If you could drive the down the cost (training and similar evangelism efforts sponsored by domestic steel manufacturers perhaps to stoke demand to replace other more volatile demand like auto sales), certainly friction based solar racking mounted to such a roof is superior to something requiring penetrations through the roof material and decking.
Regardless, we should assume most home owners are not going to do these installs themselves on their roofs. When new homes are built, solar installs should be required but in a way that makes the cost competitive vs unreasonable profit capture through whomever is building the home. When roofs are replaced, also an excellent time to have a solar PV system installed. These systems have a lifetime of at least 25 years, so it's important to have the stars align to make the choice as inexpensive and frictionless as possible when its made.
I'd love to have some form of solar work out cost-wise for me here in Seattle -- there just aren't enough sunny days throughout the year to make solar financially make sense, even over a 20-year period. At least from what the solar calculators I've found on the web would have me believe.
We put 7.8kw on our roof on a snowy mountain town in Canada in a tight valley. In 12 months it generated $950 worth of power at $0.13/kwh, and we now have no power bill for our house and all heating and cooling with a heat pump.
We tore out the old natural gas furnace and had the line disconnected, saving us about $2k/year for the heating.
I know this isn't what you're asking about, but my electric company has a budget billing program where they average out your usage and charge you the same amount each month.
I use it mainly so that I can set it up and with my bank's bill pay system and then forget about it for a year. But it's also nice for avoiding those huge bills in the summer.
I appreciate that! It's not the cost fluctuation that is a problem, just the fact that usage and price goes up in the summer and the cost scales so quickly. Battery storage is a hack that may work financially for now but I'm more interested in shedding the additional consumption at peak even if it's just the few hottest hours of each day.
