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New Jersey Outshines Most Others In Solar Energy
An anonymous reader points out this CNBC story which says that "New Jersey—known more for its turnpike, shopping malls and industrial sprawl—has become a solar energy powerhouse, outshining sunnier states like Hawaii and Nevada. And it's largely because of incentives that make it cheaper for residents and businesses to buy and install solar power systems."
New Jersey already gets 50% of its electricity from nuclear.
Replying to myself because I was still looking for this when I posted. Year-to-date (to June), there have been 16,920 thousand megawatthours of electricity from nuclear out of 29,244 - almost 58%.
I live in NJ and have a 7.8kW solar system on my roof. I purchased it through Home Dept/BP Solar. The state rebate covered about 65% of the cost. I only had to pay the other 35% of the cost up front. I applied for the system in 2005 and about 6 months later in April 2006 I had a working system on my roof. I have been extremely happy with its performance especially since my roof faces pretty much directly south. Not only do I save in electricity, I also get Solar Renewable Energy Credits that I can sell to help pay for my cost of the system. An SREC is received for every 1000kWH of electricity generated. My system generates about 9 SREC's per solar year. The solar year begins in June and ends in May. After it was installed I immediately purchased RS485 communcation boards for the two inverters and an RS232 to RS485 converter for a PC and runs the SunnyData software that continuously monitors the system. It reads various data every 8 seconds and I use ssh/rsync to push it to a linux server every minute where I wrote some scripts to parse the data and create almost real time graphs of its performance. For anyone interested, I setup my own domain mysolarenergysystem.com where you can view all the details about the system. I also had the electric company replace my meter with a net meter, so each month on my bill I can see my exact in and out usage. The net meter has what looks like a phone jack that can be used for remote monitoring. I asked them about it because I wanted to connect it to my computer, but unfortunately they didn't give me much of an answer except that its not used, but would have been nice to monitor and graph daily statistics for that as well.
And yet others obviously don't see how long it would actually take to actually break even on it -- especially if you're financing the cost of putting it up with borrowed money, your own or somebody else's.
If you want to make it about cost savings, put 27000 USD into your favorite low-risk savings vehicle. Then wait the estimated amount of time it would take for you to break even on the 27000 you spent for the 6kW solar rig. Compare your cost savings from the solar rig vs. the investment. If you put your dough, for example, in a 10 year CD at 3.25%, you'd come away with ~10000. Then subtract what you (supposedly, by estimate) would have saved with the solar setup. Or...what if you invested half of that 27000, and spent the other half weatherproofing your home (also tax benefits there)?
A local guy put a 2kW rig on his roof. He was proud of his work, which is fine, but admitted it would take him 53 years to break even on the cost of the materials and install. I don't know how much maintenance is involved in solar configurations.
It wasn't about cost savings. That's fine if you have money to spend on the cause du jour. I just don't have that kind of money and my state doesn't either (Michigan). Truth be told, my country doesn't either.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".