Wow, this Earth Day snuck up on me. You’d think that after writing about it for 16 years now, I wouldn’t be caught writing an article at the last minute.
Is it okay to write about Earth Day nowadays? I feel like half the country would label an article like this as “woke” and say that I’m pushing some kind of Green New Deal.
You’d think that after the rise of natural disasters (remember Hurricane Helene), people would listen to the science and take action. Somewhere around 20% of homes in Florida are not insured. In many cases, insurance companies won’t take the risk. In other cases, it’s so expensive to insure a home that people opt out of it.
It’s getting worse every year. I’m concerned with the lives lost and cities destroyed. However, some people only care about the money. Climate.gov has some great charts to see how the costs of billion-dollar weather disasters have grown through 2024.
Ten years ago, we got solar power. Let’s look at how it has worked out.
Solar Power Update: Ten Years Later
When I was looking into solar power ten years ago, I didn’t expect it to go anywhere. I was simply looking for ways to reduce my monthly expenses. Rhode Island isn’t known for its sunlight.
As I looked into it the stars started to align. We had to have a house facing the right direction. We did! It had to be cost effective to meet the goal of reducing our monthly expenses. It turns out that Rhode Island has some of the most expensive electricity in the country. Any energy generated saves a lot of money. Finally, we took advantage of significant government subsidies. Some guy named Musk was doing the same thing for SolarCity and Tesla on a much bigger scale.
We paid $16,000 for our solar panels. Without the tax breaks, they would have cost $32,000.
In ten years, we’ve had a couple of inverters fail. The local solar company we worked with fixed it all free of charge. Everything is still under warranty for another 15 years.
In ten years, our panels have generated 90.5 MWh of electricity. That’s 90,500 kWh of power. The cost of electricity in RI is currently around $0.30 per kWh. It was around 19 cents when we got solar power in 2015. I could estimate that the average cost of energy was about 24.5 cents over the last ten years. That means we’ve gotten around $22,172.5 of electricity for our $16,000 (The $22,172.5 comes from 90,500kWh multiplied by $0.245). In fairness, if we invested the $16,000, we’d probably have at least $32,000 with the stock market growth. You can never expect the stock market to grow like it has been, though.
Overall, we’ve paid about 17.6 cents per kWh. That’s $16,000 divided by 90,500 kWh. Our cost per kWh keeps going down because each year we generate more electricity from the same $16,000 investment.
Looking at the last year, we generated 8400 kWh. At the current $0.30 rate, we saved around $2,500. Our solar panels are less efficient, but we’re still saving more as the cost of electricity goes up. When we bought our solar panels, the salesman said that they were guaranteed to be 95% effective for 25 years. Looking at the numbers, they don’t seem to be living quite up to that billing. However, we have a tree that has grown and is likely blocking them some part of the day. Ironically, nature is limiting us from saving nature. Fortunately (or unfortunately?), the tree needs to be cut down because it’s diseased.
I have one final note on the numbers and savings. Our Enphase dashboard has a dollar calculator, but it seems to be using some kind of national average. Here’s what it looks like:
Clicking on the information icon wasn’t very helpful in figuring out how they came across the calculation.
That’s enough for this year’s Earth Day update. If that wasn’t too woke for you, here’s a look back at my Earth Day articles:
Previous Earth Day Articles
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Climate Change is like Personal Finance
Whether it is personal finance or fighting climate change, the little things add up to become big things over time.
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All At Once
COVID shutdown hit one month when I published this one. The Jack Johnson lyrics written in 2008 about the environment described how many were feeling about COVID-19.
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Solar Panels: One Year Later
My one-year review of solar panels.
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Solar Panels Completed
My post after finishing the installation of the solar panels.
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Four Lazy Ways to Save the Environment
This is an old article from 2009. I was recommending CFLs – those corkscrew bulbs. We still have and use some, but the technology with LEDs is better and more cost-effective now.
If you’ve finished all that reading… or even if you haven’t, I hope you take some time to get outside and enjoy Earth day today.
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