Solarcity Corporation

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• By Phillip

  June 27, 2017

  Verified Hire

  Definitely would recommend SolarCity/Tesla. As far as the work, very quick and professional. There are a lot of moving parts with solar so the installation, which only takes a portion of one day, is just one part of it. You need to first speak to the sales person, who comes up with a proposal for your home. Then, a site surveyor will come out and actually get up on the roof and in the attic and see if the proposal is realistic in light of onsite conditions. Often, the system gets scaled back a bit at that point depending on a bunch of factors - shading, roof condition, rafter condition, etc. but you end up with a final proposal that can be supported by the house. Next is permitting and installation. Once installed, you have to wait for a post installation inspection and PG&E's authorization to turn the system on. That entire process may take 2 months so you should have realistic expectations about that. Once it's on, you can see in real time how much energy you're producing either online or on a smartphone app. It's pretty cool.

  The key to happiness with solar is understanding the billing and getting the correct system size. The best value proposition is to buy it outright and enjoy the 30% tax credit and free energy thereafter. If you do, the system will definitely pay for itself. However, leasing or signing a power purchase agreement are still better than doing nothing because your combined electricity bill between SolarCity and PG&E should be less than what you're paying PG&E. SolarCity's kWh rate will be less than PG&Es. I recommend having a year of PG&E bills first so that you can see what your average monthly kWh usage is and what you're spending on average per month over the course of a year for electricity. Then you want to try to knock out about 90-100% of that with your solar system, understanding that the system will produce much more in the summer months and less in the winter. Also, something to keep in mind, once you go solar in PG&E's territory, they put you on an annual net metering billing cycle for electricity. So the electricity portion your utility bill will drop to almost zero each month but they will be keeping track of your generation versus your usage and show you that in a table on page 2 of the bill. At the end of the year (12 months of having the system on), they true-up your account. You may owe them some money at that point if your system generated less power than you consumed, or you may end up with a credit, but they pay very little per kWh as a credit so better to try to get as close to zero as possible.

  The only caveat to that is that you may want to go bigger than you currently need if you plan on getting an electric vehicle, pool, hot tub, etc. - basically anything that would cause you to use more electricity than your past historical usage. Really the only risks from solar are 1) you get too small of a system and leave some savings on the table you could have otherwise received, or 2) if you end with a system that is bigger than what you need because there is no real money for consumers to make from backfeeding power to PG&E. Backfeeding will negate your usage, which is great, but as a private homeowner, you can't expect to make a profit from backfeeding power to the grid. You have to be generating significant power to do that ~ several megawatts at least.

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