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Jun 02 2016
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Solar Borrowing 101: Loan Maturities

How Will Solar Panels Affect My Home’s Value?

By Increase Your Home Property Value No Comments

 

Any solar company should be able to show how much you can save on your utility bill with solar panels for your home, but the savings estimate only looks at solar energy costs compared to the cost of energy from the grid. Homeowners often wonder how that solar array on the roof will affect the home’s resale value.

We’ve got good news for you: Study after study has confirmed that going solar offers a boost to the value of your home.

In 2011, 2013, and again in 2015, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California conducted studies to gauge if solar homes sold for more than non-solar homes. The answer is a resounding yes.

The price premium for solar homes changes over time, and the premium amount depends on the size and age of your system. In 2015, the home premium equaled about $4.10 per Watt in California and averaged about $3.00 per Watt in seven other states—Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania. In California, with its average home solar system size of 5.5-kilowatts, that would equal $22,550 in added value to a home.

This marks a slight decline in the value boost from previous LBNL studies. In 2013, researchers found a $5.50 per Watt boost, and in 2011, the price premium ranged from $3.90 to $6.40 per Watt for California homes.

This downward trend is likely due to the fact that solar is getting mainstream: More homes are being constructed with solar and more homeowners are installing solar on their roofs. But the LBNL researchers also found that the older the system, and the smaller the system, the less of a boost to home values they offer.

No matter how you slice the numbers, though, the home value from adding solar panels can partially or completely cover the cost of the system itself.

It’s important to note that these studies only looked at fully owned solar systems, where the homeowners purchased the panels, rather than third-party-owned systems from a solar lease provider, like SolarCity. While a number of stories highlight the potential challenges of selling a home with leased solar panels on the roof, the prolific LBNL team in late 2015 conducted a qualitative assessment of sales of homes with leased solar systems in San Diego County. Though not as scientifically rigorous as the broader studies, the report notes that most homeowners in this group, 83 percent, said the leased panels did not affect their homes’ sale price. One-quarter of respondents said their solar homes spent more time on the market than they might have without a leased system, but all the homes in the study eventually sold.

So the bottom-line answer is that solar panels will probably affect your home value in a good way. Quite possibly in a very good way.

If you own your system, you’re likely to see a nice bump in the value and/or sale price of your home. The LBNL researchers found that the premiums exist whether or not you’ve paid it off in full. And why not? Just look at it from the buyer’s perspective. All the money they will save from lower utility bills may help pay for a nicer home—and they benefit from all the work you put into learning about solar energy, selecting a contractor, and making sure the job was done right. Meanwhile, those of you who opt for a solar lease may also see a small increase in sale price. Even if not, you most likely won’t be penalized for having gone solar.

For more information about whether solar is right for your home, talk to a Solar.com expert.

 

May 31 2016
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do-i-need-batteries

Do I Need Solar Batteries?

By How Do Solar Batteries Work? No Comments

There are good reasons why batteries are sold separately from residential solar energy systems. First of all, it’s easy to go solar without using batteries. Secondly, even though prices have come down significantly in the last few years, batteries are still too expensive to make sense for US homeowners. Installation can cost $7,000 at the low end, or twice as much at the high end. And the stored energy will cost more than energy from the electric grid.

How Batteries Can Help

In backup situations, batteries can come in handy. With storage installed, your inverter now relies on the battery instead of the grid to power your home. Unfortunately, such a setup with modern lithium-ion batteries currently adds between $7,000 and $15,000 to the price of your solar system. And that still would not buy enough battery capacity to keep all appliances and gadgets in your house on. You have to choose what to run for roughly one day before the battery would be fully discharged. Your solar panels will recharge the battery, but by how much depends on weather conditions. Such a setup does not provide enough power to completely defect from the grid.

When Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the Powerwall, he made it sound as if you might be able to power your whole home with a battery that costs little more than $3,000. A year later, as the first Powerwalls are hitting the US market, it turns out they cost at least $6,500 installed plus additional fees if you want to retrofit them to an existing solar system. One Powerwall isn’t powerful enough to run your A/C though. For that, you would need at least two. And after ten years you can expect to replace the battery because it will have reached the end of its cycle life. Tesla rates the Powerwall for one daily charge-discharge cycle over the span of ten years.

Other vendors like Sonnen Inc. and Adara Power offer similar battery systems for homeowners with solar panels. None of them have gotten the cost for a kilowatt-hour of stored electricity lower than $0.40.

But, what is a kilowatt hour? Check this video to know more about Kilowatt Hour.

This means that even if you would use free power to charge your battery, just storing it and taking it out later costs you $0.40 per kilowatt-hour. Your local utility sells the same kilowatt-hour for $0.10 to $0.25, depending on where you live in the US. Only Hawaii and Alaska are more expensive. So at the moment, it makes more sense to get electricity directly from your utility if you need it instead of using a battery for times when the sun does not shine.

Those numbers are going to change in the future. Battery prices will come down even more and there might be other ways to make use of their storage capacity than just consuming it yourself. Utilities will pay homeowners to access their batteries because it helps them to smooth out grid fluctuation. It also might make sense to charge the battery at times when electricity is cheap and discharge it when it is expensive. Those use cases are on the horizon, but they are not here yet.

Homeowners who need battery backup because they live in areas with frequent power outages will probably stick to generators for now. Or they go with batteries regardless of the economics. Having peace of mind when the grid goes down is, after all, priceless.