What do you get when you sign up for a solar leasing program? Some pretty neat stuff:
- A net meter - When your system's outproducing your consumption, the meter spins backward, selling electricity back to the utility company.
- Rollover kilowatt hours - This is the part that should eliminate our electric bill. By summer, the system should be producing way more electricity than we consume. In the winter, we will likely consume way more per day than the system is producing. Xcel gave two options for excess energy produced by the system
- The first, and to me the only logical one, is that Xcel can treat your excess kWh like rollover minutes on a cell phone plan. Don't use them one month when you're outproducing what you can consume, and each kWh can be applied toward your next bill. From what I understand, they either don't go away at all, or it's on a year-to-year basis.
- The other option is to have the utility cut you a check for all excess kWh at the end of the year, the trick being that they buy back the kWh at about 1/3 the price that they charge you.
- System monitoring and warranty repair - If you lease a system, the vendor monitors its production for you and fixes it if something's wrong. Not included with the purchase the system, so for that you'd have to buy an extended warranty. Of note, one reason for choosing REC Solar over SolarCity was the fact that SolarCity requires in their contract that you maintain your own broadband in order for monitoring to work. REC Solar provides its own wireless connection.
- Ability to track system production - I don't know if this is true for SolarCity, but I assume it is. REC Solar has a customer web portal where you can pay your bill, and also track historical production of your solar array. This can also be tracked on the LCD panel of the power inverter.
- Energy production on cloudy days - On sunny days, our 5.1kW system is hitting about 3.5kW of output (probably due to the sun's low angle in the sky). On cloudy days, I've seen as little as 150W, but it's still producing something, even when snowing in a few cases!
What don't you get that you might otherwise expect?
- Tax credits - Most of us would expect to collect tax credits for going green. Not so if you're LEASING the system. The company that finances the system (in REC Solar's case, this is a company called SunRun) actually receives the tax credits. That's largely how they can finance an entire lease for a fraction of the cost that they'd sell the system for. As I'd mentioned in my previous post, monthly lease, in our case was $62 / month. That's just under $15k paid over the course of the lease. Whole-lease buyout up front was $8k. Buying the system outright would have been over $25k. We pay much less than the cost of a system over the course of the lease, partially because the solar company reaps the tax benefits.
- Immediate elimination of electricity bills - As our installation took place in the winter, and we're consuming more than we're producing, we did have to pay a bit toward our electric bill this month. We did, however, see a pretty drastic reduction in the number of kWh sold to us last month compared to the month before the system was installed:
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| Here you can see that we used less than 1/2 of the electricity than we did in the same month last year, despite cooler average temperatures. |
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| Our 291 kWh came to $28.31, but Xcel tacks on an eternal $6.75 / month cross-connect fee. The electricity that we continue to get from Xcel is cheaper on average because we're only hitting Tier 1 and Tier 2 pricing. |
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| Our electric bill came to about $38 instead of over $65 for the same period last year. |
- You may get nothing at all - THIS WHOLE SOLAR LEASE AND UTILITY ELECTRICITY BUY-BACK ONLY WORKS IF YOUR UTILITY COMPANY PARTICIPATES, AND IT IS STILL NOT REQUIRED TO DO SO. (Vote pro solar!)
So far, so good though. We're looking forward to the electric bill going away entirely this summer (with the exception of the $6.75 Service and Facility fee, and the $0.70 Renewable Energy Standard Adjustment.
If you have questions about any of this, or are interested in pursuing something like this, we're happy to answer questions and give pointers based upon our experiences so far. And we'd of course be happy for you to use us as a referral. ;-)
Cheers.
