>Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn’t my idea of the right place to do it.
That's a pretty strange sentiment. 20 years ago, solar was decidedly more expensive than it is now. A fair price would be higher than grid power. For the installation to have occurred at all, the up front capital cost had to be amortized by a for-profit company in an attractive way. This appears to have been crafted as a payment schedule that's slightly back-heavy. Seems to me that the author just didn't want to be left holding the bag, but still wanted to pay lip service and feel like a good environmentalist.
Seems like one thing to make the payment schedule back-heavy and be honest about it, another thing to use unrealistic assumptions about utility price increases to disguise this payment schedule as a lifetime cost savings.
And the huge issue is that if it's a back-heavy payment scheme: A future buyer will only see the heavier portion. Which makes your house less attractive to a buyer, and devalues your home, which also hurts any potential cost savings.
The growth rate of the payment is 2.9%. This is only very slightly higher than inflation, on average.
Also, assuming that the lower home value came true, the original purchaser of the solar installation did put his money where his mouth is, and paid a financial cost to his environmental interests, which is the moral thing to do, regardless of whether he was "tricked" by the negative cash flows showing up in later years (and in this case, when he was dead).
I guess my main point from my multiple posts is that there is no free lunch. If the fully amortized cost of solar is higher than grid power, someone will have to pay. Someone with buyer's remorse, who fully understood the cash flow implications at the time of purchase, can still feel like they were tricked. And maybe, the pessimistic projections of grid power costs made by sunrun should be taken with a grain of salt, and it should also be acknowledged that this deceptive practice is helping the planet.
Maybe a game theory perspective is valuable here- assuming cooperation is possible, people place an irrationally small cost to global warming, and discount future costs (in this case, of their power bill) to an irrationally large degree. The way to get people to cooperate is to trade one irrational impulse for another.
Sure, someone is going to have to pay for greener power. But the problem is that Sunrun is claiming it's cheaper, even though it isn't, and that the owner ends up paying both Sunrun's expenses and their profit margin.
Ah, sorry. Yeah, I must have misremembered "20 years" from the first quote below. Doesn't materially change my argument, I think.
Another important point, in my opinion, is the cost given in the second quote below is a fair cost. $6000 over 20 years is an average cost of $300 per year. If you are purchasing 2016-era installed solar, knowing that it is a less cost-effective form of electricity generation than conventional means, an amortized (predicted) cost of $300 per year is fair. Refusing to pay this and still claiming to "be willing to pay a little extra to help the planet" is hypocritical.
>I got ahold of a copy of Jug’s contract, and quickly saw how Sunrun could afford to extend such an offer. It lasted 20 years. The payments escalated annually by 2.9 percent—they’d be 72 percent higher by 2036. The tax credit was worth at least $5,000.
>If Southern California Edison's residential rates continue to rise annually by 2.2 percent, as they have on average over the last decade, Jug's total electricity outlay having gone solar would have cost about $6,000 more over 20 years.
You're mixing up two different sets of numbers here. $6,000 is the extra amount that Jug would have paid after being sold the solar installation as a way to save a lot of money over the next 20 years.
The author, who was willing to pay a little more to save the environment, would have been paying an extra $30/month from the start, before the annual increases started widening the gap. Their bills without the solar started at $30/month, so this would start out doubling their bill and increase from there.
This seems really suspicious to me since in the article they clearly stated that their electricity usage was much lower than the previous owner, who was running some kind of server farm there.
Of course someone needed to pay, but it seems wrong to pay extra for electricity they are not using to pay lip service for supporting a for-profit company who had locked in the plan with an earlier contract.
That's a pretty strange sentiment. 20 years ago, solar was decidedly more expensive than it is now. A fair price would be higher than grid power. For the installation to have occurred at all, the up front capital cost had to be amortized by a for-profit company in an attractive way. This appears to have been crafted as a payment schedule that's slightly back-heavy. Seems to me that the author just didn't want to be left holding the bag, but still wanted to pay lip service and feel like a good environmentalist.