Forget the political global warming BS for a minute, I have a few technical questions.

If we were to have a hurricane, would solar panels on my roof mean I don't need a generator? Where do I put all those batteries?

Related question... an emergency generator legally requires an automatic transfer switch to attach a generator to a house, to prevent it from back-feeding into the grid, and possibly electrocuting some poor power company lineman working to restore power. So howcome solar panels are allowed to back-feed the grid all the time? Does power derived from the sun somehow not electrocute power company linemen the same way fossil fuel power does?

Are solar panels impervious to hail storms? They look like they're made of glass. Will my insurance pay to replace glass gadgets installed on my roof?

Related question... How long do they last? Do they last longer than the 15 year payback period?

If they only last 15 years, will my solar power company help me scam my insurance company into replacing them, like all those Florida roofers who have made it impossible to insure a 10 year old roof in Florida? Or do they just scam the government again for part of it, and I get stuck with another 15 year payback?

Do they have to be "upgraded" every three years, like all my other electronic gadgets? Is that included in the 15 year payback?

What if my roof needs to be replaced before the solar panels? How much does it cost to remove and reinstall the solar panels when I replace my roof?

Do I need to find both a solar panel scammer and a roof scammer every 15 years, or in the future will it be possible to do it all with just one scammer?

Every time I think about solar, it just sounds like more trouble than it's worth! What am I missing?

It just cost my neighbor $5600 to remove and replace his panels so they could replace roof

Boy did you ever nail that one!!!
From reading all the people bashing your post I can confirm.....YOU REALLY CAN'T TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS!!!!:ho:

The ROI for solar panels in Florida isn’t there. All you’re doing is trading one bill for another. Instead of paying your power company for electricity, you’re paying for your solar panels.

Solar panels effectiveness degrade a small percentage every year. By the time you pay off your panels they’ll end up being 70% effective. Then you’ll need a new roof and just wait till you see what it coats to remove all the panels and reinstall them.

It doesn’t make sense to go solar, even is sunny Florida.

We were wondering as well what the extra cost would be to replace the roof a few years from now when ours will need replacement if we had solar panels installed. Could the panels be re-installed on the new roof?

Re-roofing issues?
 

Yes, they do. The average cost to remove and re-install existing panels is about $4,000.

A few answers: I did not intend this post to change anyone’s belief in the existence of global warming. For those whose opinions have hardened, no analysis is sufficient. For those who are skeptical, I suggest a reading of the science reports is not beyond the grasp of educated non-scientist. The issue is important and deserves scrutiny, not of the comments of politicians, pundits, and talk show hosts. Wikipedia has an authoritative writeup, including citations from more than 300 scientific papers. It is worth reading.

People considering solar panels as an investment decision are missing the point. There are many factors to consider to determine if the money to purchase solar for your house is the best investment of your money. In my opinion, investing in solar panels on your home will probably not return as much money as some other prudent financial investments. However, I have traded sending a check to the electric company for sending a check to pay off my loan. I have just about as much money left after paying the bills. I am more in debt, but the asset of my house has increased in value. I golfed this week with a man who had just purchased a used solar home, so I am confident my house will sell when the time comes. Financially, my solar investment is break even.

The real benefit of solar is in carbon savings. For example, in May (the last monthly record I saved), my roof produced 2.4 MWh of electricity, which equals 1.66 tons of carbon that would have been released into the air.

When I add the subjective value of carbon saved to breaking even on electricity payment) I am well pleased with my investment in solar.

One and a half tons of carbon saved each month may only be a drop in the ocean, but if like-minded people who read this do the same thing. Then, we can have an impact.

Don’t abandon your ideals to cynicism. Think like an ecologist. Think about your great-grandchildren living in a world of sea-level rise, climate refugees, fires, floods, drought, and the political instability those things lead to.

Please do not preach to the choir.

I know of no one who does not believe in climate change and global warming. It is what we can do about it that is up for debate. Carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" that are pollutants from industry are probably to blame, BUT...

Industry has halved death from starvation and poverty since 1990.

I do not think all the noise and all the rah rah rah stuff that comes from things like the Paris Summit add a damned helpful or NEW solution to this problem. To me it is mostly political noise and a lot of money wasted.

I stand with being much more careful with the things we own; reuse, recycle, repurpose and try to avoid unnecessary use of plastics. We need to be careful where we throw our trash and we need to just be more careful, period. We listen to "faddy" solutions that really don't work and cost more. We are sending a lot of stuff into the sky and using a lot of fuel to do it. We are seeing forests and homes burn because we don't want to sacrifice trees to stop forest fires. We are throwing out the baby with the bath water.

We have solar heaters for the pool on our house but at this time I don't think solar panels for power are cost productive or useful.

Maybe turn our air conditioning to a little less cool???

We’ve had solar panels on our northeast home for 8 years. We purchased the system outright. We made our money back in 4 years.

With the state and federal subsidies and the monthly SREC checks we receive for overproduction, we never pay for electricity.

But for our home in the villages, it doesn’t make financial sense to install them at this time.

This is the problem with solar power it only makes since if you get large subsidies from someone else as well. Which of course means it doesn’t make sense to do it.

In my opinion, the solar systems being sold to Villagers are not about global warming or saving the planet. Most of these homeowners are being scammed by contractors who lie about the financial benefits of the systems they are selling. If the contractors provided a fair and accurate assessment of the payback period, and included the total life cycle cost, offset by the potential alternative investment income, they would go out of business. If solar panels were a good idea, the power companies would use them to produce the electricity that they sell to you in the first place.

Do not fall for the solar scam . Same scams been running for 20 years only the names and victims have changed .

solar scam
 

Try Amway . I also have a bridge in New York I can sell you

Be smart with your money ( solar in this state is not smart )

The anthropogenic global warming premise is based on the theory that humans are increasing the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere which reducing the rate of infrared radiation escaping to space resulting in warming the earth. Ice core samples drilled in Antarctica and Greenland give us a record of temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide contents going back as far as 740,000 years. The original coarse measurement of the cores showed a remarkable positive correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature. BUT more recent closer examinations of the ice cores on finer time scales (more measurements per unit of length in the cores) has shown CONCLUSIVELY that in the past temperature changed BEFORE the carbon dioxide concentration changed. This can be easily explained by the fact that water holds more dissolved carbon dioxide when it's cold than when it's warm. This is why the carbon dioxide in a cold carbonated beverage fizzes off when it comes in contact with your warm mouth. This indicates that the earth is warming (several very plausible explanations have been offered as to why) and this is causing carbon dioxide to be released from the oceans (oceans cover 70% of the earth and contain 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere). Unexplainably, people pushing anthropogenic global warming simply ignored this ground-breaking refutation of their theory.

So in 2020 we got a chance to conduct a grand expireiment to see who's right. Due to COVID shut-downs all over the industrialized world which stopped cruse ships, airline flights and a lot of car travel and kept billions of people stuck at home and recessions in all the industrialized nations. Human carbon dioxide emmssions dropped precipitously. If human emission are what's causing the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere to increase we should have seen a decrease in first half of 2020. But check out the atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements at Mona Loa Observatory in Hawaii. There was no apparent effect form all the lock-downs. The carbon dioxide concentration just kept rising at the same slow rate.

Carbon dioxide is coming out of the oceans because the earth is wamimg very slightly from a cold period around 1750 called the "Little Ice Age" and you're not going to change that by putting solar panels on your roof.

Well, it helps if you have actual info that help back your position...

It has been reported that daily CO2 emissions dropped by about 17% during the peak of the pandemics but have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Typical average drops by country were much smaller with the US at 12% and China at 1.7% (not sure what the time scale was but I would guess about a year). I would not call that a "precipitous" drop.

Just thinking out loud...

If solar is such a great deal, why doesn't the electric company just rent or lease our roof space, put up solar cells, and sell the electricity generated.

Exactly. It makes no sense to mount metal and glass panels on an expensive asphalt shingle roof just to generate a small amount of electricity. The electric company could install the panels almost anywhere for a lot less money, if it were cost effective to generate electricity that way. But, it is cheaper to use fossil fuels instead of solar.

And you get a tax credit on your taxes.

How do you dispose of old fluid/panels?

Sorry, Zendog3, I shouldn't have poked fun at your purchase. You should spend your money on whatever makes you happy. That is the best ROI, regardless of the cost.

And frankly, I've been very interested in solar for a long time, because of my own fears for the future. There is a year's worth of dried food under my bed because I also think we're in for some hard times ahead. I'm just a lot more worried about an economic collapse in my own lifetime than I am about Florida sinking under a foot of water in my grandkids' lifetimes.

Whatever the disaster, it would really ease the pain to be able to supply my own power when the lights go out. It's just that every time I look into solar, I find issues that nobody is addressing.

The batteries alone cost as much as the panels, and neither the panels nor the batteries have a lifespan longer than what I've got left. By the way, wouldn't a wall of lithium batteries containing 15 kilowatts of stored energy be a tremendous fire hazard to keep under your roof? Maybe that's part of the reason most solar systems don't include them. Instead, they back-flow excess power into the grid, effectively using the grid as a battery. But why is that OK? Do we have to wait for a lineman to get killed to worry about that? I'm not allowed to do that with my emergency generator.

The problem with putting the cells on the roof is huge, and I don't understand why nobody is addressing it. It is technically possible to embed photovoltaic circuits into a flexible, non-breakable substrate. So why can't I buy shingles that would literally turn the entire roof into a generating system and last a lifetime? Odd that nobody seems to be working on anything like that. Maybe the battery problem could be solved with a flywheel. But nobody is working on that, either.

If the solar industry was serious, you'd think someone would be solving these issues. But the solar industry seems to be based in China, where they build a coal-fired generation plant every month or so. They seem more interested in selling solar cells to Americans than solving problems, including the global warming crisis, if it's real.

But I guess nothing will be solved without early adopters to spend the first buck. I used to be like that -- I once bought Radio Shack computer, back before Microsoft made them practical, just so I could teach myself to code.

So for doing taking the first step for the rest of us, I salute you, Zendog3!

Grid tied solar panels do not send power to the grid during a power outage.

Roof shingles that are solar panels are available.

Battery storage of solar panel energy is expensive. I believe that is the reason why there are not more solar systems with battery storage.

Rotating mass energy storage is available. It is not a consumer product.