I see a lot of people now doing full house solar/battery and it looks appealing, esp the part going full off grid... But the numbers.... tricky.
My electric is about $0.12/KW and I'm in Orange, Tx, the utility averages about $168/Month on a 1200' house but but I can put up about 15 KW of solar panels.
Might be $0.12 per Kwh for the juice, it's the extra fees that cost you. Using $0.12/Kwh and $168/month comes to 40Kwh per day.
Base here is $0.16/Kwh but after adding in the taxes per Kwh, transmission fees per Kwh, access fee per Kwh, it comes out to $0.185/Kwh last time I checked (wife handles paying all the bills). Also, it is a tiered rate here, in winter it is $0.16/Kwh but in summer it has a different rate and also a demand charge.
Utility has already notified us that there will be rate increases, I'm pretty certain we will be over $0.20/Kwh.
I figure total cost with my setup would be about 64KW of batts and 13 KW of inverter power (dual inverters sungold power clone LV6548), and 15KW solar panels would be about $45,00.00 assuming I do most of the work.
You need to shop better. First off, I'd move to something like an EG4 6500EX simply due to the VOC rating of the SCC. This saves wire costs considerably. In my case, it costs $2000 less for wire using a higher VOC rated SCC.
Batteries can be DIY, current built for 54Kwh with cabinet/BMS complete will run me about $13K, for something like EG4 is would be $20K.
A few thousand here and a few thousand there and pretty soon you're talking big money.
That would be 22 or so years of electric bills (with inflation, I guess we could say 19 years), and that is assuming nothing breaks on the batts/inverters/solar panels We all know electric companies are basically paying nothing to buy back power so everyone is trying to use batteries but this seems like a very risky deal.
How are you factoring in the cost, or if you have reliable utility power, don't even bother with solar at all?
I could see the trend a few years ago, loss of local coal powered plants (not just mothballed but torn down) the only nuclear reactor in this state closed, and a move by local utility to purchase power off the open market from anywhere (used to be the coal plants supplied all) all added up to higher utility costs down the road. We may have hit peak oil back around 2006 where the cheap extraction is gone and the cost to extract becomes higher per unit.
I wanted to purchase a large standby genny for power outages. We get ice storms on occasion with high winds. We had one winter where we lost complete power for 2.5 weeks. The large transmission lines went down, poles snapped like toothpicks and until those lines are back up you get to spend all your time fueling generators and sourcing fuel. Same thing happens in summer with tornadoes taking down large transmission lines.
I have 2 deep freezes here full of beef most of the year. If one figures the cost of the standby generator plus the cost of losing the contents of the freezer (yes, homeowners would cover the loss minus the deductible), it doesn't take long to get some of the solar investment back.
I'd rather spend the money on something like solar as they continue to devalue the dollar to net zero. At least I'll be able to sit in my underwear eating Cheetos and watching Netflix with the AC cranked when utility power rates go hyper.
