In residential solar, panels are largely subsidized by federal ITC or financed by banks claiming the tax equity which covers the maintenance, upfront costs, etc; hence the zero upfront residential solar model. Will this be similar?
I’ve seen a bunch of people talking about how you need to install solar this year because the subsidies are going away. The whole goal of the subsidy is to get enough of an installed base to get costs down so you don’t need the subsidy. Even if the midterms give us a better Congress, you can’t count on these forever.
Wait a few years and panel prices will drop by more than the subsidies you are receiving now on the existing ones. Even without subsidies, it might be worth it for some people to do right now. It depends on your situation.
The trick is having a well integrated system that doesn't waste power but instead works with batteries, grid, and EVs to make sure you waste as little as possible of the free energy your panels generate when they are producing rather than just serving excess power to your neighbors via the grid at some token value that your power supplier sets. There are some nice solutions emerging in this space.
There’s a company making water heaters that store about 4x the heat per liter of water, and heat the water on demand. I can’t recall if the storage material is solid or liquid so I hesitate to call it a “tankless” system if it has a tank of hot sludge.
Those units are supposed to be quite good as a dump for excess solar power.
In residential solar, panels are largely subsidized by federal ITC or financed by banks claiming the tax equity which covers the maintenance, upfront costs, etc; hence the zero upfront residential solar model. Will this be similar?