this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Depends on where you live in Texas. My solar panels cut my summer bill in half, and my winter bill is usually zero.

If my power company didn’t pay me a decent buyback amount, I’d invest in an enphase battery and offset the cost of running appliances at night.

That's fair. In ONCOR territory, the buyback offers I had last time I renewed a plan were either a fraction of what you pay but no limits on how many kwh you can sell, or what you pay your REP but capped to a comically low number of kwh a month, or the wholesale rate at the time the kwh was put back on the grid.

Essentially the options are shit, probably shit, and almost certainly shit.

I did the math on the batteries, and the solar install would have been like four times the cost it was without batteries: ~$8000 for the panels, but nearly $20k more for enough batteries to provide peak load and sufficient storage along with the added installation costs for the batteries.

Problem was/is that even at $0.13/kwh to pull from the grid, the payback time was basically a decade longer than the batteries are going to last based on how much power I actually use, so shitty buy back or find some way to burn the extra power it is, then.

(Disclaimer: prices probably have changed in the past 3 years, but probably not enough to make the math wrong.)