8 ms·

The rooftop solar industry could be on the verge of collapse

39 points by nkurz 3y ago

d1str0 3y ago
Ive seen a few articles about this topic. I’m a new homeowner and have been looking forward to getting rooftop solar within the next year (recently swapped to a heat pump instead of gas furnace). The local (PDX, OR) companies seem a bit sketchy but I do have at least one solid recommendation from a friend. My mother however wasn’t so lucky and experienced something similar to the article where the salesmen claimed it would all be free and pay for itself but the. She ended up with a $16k loan. When she called to clarify they offered to double the number of panels on the roof and install for free, which she agreed to. Any one else here with experience getting rooftop solar?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jlubawy 3y ago
  We got Sunrun within the past year on a house we bought 1.5 years ago (so we're NEM 2.0 which is important). I'm in San Diego, we were paying about 500/month for SDGE (fluctuating anywhere from 300-800 throughout the year, 800 because of gas prices last January). We're paying Sunrun a fixed $300/month, with a 4% increase annually for inflation (presumably electricity prices will also go up during the same time). Sunrun 100% paid for a main panel relocation required by our county to be to code, so we literally haven't paid for anything other than the 300/month bill. So far I've only had a good experience.
- Kluggy 3y ago
  My house faces east-west and so the local solar companies refuse to come out and give a quote. I know it's not going to be as efficient, but I live in an area with lots of power outages, so having a backup system is worth the lack of efficiency, but they all refuse to come out, no matter what I explain up front.
  - philjohn 3y ago
    It's not AS efficient, true, especially in the winter when the sun is lower in the sky, but it's not like it'll do nothing - and in the summer you get a longer generation period. You'll likely need more panels, but panels (should) be cheap, although in the US you seem to have high prices due to tariffs.
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > I live in an area with lots of power outages, so having a backup system is worth the lack of efficiency Unless you go completely off-grid then rooftop solar isn’t going to help with outages as they are turned off during outages to protect electrical workers and the power grid. [1] Your problem can be solved with home batteries. 1. https://www.paradisesolarenergy.com/blog/will-solar-panels-work-during-a-power-outage https://www.paradisesolarenergy.com/blog/will-solar-panels-w...
    - dmazzoni 3y ago
      I was surprised to discover that even with a backup battery, a typical solar install is not designed to power your whole home in the event of a power loss. Only some inverters support it, and most backup batteries can't generate enough amps to start an A/C unit, even though they'd have enough to run it for a while. Tesla's PowerWall is more capable than some, but I've heard nightmare stories about working with Tesla customer service so I stayed away from that one, even though technologically it's probably the most advanced.
      - pbmonster 3y ago
        > I was surprised to discover that even with a backup battery, a typical solar install is not designed to power your whole home in the event of a power loss. Might even be illegal, depending on jurisdiction. For good reasons, you could kill electricians working on the local grid or firefighters working on your house if you're not careful with the install and adding local shut-offs. My battery turns off when the grid goes down, but it has 3 outlets directly on the body of the battery, and those always work. I run extension cords from those when the power goes.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I follow Will Prowse on YT. He's full of great information about solar/batteries/etc. He's more about "mobile solar", but tbh... you can apply a lot of the same stuff to your own home. Especially when it comes to storage.
- dmazzoni 3y ago
  I thought I would avoid those issues by buying a system outright, rather than financing it. I had the cash to spare and thought it would be a good investment. I went with a local company. The owner was an electrician and knew what he was talking about. He didn't try to upsell me. He didn't claim to be the cheapest but the price was competitive and the workers were in-house, not subcontracted. It seemed like just what I wanted. The installation day came and they arrived early in the morning, and spent hours installing brackets. The solar panels were supposed to arrive by 9am. By noon they were still waiting. Finally they gave up and went home, no answer on the panels. The next day they came back to keep working, still with no panels. I sent them home and called the owner, demanding an answer. Eventually I learned that the panels were damaged in transit and it'd be weeks before they could procure new ones. They couldn't guarantee a date. They had already charged my credit card for the full amount of the install. I told them this was unacceptable, the law says they can only charge a deposit, with the balance due when the work was actually complete. They stopped returning my calls, so I initiated a chargeback with my credit card company. That got their attention. They begged me to cancel the chargeback, which I only reluctantly agreed to after they hand-delivered a refund check to me in person. It took me dozens of calls before I found another company willing to work with the half-completed install. Most companies didn't want to touch it. In the end, I got the system I wanted and it worked great. One thing I learned through this process is that there are a lot of companies who want to install solar, but none who want to service your existing solar installation, which is seen as a money-losing business. Lots of homeowners buy a system that supposedly includes an excellent warranty, but then their solar company goes out of business, and suddenly they have nobody to call when something goes wrong. I don't really know the solution to that problem. It makes me think that if I had to do it again, maybe I should go with a larger national company.
  - switch007 3y ago
    > He didn't claim to be the cheapest Ugh! Every independent tradesperson that’s spun that line (“I’m not cheap, I’m quality” etc) with me has turned out to be a liar. Super expensive without the quality part … Most are conmen and incompetent at running a business and price isn’t a strong signal for a good one Anyone who comes in strong with the hard man, “I’m expensive for a reason” spiel is a hard no now
- dehrmann 3y ago
  I haven't researched it much, but what's always smelled fishy to me is that rooftop solar is going up, but there's less utility-scale solar in the desert where there's more sun, no shade, panels angled correctly, and consolidated maintenance. I suspect rooftop solar only appears to work because the sales pitch sounds good, there are government subsidies, net metering is broken, and people don't consider depreciation and maintenance.
MostlyStable 3y ago
Rooftop solar never really made sense in the big picture kind of way. It's about 2x the cost of non-rooftop solar, so why should we be putting it on roofs when there is still plenty of non-roof space to put it? If we get to a point where we've run out of room for solar...then sure, roofs are great (although residential roofs should probably be the last roofs after big, flat industrial/commercial roofs), but the only reason it ever made sense to begin with was extremely large subsidies that probably should have gone to other renewable efforts.
- emmet 3y ago
  If you want private panels in pretty much any country outside of America, they're going to have to go on the roof as we don't exactly have the land to waste elsewhere.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Here in Germany we waste about 2.4 million hectares on „energy crops“. That’s enough to cover a large fraction of Germany’s primary energy consumption if it were used for solar instead.
    - arunharidas 3y ago
      The foolish move by the German government to close down all the nuclear reactors. The German government is weird.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        It would have been nice to turn off coal first, but it doesn’t change what we need to do for renewables.
      - pgeorgi 3y ago
        Or history is more complex than a sound bite. Getting Germany off nuclear has been in the making since the 1980s, and a big factor was fighting corruption. We still have a glowing mess from those days, waiting another 80 years until it can be cleaned up.
porphyra 3y ago
A pity that shady companies are ruining the solar industry with predatory loans when actually the solar panels are cheaper than ever and it's a great idea to install solar to help accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
elzbardico 3y ago
Extreme financialization Will be our downfall.
- timthelion 3y ago
  Underfinancialization also sucks. In Czechia there are tons of empty or uninsulated buildings that their owners could put to good economic use if only they could borrow money.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    De-hydration being a fatal problem is probably not a consolation for someone who is drowning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
liampulles 3y ago
Home solar is a pretty big industry here in South Africa at the moment, mainly because of our ailing power utility. Banks provide reasonable long term loan options to homeowners. There are better and worse contractors, but because it is quite a booming market right now, you can fairly easily figure out who the good ones are.
konschubert 3y ago
Doesn't sound like a collapse, sounds more like running hot? Even if they over-leveraged, it will kill a bunch of companies, but the industry will bounce back. Maybe that's what they mean with a collapse... so I guess the title is fair after all.
m463 3y ago
This is a terrible article. I think most of the solar "boom" and "bust" comes from PG&E and its influence on california energy pricing. Solar could not have gotten such a boost if it hadn't been for PG&E running up the price of electricity in California. The wholesale cost of electricity in California is still 2-4c/kwh, yet california electricity costs residents an average of 36c/kwh, and reaches 50c/kwh. This gave a boost to solar, because with power THAT expensive, solar is a no-brainer. Additionally, there used to be some benefits to folks who got solar in california, where they could sell back some power to the grid to defray their costs. However PG&E holds all the cards, and recently legislation was pushed through so that excess power generated by solar customers can be sold back to the grid for around the wholesale rate, no matter the time of day. Some folks think this is fair, but remember that PG&E has always been treated more fairly than anyone. It is looking like a "war games" sort of situation for electric customers. Get solar and batteries, because the only way to win is not to play at all.
- theogravity 3y ago
  You wrote exactly what I was going to. The article only focuses on shady loans, but nothing about state-specific programs like in CA with PGE's NEM (aka net metering) for solar customers. Those under NEM 1 and 2 get a lot of the electrical export back to offset import consumption, but those under NEM 3 are heavily penalized where export gives only around the wholesale rate that the only way a PV system makes sense is to pair it with battery storage so that export can be used during the night instead to offset generation during that time. It just feels so backwards that NEM 3 discourages people to want to install a system.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    It is great that previous system that allowed rich to exploit the poor are not kept. Market price at time of production is exactly what the value of produced power is and that is only just and moral price to pay for it.
    - theogravity 3y ago
      I never thought of it like that. I think that anger is misdirected - it should be to PGE / utilities that charge residential customers an arm and a leg where the actual market price is 30-40 cents lower than it should be. I don't think anyone under some NEM program would complain as long as what they export matches up with what PGE is charging.
wharvle 3y ago
We got some. I'd been skeptical that screwing with your roof that much was a good idea, but so many people do it and seem happy about it... it must be OK? TL;DR never again. Way too expensive for what it gains you, way too much risk (to your roof, of future costs for roof maintenance, et c.) Installing on a roof is crazy-expensive compared to ground. If we have enough room at our next house I'll self-install panels at ground level and have an electrician do the rest. It's just not favorable enough a move, otherwise, to be worth the risk and hassle. Ground-level's way cheaper, even if you don't self-install parts of it, and won't make your roof more complicated. It's technically saving us a little money, but no, not worth it, the peace of mind is worth the tens of dollars a month or whatever.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  What risks and complications do you worry about with a roof install? Unless you are maliciously incompetent as an installer there is no risk of destroying anything. And while it's easier to access and service on the ground, the roof is often perfectly tilted towards the sun AND lets you have many square meters of panel without sacrificing any area you could use for anything else.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Future maintenance now has to involve removing the panels, then installing them again afterward. That's a lot of extra work (so, money). Lots of roofers hate solar and won't touch it (they've worked on many roofs solar installers fucked up—talk to some). So now you need two companies involved. You'll have to take great care with the whole arrangement if you want the usual warranty you get with roof work from any decent roofing company (again, many hate solar and will be reluctant to guarantee work that has solar touching it, especially if another company has to do that part, which is often the case). The coordination effort means roofing projects are longer now. It's just not worth it once you factor in the period to recoup investment on the panels. The extra headache and risk plus long period before you're in the black anyway, just nowhere near being worth it. And all that assumes nothing goes wrong with the panels
    - 3y ago
balderdash 3y ago
It’s a shame home owners can’t find cheaper ways to buy and install systems without doing it themselves - we’d have a whole lot more roof top solar. I’d do it if the return was better, but it’s pretty meagre return unless I do it myself (and that’s not something I want or should do)
alluro2 3y ago
(Hyper-)Capitalism for you again... What would be wrong in building a life-long business that sells and installs solar panels and has normal margin on each sale/installation, without the crazy financial "products", companies themselves running on investor money, chasing huge growth and all beautiful things current way of doing business involves? It's like everybody is racing to the top, while being in a landslide going to the bottom.
- kragen 3y ago
  your customers would buy from a 'cheaper' vendor who extends them credit instead
  - alluro2 3y ago
    I don't think it should be allowed for companies to provide financial products such as credit. That's bank domain, heavily regulated and with good protections for both parties.
    - kragen 3y ago
      you probably don't know this if you haven't run a company or done accounting, but basically all b2b transactions are on credit, and that's been the case for at least 5000 years they've also been common for b2c transactions for at least the majority of that time, especially when dealing with consumers with limited cash flow
jillesvangurp 3y ago
The solar panel manufacturing industry is fine. Healthy year on year growth at a rather spectacular rate with absolutely no sign of that changing any time soon (the opposite rather). Demand world wide is strong; and growing. Both for grid solar and roof top solar. Hundreds of gigawatts added every year and that's trending towards terawatts. The bit of the industry that is at risk collapsing is the VC funded companies that "help" their customers get solar roofs by talking them into dodgy loans or leases they can't afford. If people can't pay off their loans or cancel their lease, these companies end up with a lot of solar panels that are stuck on roofs not generating any monthly recurring revenue. Removing them means spending more money and the second hand value is probably not amazing. Add a lot of dodgy sales practices to the mix and the same kind of sleazy practices that banks used to talk people into mortgages they couldn't afford before the housing bubble burst in 2008 and you have a nice recipe for a company sitting on a lot of debt that is at a high risk of defaulting and not bringing in the revenue that they thought they were going to get. They'll create a big mess by twisting lots of arms to get some of their money back and bankrupting some families in the process and they'll get bogged down in expensive court cases for years to come. So, what's collapsing is the notion that these companies that took billions in investment to fund all this are going to turn into nice little rainbow pooping unicorns. This kind of economical Darwinism is fine. Bad businesses not making it and taking some investors with them is not going to be the end of the world. But it's not going to slow down solar panel production and deployment. The US has plenty of underused roof real estate, and most of it us at a great latitude for getting some decent energy out of solar. With US grid infrastructure being as bad and expensive as it is, there are going to be plenty of people looking at getting some panels on their roofs. Just like every else in the world.

39 points by nkurz 3y ago

Ive seen a few articles about this topic. I’m a new homeowner and have been looking forward to getting rooftop solar within the next year (recently swapped to a heat pump instead of gas furnace). The local (PDX, OR) companies seem a bit sketchy but I do have at least one solid recommendation from a friend. My mother however wasn’t so lucky and experienced something similar to the article where the salesmen claimed it would all be free and pay for itself but the. She ended up with a $16k loan. When she called to clarify they offered to double the number of panels on the roof and install for free, which she agreed to. Any one else here with experience getting rooftop solar?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jlubawy 3y ago
We got Sunrun within the past year on a house we bought 1.5 years ago (so we're NEM 2.0 which is important). I'm in San Diego, we were paying about 500/month for SDGE (fluctuating anywhere from 300-800 throughout the year, 800 because of gas prices last January). We're paying Sunrun a fixed $300/month, with a 4% increase annually for inflation (presumably electricity prices will also go up during the same time). Sunrun 100% paid for a main panel relocation required by our county to be to code, so we literally haven't paid for anything other than the 300/month bill. So far I've only had a good experience.
Kluggy 3y ago
My house faces east-west and so the local solar companies refuse to come out and give a quote. I know it's not going to be as efficient, but I live in an area with lots of power outages, so having a backup system is worth the lack of efficiency, but they all refuse to come out, no matter what I explain up front.
- philjohn 3y ago
  It's not AS efficient, true, especially in the winter when the sun is lower in the sky, but it's not like it'll do nothing - and in the summer you get a longer generation period. You'll likely need more panels, but panels (should) be cheap, although in the US you seem to have high prices due to tariffs.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > I live in an area with lots of power outages, so having a backup system is worth the lack of efficiency Unless you go completely off-grid then rooftop solar isn’t going to help with outages as they are turned off during outages to protect electrical workers and the power grid. [1] Your problem can be solved with home batteries. 1. https://www.paradisesolarenergy.com/blog/will-solar-panels-work-during-a-power-outage https://www.paradisesolarenergy.com/blog/will-solar-panels-w...
  - dmazzoni 3y ago
    I was surprised to discover that even with a backup battery, a typical solar install is not designed to power your whole home in the event of a power loss. Only some inverters support it, and most backup batteries can't generate enough amps to start an A/C unit, even though they'd have enough to run it for a while. Tesla's PowerWall is more capable than some, but I've heard nightmare stories about working with Tesla customer service so I stayed away from that one, even though technologically it's probably the most advanced.
    - pbmonster 3y ago
      > I was surprised to discover that even with a backup battery, a typical solar install is not designed to power your whole home in the event of a power loss. Might even be illegal, depending on jurisdiction. For good reasons, you could kill electricians working on the local grid or firefighters working on your house if you're not careful with the install and adding local shut-offs. My battery turns off when the grid goes down, but it has 3 outlets directly on the body of the battery, and those always work. I run extension cords from those when the power goes.
latchkey 3y ago
I follow Will Prowse on YT. He's full of great information about solar/batteries/etc. He's more about "mobile solar", but tbh... you can apply a lot of the same stuff to your own home. Especially when it comes to storage.
dmazzoni 3y ago
I thought I would avoid those issues by buying a system outright, rather than financing it. I had the cash to spare and thought it would be a good investment. I went with a local company. The owner was an electrician and knew what he was talking about. He didn't try to upsell me. He didn't claim to be the cheapest but the price was competitive and the workers were in-house, not subcontracted. It seemed like just what I wanted. The installation day came and they arrived early in the morning, and spent hours installing brackets. The solar panels were supposed to arrive by 9am. By noon they were still waiting. Finally they gave up and went home, no answer on the panels. The next day they came back to keep working, still with no panels. I sent them home and called the owner, demanding an answer. Eventually I learned that the panels were damaged in transit and it'd be weeks before they could procure new ones. They couldn't guarantee a date. They had already charged my credit card for the full amount of the install. I told them this was unacceptable, the law says they can only charge a deposit, with the balance due when the work was actually complete. They stopped returning my calls, so I initiated a chargeback with my credit card company. That got their attention. They begged me to cancel the chargeback, which I only reluctantly agreed to after they hand-delivered a refund check to me in person. It took me dozens of calls before I found another company willing to work with the half-completed install. Most companies didn't want to touch it. In the end, I got the system I wanted and it worked great. One thing I learned through this process is that there are a lot of companies who want to install solar, but none who want to service your existing solar installation, which is seen as a money-losing business. Lots of homeowners buy a system that supposedly includes an excellent warranty, but then their solar company goes out of business, and suddenly they have nobody to call when something goes wrong. I don't really know the solution to that problem. It makes me think that if I had to do it again, maybe I should go with a larger national company.
- switch007 3y ago
  > He didn't claim to be the cheapest Ugh! Every independent tradesperson that’s spun that line (“I’m not cheap, I’m quality” etc) with me has turned out to be a liar. Super expensive without the quality part … Most are conmen and incompetent at running a business and price isn’t a strong signal for a good one Anyone who comes in strong with the hard man, “I’m expensive for a reason” spiel is a hard no now
dehrmann 3y ago
I haven't researched it much, but what's always smelled fishy to me is that rooftop solar is going up, but there's less utility-scale solar in the desert where there's more sun, no shade, panels angled correctly, and consolidated maintenance. I suspect rooftop solar only appears to work because the sales pitch sounds good, there are government subsidies, net metering is broken, and people don't consider depreciation and maintenance.

MostlyStable 3y ago

Rooftop solar never really made sense in the big picture kind of way. It's about 2x the cost of non-rooftop solar, so why should we be putting it on roofs when there is still plenty of non-roof space to put it? If we get to a point where we've run out of room for solar...then sure, roofs are great (although residential roofs should probably be the last roofs after big, flat industrial/commercial roofs), but the only reason it ever made sense to begin with was extremely large subsidies that probably should have gone to other renewable efforts.

emmet 3y ago
If you want private panels in pretty much any country outside of America, they're going to have to go on the roof as we don't exactly have the land to waste elsewhere.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Here in Germany we waste about 2.4 million hectares on „energy crops“. That’s enough to cover a large fraction of Germany’s primary energy consumption if it were used for solar instead.
  - arunharidas 3y ago
    The foolish move by the German government to close down all the nuclear reactors. The German government is weird.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      It would have been nice to turn off coal first, but it doesn’t change what we need to do for renewables.
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      Or history is more complex than a sound bite. Getting Germany off nuclear has been in the making since the 1980s, and a big factor was fighting corruption. We still have a glowing mess from those days, waiting another 80 years until it can be cleaned up.

porphyra 3y ago

A pity that shady companies are ruining the solar industry with predatory loans when actually the solar panels are cheaper than ever and it's a great idea to install solar to help accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.

elzbardico 3y ago

Extreme financialization Will be our downfall.

timthelion 3y ago
Underfinancialization also sucks. In Czechia there are tons of empty or uninsulated buildings that their owners could put to good economic use if only they could borrow money.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  De-hydration being a fatal problem is probably not a consolation for someone who is drowning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

liampulles 3y ago

Home solar is a pretty big industry here in South Africa at the moment, mainly because of our ailing power utility. Banks provide reasonable long term loan options to homeowners. There are better and worse contractors, but because it is quite a booming market right now, you can fairly easily figure out who the good ones are.

konschubert 3y ago

Doesn't sound like a collapse, sounds more like running hot? Even if they over-leveraged, it will kill a bunch of companies, but the industry will bounce back. Maybe that's what they mean with a collapse... so I guess the title is fair after all.

m463 3y ago

This is a terrible article. I think most of the solar "boom" and "bust" comes from PG&E and its influence on california energy pricing. Solar could not have gotten such a boost if it hadn't been for PG&E running up the price of electricity in California. The wholesale cost of electricity in California is still 2-4c/kwh, yet california electricity costs residents an average of 36c/kwh, and reaches 50c/kwh. This gave a boost to solar, because with power THAT expensive, solar is a no-brainer. Additionally, there used to be some benefits to folks who got solar in california, where they could sell back some power to the grid to defray their costs. However PG&E holds all the cards, and recently legislation was pushed through so that excess power generated by solar customers can be sold back to the grid for around the wholesale rate, no matter the time of day. Some folks think this is fair, but remember that PG&E has always been treated more fairly than anyone. It is looking like a "war games" sort of situation for electric customers. Get solar and batteries, because the only way to win is not to play at all.

theogravity 3y ago
You wrote exactly what I was going to. The article only focuses on shady loans, but nothing about state-specific programs like in CA with PGE's NEM (aka net metering) for solar customers. Those under NEM 1 and 2 get a lot of the electrical export back to offset import consumption, but those under NEM 3 are heavily penalized where export gives only around the wholesale rate that the only way a PV system makes sense is to pair it with battery storage so that export can be used during the night instead to offset generation during that time. It just feels so backwards that NEM 3 discourages people to want to install a system.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  It is great that previous system that allowed rich to exploit the poor are not kept. Market price at time of production is exactly what the value of produced power is and that is only just and moral price to pay for it.
  - theogravity 3y ago
    I never thought of it like that. I think that anger is misdirected - it should be to PGE / utilities that charge residential customers an arm and a leg where the actual market price is 30-40 cents lower than it should be. I don't think anyone under some NEM program would complain as long as what they export matches up with what PGE is charging.

wharvle 3y ago

We got some. I'd been skeptical that screwing with your roof that much was a good idea, but so many people do it and seem happy about it... it must be OK? TL;DR never again. Way too expensive for what it gains you, way too much risk (to your roof, of future costs for roof maintenance, et c.) Installing on a roof is crazy-expensive compared to ground. If we have enough room at our next house I'll self-install panels at ground level and have an electrician do the rest. It's just not favorable enough a move, otherwise, to be worth the risk and hassle. Ground-level's way cheaper, even if you don't self-install parts of it, and won't make your roof more complicated. It's technically saving us a little money, but no, not worth it, the peace of mind is worth the tens of dollars a month or whatever.

alkonaut 3y ago
What risks and complications do you worry about with a roof install? Unless you are maliciously incompetent as an installer there is no risk of destroying anything. And while it's easier to access and service on the ground, the roof is often perfectly tilted towards the sun AND lets you have many square meters of panel without sacrificing any area you could use for anything else.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Future maintenance now has to involve removing the panels, then installing them again afterward. That's a lot of extra work (so, money). Lots of roofers hate solar and won't touch it (they've worked on many roofs solar installers fucked up—talk to some). So now you need two companies involved. You'll have to take great care with the whole arrangement if you want the usual warranty you get with roof work from any decent roofing company (again, many hate solar and will be reluctant to guarantee work that has solar touching it, especially if another company has to do that part, which is often the case). The coordination effort means roofing projects are longer now. It's just not worth it once you factor in the period to recoup investment on the panels. The extra headache and risk plus long period before you're in the black anyway, just nowhere near being worth it. And all that assumes nothing goes wrong with the panels
  - 3y ago

balderdash 3y ago

It’s a shame home owners can’t find cheaper ways to buy and install systems without doing it themselves - we’d have a whole lot more roof top solar. I’d do it if the return was better, but it’s pretty meagre return unless I do it myself (and that’s not something I want or should do)

alluro2 3y ago

(Hyper-)Capitalism for you again... What would be wrong in building a life-long business that sells and installs solar panels and has normal margin on each sale/installation, without the crazy financial "products", companies themselves running on investor money, chasing huge growth and all beautiful things current way of doing business involves? It's like everybody is racing to the top, while being in a landslide going to the bottom.

kragen 3y ago
your customers would buy from a 'cheaper' vendor who extends them credit instead
- alluro2 3y ago
  I don't think it should be allowed for companies to provide financial products such as credit. That's bank domain, heavily regulated and with good protections for both parties.
  - kragen 3y ago
    you probably don't know this if you haven't run a company or done accounting, but basically all b2b transactions are on credit, and that's been the case for at least 5000 years they've also been common for b2c transactions for at least the majority of that time, especially when dealing with consumers with limited cash flow

jillesvangurp 3y ago

The solar panel manufacturing industry is fine. Healthy year on year growth at a rather spectacular rate with absolutely no sign of that changing any time soon (the opposite rather). Demand world wide is strong; and growing. Both for grid solar and roof top solar. Hundreds of gigawatts added every year and that's trending towards terawatts. The bit of the industry that is at risk collapsing is the VC funded companies that "help" their customers get solar roofs by talking them into dodgy loans or leases they can't afford. If people can't pay off their loans or cancel their lease, these companies end up with a lot of solar panels that are stuck on roofs not generating any monthly recurring revenue. Removing them means spending more money and the second hand value is probably not amazing. Add a lot of dodgy sales practices to the mix and the same kind of sleazy practices that banks used to talk people into mortgages they couldn't afford before the housing bubble burst in 2008 and you have a nice recipe for a company sitting on a lot of debt that is at a high risk of defaulting and not bringing in the revenue that they thought they were going to get. They'll create a big mess by twisting lots of arms to get some of their money back and bankrupting some families in the process and they'll get bogged down in expensive court cases for years to come. So, what's collapsing is the notion that these companies that took billions in investment to fund all this are going to turn into nice little rainbow pooping unicorns. This kind of economical Darwinism is fine. Bad businesses not making it and taking some investors with them is not going to be the end of the world. But it's not going to slow down solar panel production and deployment. The US has plenty of underused roof real estate, and most of it us at a great latitude for getting some decent energy out of solar. With US grid infrastructure being as bad and expensive as it is, there are going to be plenty of people looking at getting some panels on their roofs. Just like every else in the world.