Eco Dude: Tapping into energy from out of this world

By DAVID POGUE —

Saving the planet is one thing. Withholding $100,000 from the electric company is pleasure on a whole different level.

I actually have no beef with NYSEG and ConEd. They’re probably very nice people. They are, however, New York utilities, and therefore they produce about half of our electricity by burning natural gas. Which produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Which makes our atmospheric blanket thicker. Which makes the oceans warmer, the hurricanes stronger, the heat waves longer, the winters shorter, the droughts grimmer, the wildfires deadlier.

And it’s only getting worse. I don’t mean the climate crisis (well, that too) — I mean the price of power. It’s up almost 40 percent since 2012. Hell, we’re up 13.4 percent just since last year. And thanks to an agreement locked in with the New York State Public Service Commission, we can look forward to more double-digit price hikes through at least 2025.

And every year, you’ll be buying more of that more expensive juice — to run your A/C, as the summers get hotter and longer.

In our first year here in Bedford, my wife Nicki and I have experienced only one outbreak of door-to-door salesmen. It was two weeks ago: two guys selling solar panels.

OK, maybe I’d consider buying a magazine subscription or a fundraising candy bar. But $25,000 worth of photovoltaic equipment? How desperate are these guys?

Still, we agreed to hear them out.

The next day, a rep from Trinity Solar arrived. On his laptop, he showed us satellite photos of our house, indicating where the panels could go. As he began his spiel, I realized just how much has changed since the last time I sniffed around solar.

First of all, modern panels look great. They’re no longer all silver-and-black checkerboards. Now they come in solid glossy black, sleek and shiny, like Apple iPanels.

Second, they’re much more efficient. In 2010, they’d convert 15 percent of sunshine into free power; today, they’re over 22 percent.

Third, the price of getting solar has crashed. It’s half of what it cost in 2010.

Fourth, solar adds to the resale value of your home — about $25,000 on an average New York house. The panels keep your roof cooler in summer, and melt snow faster in winter.

Best of all, the government would really, really like to buy your panels for you. The wishful-thinkingly named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 slices a delicious 30 percent off the cost. New York state is pleased to kick in another $5,000. (These are not lame tax deductions, which lower the amount of income you use to calculate your taxes. These are tax credits, which subtract real money from your final tax payment. Much juicier.)

But wait, there’s less! NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) wishes to chip in, too: 20 cents per watt of solar you’re installing. In my case, that’s another $3,500. I mean, these people really want you to get solar.

You no longer need a backup battery (about $10,000), either, thanks to a cool scheme called net metering. When your rooftop generates more power than you need (daytime, summertime), the electric company stores it for you.

Then, when you need more than your panels produce (nighttime, winter), it returns the power you’ve banked, as needed. In essence, you’re using the entire electrical grid as your personal battery.

You can get solar in the same three ways you can get a car: Loan, lease, or buy outright.

— Loan. A solar loan buys your panels; you pay it back over 25 years. You get the installation now, without paying anything — and the beauty part is that the loan payments are less than your current electricity bill. (In our case, it’d be about 22 percent less.) The interest rate’s about 7 percent, or 4 percent in lower-income areas.

— Lease. You pay a fixed amount for your power — once again, less than you’d pay the utility. But you don’t get the tax cuts and rebates, and selling your house to a new owner can get complicated.

— Buy. If you can afford to buy the panels outright, you get to “free power forever” much faster, and you pay much less in total. (Example: If your buy-it-now price is $25,000, then paying back a loan for the same panels would come to $80,000 over the 25 years. That’s just how interest works.)

We very much appreciated Trinity Solar’s go-getter attitude; they turned us onto the insane value of 2024 solar.

In the end, though, we did some due diligence. We uploaded our electric bills to EnergySage.com , an independent clearinghouse for solar installers. Four companies submitted quotes; you can view their terms side-by-side for comparison.

Over the phone, a free EnergySage coach guy helped us sort through the proposals. (They are not, ahem, novice-friendly.)

He explained that these days, the hardware is essentially identical across the industry. Almost every solar company will give you the same gorgeous, high-efficiency panels, the same kind of phone app to monitor them, the same 25-year warranty. All you’re really choosing is the company you want to deal with — for support, maintenance, the rare repairs — for the next 25 years.

(He also noted that one of the two presidential candidates, who shall remain nameless, has vowed to gut the IRA bill if elected. Therefore, the safest time to buy solar might be before January.)

In the end, we chose a company called Infinity Energy. They’ve done 10,000 installations in the tri-state area. Their panels are made in America. They’ve got an A+ Better Business Bureau rating, a 4.8 average Google rating, and zero debt. (That’s a big green flag. In 2023, high interest rates drove over 100 solar companies out of business. Including a California company called Infinity Energy — no relation.)

Infinity, too, has a roof-preview app. It revealed that, because of our house’s position, we’ll get only 85 percent of our power from the sun. We’ll still have to buy a few dribbles from NYSEG.

“But some savings is better than no savings,” our rep pointed out. “Some reduction of your carbon footprint is better than no reduction.”

True. Besides, there’s a golden lining to the news: the front of our house won’t have panels on it — it faces the wrong way — so it will still look cute from the street.

The cost of all of this? All in, $46,200. But thanks to the contributions of our generous elected officials, our final cost will be just under $25,000.

25 grand? Well, hold on now! Our current NYSEG bills are $4,300 a year. In other words — am I sitting down? — we’ll recoup the entire price of those panels in six years.

Six years! And at that point — hoo, baby. Free power forever! No more annual price hikes. No more wasting the free money that Mr. Blue Sky has been dumping on us for years.

And no more burning natural gas for power, either; the power plant that does our burning is 93 million miles away. Our new rooftop panels will keep 17,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air, every single year, forever.

We already drive electric and don’t eat beef. Once we fire up our new panels (after three months of design, permits, and other preamble), we’ll be getting dangerously close to being zero-emissions humans.

As a sweet reward for our noble service to the planet, we’ll save $100,000 over the next 25 years. A hundred grand we would have paid to the power company. Sorry ‘bout that, NYSEG.

Well, sorry/not sorry.