Solar panel information?
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SolarBuzz is the foremost news site for solar PV information. The first link is to their economic analysis page. Solar power is still fairly expensive and in most parts of the United States will only pay for itself with subsidies. If you do not take into account the resale value boost it adds to your house. If you consider that as well solar will pay for itself in 10-20 years in most locations.
The one exception are off-grid installations in remote areas where the costs to run power can be extraordinarily expensive. Even running power a few hundred yards can cost many thousands of dollars. In those cases solar is the cheapest alternative hands down.
The second site offers a very good and sophisticated payback calculator that can give a cost and pay back for a specific installation anywhere in the country including incentives.
Currently, the financial reasons are not good because it takes years for the investment to pay off. THe only real benefit is less emissions but someone has to initiate these trend.
I would think corporations would be more interested in installing solar panels than the common person.
I recently did some research on solar power for my home. I found that the investment would pay for itself in 50 years, which is waaaay too long. The main cost variable is the cost of the solar panels. The cost of the rest of the equipment required (eg inverter, wiring, installation) is fairly stable. With improvements in technology, the cost of panels are coming down, and their efficiency is getting better. There will come a point in time, where the cost will come more realistic. When the payoff time gets closer to about 10 years, I'll be installing solar panels.
"At present, photovoltaic panels typically convert about 15% of incident sunlight into electricity" - Wikipedia
That's the challenge. For the effort that goes into converting solar energy to usable electricity, you don't get much power. There are some applications that work fairly well (like heating water for the kitchen and bath) depending on where you are in the world, but solar energy will always only save you a few dollars and as the other responder mentioned, reduce pollution. It will never "pay for itself"
The source is a seller of solar panels and systems. When energy prices went up I looked into buying a system to lower my electric bill. A $22,000 system would make $3 of electricity per day, on a sunny Summer day. So I could save about $90 a month in summer. It would be less in winter, so say $50 per month averaged over a year. That is $600 a year. It would take 36 years to pay the system off. I could put the $22,000 in a savings account and get more than $600 a year, so it is not a good deal.
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