Is Solar worth it for me?
So I started looking into solar recently and got really excited at first. We got a quote from a pretty large solar installer in the area. They had said in their sales pitch our average monthly electric bill was $191/mo and with financing we would pay $234/mo for the panels on a 20 year loan ($45k for 9.7kwh system)
So I started looking at my bills for the last year and found my actual average was $120/mo and my highest single average was $186 in a month.
So now I am trying to find if I can actually get a solar system that makes sense financially. We have some good benefits in our area:
- South facing roof with basically perfect exposure 2.Utility companies does 1:1 net metering credits and writes a check for excess credits generated
Where I'm struggling to figure out if it makes financial sense is because in my research, our utility company seems to charge less for electricity than most other utilities. I saw somewhere they are 30% lower than other companies in Wisconsin (city owned).
Standard electricity rate: $0.097/kwh Actual average rate: $0.1184/kwh (averaged across 12 months of actual bills paid)
What I'd like to do is oversize a system because the utility company does pay out excess credits. With the quote we received previously we can fit ~30 panels on our roof.
Breakdown of current yearly bill: Electric: $1,433.90 Water/Sewer: $1,020.62 Electric usage: 12,114 kwh W/S usage: 11,455 CF
My goal would be to have a system that can can generate enough excess credits to cover the water/Sewer bill. Basically equivalent to needing to generate 20,700kWh/year.
Are systems too expensive these days to realistically do this when our electricity rates are low?