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Solar Panels Increase Home Value
blair1q writes "Venture Beat reports that a study (PDF) by Berkeley National Labs has found that homes sold in California earned a premium for solar panels. The benefit ranged from $3900 to $6400 per kW of capacity. An earlier study found that proximity to solar or wind power may also raise home values. These results contradict the arguments based on degrading home values used by putative NIMBY (Not In My Back-Yard) opponents to installing or living near such energy-generating equipment."
Makes total sense. If I was looking at houses, and the prior owners had installed a hot tub, earning them a glare or two from neighbors in the process, I would also pay a little extra for that amenity too. Duh. Beneficial improvement raises value.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
It sure beats living by nukes, coal plants, tire burning plants, etc., eh? Even a natural gas power generation plant isn't nice to live by. Plus, you don't have to worry about the neighbors being noisy.
This is one of the reasons why it's supposed to be worth it to install solar in some places. There's heavy subsidies that bring down the cost, and electricity rates are extremely high during parts of the day in California. And you get your money back instantly when you install the panels, because if you were to sell the house the next day, the sale price would be boosted by the value of the panels.
Well, that's what they say, at least, and this article seems to prove it.
Sorry, but people arguing from a NIMBY perspective have never claimed that domestic solar power degrades home values. This is simply an attempt to attribute a completely illogical and unreasonable opposition to someone.
It's likely that many NIMBY opponents have argued against wind farms based on a) their own personal taste as to what they can see outside their window, b) a perception that house prices will be affected negatively if what you see (and hear) are wind farms.
If it's their own personal taste it comes to then arguments about house prices aren't very relevant and don't contradict any arguments - if it's house prices it comes to then the study referred to in the article isn't highly precise, as it doesn't track house prices through time. You would usually only see wind farms from locations with great views, and hear them in a somewhat larger radius, hence a simple "do houses close to wind farms sell for less at this point in time" would be difficult to make accurate.
The article mentions an avarage cost of $5000 to install 1 kW of solar, so it seems like a pretty good investment overall.
These results contradict the arguments based on degrading home values used by [...] opponents
Members of home associations that ban solar panels aren't really arguing that panels lower property prices, they're arguing "I don't want to see it". It's the same with most HA rules aimed at "protecting property values".
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
A few years ago I got a deal from Nevada Power where they paid for half the cost of a 5kwh array. It was working great until work forced me to relocate to another state. I had a hell of a time selling the place because the general public is just not technical enough to appreciate it. One potential buyer got a static shock from the carpet as is common in the dry vegas air. She actuually thought the solar power array caused it! How am I supposed to reason with that kind of stupidity?
No kidding - you put $30k in on a solar system and that raises house prices? Because people don't need to pay extortionate power rates? What a weird concept.
The fact of the matter is, California has the highest power rates in the nation (I'd assign blame in equal parts to NIMBYs, environmentalists, PG&E, the PUC, and our legislature). Running air conditioning in the summer will kick you up into Tier 5 rates, which are currently around 50c/kWh. Getting a four digit power bill for one month is enough to convince even the most ardent anti-environmentalist of the value of solar.
If you run the numbers, rooftop solar has a levelized cost of about 24c/kWh. So it's worth it to build out capacity to meet however much power you use in the higher tier rates (Tiers 3 through 5). You don't necessarily want to run your power bills to zero (Tiers 1 and 2 are subsidized by the higher rates), but if you do, PG&E will write you a check at the end of the year. (How much has yet to be determined.) Schwarzenegger got that pushed through at the end of his term of governor - before that, PG&E would just pocket any excess capacity you generate.
I actually just had solar put in and finally turned on a couple weeks ago. It's nice running a net positive balance with PG&E, though it's still too cool for air conditioning.
Most states have specific laws that prevent HOAs from banning solar panels.
Hawaii already requires solar water heating on new homes.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
This is not surprising, but not that encouraging either. If you pay for a bit of fancy landscaping and planting around your house before you sell it, you can often improve your house resale value by much more than the cost of the work. Solar also offers a warm glow of righteousness far out of proportion with energy generated.
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
For years, I was holding out for Nanosolar or First Solar to get domestic panels out at somewhere nearer to $2/kW and without so much embodied energy in the panels, but they don't look to be interested in domestic sales. Until then, the only reason that panels are cheap in Australia is because of very high government regulated feed-in tariffs and purchase subsidies, which are just middle-class welfare masquerading as a renewable energy policy.
Until the government killed the program, there were businesses here doing energy efficiency assessments to see if houses qualified for interest free government loans to improve energy efficiency or install solar systems. An interview I heard with one assessor gave the impression that most houses had considerable inefficiency to rectify before it made any sense installing generating capacity. New Australian houses are still much less insulated than new houses in northern Europe or North America, rely too much on resistive electrical heating for the house and for the hot water supply, and the current fashion for building faux-Mediterranean rendered boxes with no roof overhang guarantees high cooling costs in summer. Old Australian houses often had no (as in, ZERO) insulation in them. Visitors from northern Europe are amazed at how uncomfortable and slapdash many of our houses are.
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
Then they should get their own solar panels.
30K for how much? I paid 11.5K for 3kw.
Also, instead of thinking about paying it off, think about it as an investment. The premise being, you get your cash back when you sell your home.
I get a 12% annual return on my solar investment. That'll improve as energy gets more expensive.
Spend 30k now only to have to wait ten years to break even? By then, you'll probably be in another house, in another city.
I don't know that a 10% tax-free return on investment is anything to sneeze at. It also seems less volatile that most equities - the downside risk is that your local power costs are perhaps going to dramatically decrease? If the summary is has any validity, it seems as though moving is not much of an issue as the house value would have increased to offset some or all of the investment.
Check out the solar lease deals. I just signed up with Sun Run to install solar on my house. They own the panels, and I don't pay them anything up-front. They get the rebates, and then sell me discounted electricity from my panels. They also maintain the system. If I move, the system gets transferred to the new owner(assuming they have good credit, which is a safe bet if they're buying my house).
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I put panels up 6 years ago and they save roughly $2,000/year in electricity here in California ( my previous three years before panels were $6100; I've spent $300 over the last 6 years on electricity).
A prospective home owner knows they won't have to pay that $2000/year on electricity, so if they pour that into a 4% loan, they can borrow an extra $35,000 for that roughly $160/mo savings.
So to see a story say that my panels should be worth between $10K-$20K to a home buyer makes total sense.
By then, you'll probably be in another house, in another city.
Thus the whole point of this article - that you can generally recover the costs of the installation if you end up moving.
I don't read AC A human right
This doesn't surprise me, what with rising electrical costs.
I just completed construction on a new house and went out of my way to put a hefty solar system (30 panels, ~6.6kwh) on it. I absolutely, positively, in every single way love it!
Ferretman
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
I farm giraffes, you insensitive clod.
Costco is now selling solar PV systems including a 5060WDC for $18K, or $3.55:W. $5.50:W increased home value sounds like a good way to nearly double your investment in solar, even before the subsidies cut the cost to $2:W or less, tripling it or better.
--
make install -not war
Seriously, in the USA, construction has all but died. What is currently going is high-end homes and business (including apartment). What would make sense at this time, would be to require that all new buildings in the lower 49, to have 1/2 or more of monthly HVAC done by Solar PV. Now, that sounds like a lot, but it really is not. What it WILL do is encourage construction firms to increase insulation esp. on windows. In addition, it will encourage builders to move to geothermal heat pumps. The reason is that they are cheap to install up front, but most importantly, they have similar energy requirements winter and summer.
By requiring this, it will also make these places NOT compete against for-closed places. That later part is very important. The reason is that it prevents new homes from competing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.