Going solar is a luxury few can afford

Here.

Excerpts:

IT’S not easy being green—nor is it cheap. With the best will (and some of the most generous handouts) in the world, solar power still makes little sense for the average homeowner, even in sunny southern California.
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The problem is that solar-energy technology has been improving incrementally, but its costs have been falling slowly.

If solar cells had abided by Moore’s Law, they too would have halved in price every 18 months or so—and we would all be running our homes on sunshine. But getting photons from sunlight to dislodge more and more electrons in semi-conducting materials like silicon, and so generate electricity, is harder than building a better microchip.

The first solar cells—built more than a century ago—had conversion efficiencies of around 1%. Since then, their efficiency has doubled once only every 30 years—a veritable snail’s pace compared with the speed of microchip development.
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Here’s where going green gets tough. At today’s prices, your correspondent would have to stump up $48,000 for the solar panels alone. Add the cost of the switching modules, the power controller, the fault protector, the DC-to-AC inverter and the service panel—not to mention the installation charges and the contractor’s profit—and the final bill could easily come to $65,000.

What about incentives and tax credits? That depends on where precisely you live and how effective an installation you have. To get anything like a full grant in your correspondent’s neck of the woods, the array would have to be facing due south and tilted at an angle of 34 degrees to the sun. The first might be possible; the second would definitely not. At best, Mayhem Manor would qualify for about $12,000 worth of local assistance plus a $2,000 federal grant.

Borrowing the balance at today’s interest rates would mean repayments of roughly $600 a month for ten years, even after setting the interest charges against tax. And all that just to feel good about saving $75 of electricity a month. Better to buy a couple of tons worth of [bogus?] carbon offsets each year for $70 and have done with it.