Was not convinced they would be good value..... Just b4 the end of the rebate I allowed a salesman (and Ms Dacat) into bashing my ears and selling me a 3.5Kw array. The array is of good quality Bosh panels and the sell speech was It would
pay by itself. I tried hard not to buy it! But gave up and handed my cash.
My first bill came in and was down from nearly $400-00 to $42-34
!
I was wrong... I now love my solar panels! I am just jealous of my mate that got the same kit at the same time (bought 2 arrays and got discount) is bill was $170-00 in credit!
Apart from the 'doing good things for the environment', although i'm not entirely sure on the energy cycle for a solar panel, fiscally I don't think they currently make sense unless you happen to be lucky enough to be in a situation to take advantage of significant feed in tariffs payed for by me, the non-solar owning tax payer.
Here in NSW they wanted to retrospectively cut the feed in tarrif from 60c/kwh to 30...or it might have been 40. Basically half the state collectively threw the toys out of the pram because they realised it was now going to take them 30 years to pay of their 30k solar array. Of course the state Govt. backed down even though the scheme caused a blow out in the fy11 budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you were payed for your feed in power, what you pay for your grid power almost no-one would have solar because it would take so long to get to a net positive investment situation there would be no point. Without govt. schemes etc solar is currently not fiscally viable if you are looking at it in terms of reducing you long term power bill. Imo.
Try and think of the panels paying off your electrical equipment. So far mine have made 1253kw in less than a year which means the fridge is payed for in power, the tv,s done and the washing machine is nearly done. So the only power i have to pay for is the lights and a few Playstations, if the energy company ever works out our power bill. No power bill for nearly 12 mths,going to be large when we finaly get it. Will i pay off the panels???maybe ,i just think of it as pre paying for my power and putting less crap into the air
!
When I first installed mine my break even time was 6yrs 5mths. However, the power cost has risen since then, so break even is now below 6yrs. I was lucky enough to get in just before the gummint halved the rebate here, so I have 10yrs @ 47c/unit to enjoy. Every time Synergy puts up the price my break even time shortens 
. Since installing my panels I've had from $24 rebate up to $99 rebate. No actual bills at all. Living right down on the south coast I didn't expect them to be that good, but even through Winter we get a small ($24) rebate. Only Mrs Piranha and myself in the house now.
Got our last quarter's account & it seemed to have gon up a bit (WTF!?) I noticed that the panels hadn't registered much of a return, so I walked around the house to the meter & as I suspected...they're not working (screen is blank). Checked the switches - still on, so called the only local authorised solar sparky & was told that they are very busy & doubt they can get here this year!
Bugger, ah well...at least we still 'look' like we're doing something good for the environment!
12 months on,
Refund $648 over the 12 months .
No bills just credits.
Will pay for themselves in 4 yrs.
best thing is no bill every quarter, Win Win.
I installed a 2 kilowatt system cost $2,700 for panels and inverter $700 for installation $200 for sparky to hook up. Sold the rec certificates for $3,125 so overall cost $475. My next power bill came to $68. Happy days.
Solar panels trap heat on earth and cause global warming.
My tax goes to fund these rebates, and buy backs.
Got quoted for a 4.9 KW system, 23 panels $22,000.00
Don,t think I,ll be goin there
Me and my mate had a 4.2Kw system installed with 16 panels each, i am in Vic and He is in SA, we got our first bill which the screwed up and didnt give us any cash for the credits into the grid so they said they will fix that up next bill and still the bill was only $240 usually $580.
My mates systems first bill was a credit of $471
I paid $10k for the same system in SA he payed $7400
All in all it was a good move i think!
!
!
Whilst I don't grudge anyone getting solar to cut thier power bill - as the government discounts certainly make them generally viable longer term - anyone who gets them to help the environment is kidding themselves. They are incredibly inefficient.
Basic operational requirements of coal power stations is that they cannot be ramped up and down on a daily cycle. They run to meet peak demand and any additional power left over in off peak times is used in other ways - ie generally inefficent storage methods with big losses.
Solar panels supply most power between 9am-4pm. Peak power loading is 5pm-9pm, so all they are doing is pushing power into an already saturated grid and coal burnt is the same.
Now if the government put the huge amount of money it currently spends on paying people to have panels into large scale solar plants with molten salt storage or developing nuclear....
OK, I'll wade in here, given I work in the science / energy / solar efficiency space.
Several people have made negative comments about the solar feed-in tariff as it is effectively subsidised by the government and hence by people who do not have solar. They've been red-thumbed for that, despite making a very valid point.
As a short-term model for providing cost-effective energy it is badly flawed.
Afterall, why on earth is the government funding lots of little installations (very few of which are on the perfect orientation / perfectly unshaded, etc) instead of spending the money direct on a couple of big solar farms which are much more cost effective the build and have efficiencies of scale.
The answer is that these schemes are designed to fund the solar industry through the "valley of death".
Simply, they can't become economically viable without there being big demand to drive down the costs.... and there cannot be big demand without them being economically viable.
So the government steps in. However, virtually all the governments in Australia have forgotten that this was the main idea. So they've gone from paying LOADS of money on the feed-in tariff, to paying very little overnight. This has effectively killed the solar industry in NSW, VIC, SA, WA AND the UK! What they should have done was gradually stepped down the feed-in tariff over a long time...
...provided of course that the desired end result was a massive government subsidy to make roof-top solar economically viable, which I think is a pretty poor aim. That subsidy could have paid for so much more power generation.
So hence I am against roof-top solar for environmental and macro-economic reasons.
I've also just bought a 4kW system for my parents' house in the UK, as it makes a lot of financial sense for me personally - why wouldn't I sign up to lots of other people giving me money for 25 years?
For anyone interested in learning a bit about the big picture for renewables vs cost I recommend starting with David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air". It can be downloaded for free from here:
www.withouthotair.com/
There's also an Australian focused version of this called Australian Sustainable Energy By The Numbers by Peter Seligman which is free for download from here:http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/index.php?page=ozsebtn
