Climate Policy

[Zenda]

You just need to look around at projects (or here) to see that I am spot on.

Not sure what you mean by being spot on. These are quotes from those links:

"It's true that we live in warm, sunny California, which has some of the best rebates and tax incentives for going solar in the nation. But wherever you live, you can benefit from energy-efficiency and renewable-energy upgrades to your existing home and become part of the solution to global warming."

"If you divide it up, what you’re paying every month for solar power for the next 25 years will be less than what you’d pay the utility company in that same time."

If you've looked at the prices of solar panels, then you would know that $2500 would buy about 3 or 4, 130 watt panels. Hardly enough to generate 20,000 watt hours. I submit there is an error in your calculations and assumptions. More likely, $40,000 for solar panels (validated by the costs other people report) is a fair number.

You made the assumptions, and also the errors in calculation. Not me.

Allright, let's take a look at this more realistic example.

The Sharp solar panel costs $648.00 and has a capacity of 130 Watt. That's about $5/W, quite different from the $2/W you assumed, btw. Earlier you mentioned that the usual costs of power are $0.12 per kWh. That seems a lot less as the number mentioned in the article you gave, but let's take it for granted. At full capacity a single solar panel produces 130 Watt, so it would take 1000/130 = 7.7 hours of full capacity to produce 1 kWh. The solar panel costs $650, which is the same as the price of 650/0.12 = 5417 kWh. If it took 7.7 hours to produce 1 kWh, it would take 7.7*5417 = 41711 hours to 'produce' the price of the panel. To completely earn back our investments and start getting the energy for nothing after 20 years, we'd need 41711/(20*365) = 5.7 hours of sunshine per day. That's assuming 0% output for the rest of the day.

It should be clear that spending $40.000 instead of $650 does not really affect the needed 5.7 hours of sunshine. That's why those reports you mention still conclude it is a profitable solution.