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Originally Posted by Hagar
You are no orphan Steve, My bill has sky rocketed. I actually work for a large electricity company, get a 25% discount and still pay a huge increase in my bill.
You will find the committment to buy and manage the home solar scheme has cost most companies dearly and the increases we all recieve are partly to pay for the management of such schemes.
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I'm struggling to reconcile how the feed in tariff for solar can possibly account for such a significant increase... PV's contribute only 1% of the total grid capacity. How can they possibly leverage a 20 or 30% increase in the cost of electricity? If the power companies are making this claim, it sounds highly dubious to me.
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The current feed in tarrifs show no incetive to install a system and even break square let alone show even a small profit anyone prepared to make the outlay equired to install a solar system.
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Not sure I agree with this.
Let's say a 1.5kW system is installed in Adelaide which has a solar insolation rate of 4.2kWh/m^2 per day and it costs you $2K. This will knock somewhere between $400 and $600 off your power bill per year depending on your usage patterns. The payback period is around 5 years. If you tack the cost on to your home loan, your mortgage goes up $150 dollars a year and your power bill goes down $500... do the maths.
More importantly though, by putting a 1.5kW system on your roof, you are cutting your green house gas emissions by more than 2 tonnes every year. Solar PV's are still a good deal, just not as good as they once were.
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Solar hot water is the greatest investment you can make on your house these days and will pay for itself in just a few years instead of the 20+ years most will need to recoup the cost of a solar generation system.
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Solar hot water systems are a great idea, but there are other ways to spend your money which offer an even better financial return. Top of the list would be to solicit the services of an energy auditor to give your house (and lifestyle) the once over. Speaking as someone who did this for a living, I can assure you that this offers the best return on investment you can make by a country mile.