In the past decade, solar panels have been installed on more and more homes. Homes and businesses across the United States have begun to transition away from traditional fossil-fueled electricity towards a clean energy economy, necessitated by emission reduction targets in a time of global climate change. During this period of energy reform, home solar panel installations are taking off!

What You Need to Know About Solar Power in 2020

How Much the Cost of Solar Panels Has Fallen

If you’re looking for a statistic that will make you feel good, you have come to the right place! The cost of solar power systems has fallen from around 70 percent in the past ten years. In this last year alone, the residential solar power market saw a five percent decrease in the cost of solar. There’s no question that the solar power industry has evolved from a commodity to a reasonable home upgrade that millions of Americans are considering in 2020. Solar panel installation is one of the smartest decisions that homeowners can make today!

Solar Panels Reduce Electricity Costs

Solar incentives, like net metering and feed-in tariff schemes, let homeowners sell the excess solar electricity that is generated by the solar panels, or you can receive bill credits during the times when the solar panels produce more solar electricity than the homeowners consume. Meaning that homeowners can reduce their overall electricity expenses by installing a solar power system.

Adding solar panels to your home can bring in annual savings of well above $100 per year in a lot of states. Residents in California can save $73,713 over the entire lifetime of the solar panels. Now, with the availability of financing for solar panels options in the form of Solar PPA agreements and various zero down loan facilities, solar power is going to be more affordable than before.

The Typical Cost of Solar For a Residential Solar Panel Installation

This is going to vary depending on where you live and the size of the solar power system that you are installing. The easiest way for you to calculate the cost of solar panels across the different solar power system sizes is in dollars per watt ($/W). Today, homeowners are paying an average of $2.96/W. In 2008 the average cost of solar was over $8/W. For an average 6kW solar power system, a price of $2.96/W means that you are going to pay $18,760 before adding solar incentives like tax credits and rebates in 2020.

The Length of a Residential Solar Panel Installation

After meeting with the solar installers and completing all of the required site visits and planning, the actual solar panel installation process will only take a few days of work. The exact time is going to depend on a few factors. If you are setting up net metering, that process is going to add more time until your solar panels are properly connected to the grid. The decision process for solar panels can take some time, the actual solar panel installation time frame is going to be a quick and simple one.

Solar Batteries are Expensive

Solar batteries will help smoothen out the demand load, making solar power more stable, but solar batteries are also expensive.

Luckily for homeowners, there’s a good correspondence between access to solar power and human energy demand. Electricity demand peaks in the middle of the day, which is also going to happen to be the same time there’s a lot of sunlight.

Solar Panels are Environmentally Friendly

Generating solar electricity doesn’t often cause pollution. Some carbon emissions are associated with the production and the solar panel installation equipment, but these emissions are very minimal when compared to generating electricity from fossil fuels.

Will Solar Panels Make Sense if You Don’t Plan on Staying In Your House for 25 Years?

A typical solar power system is going to last for 25 to 30 years. If you don’t plan on owning your house for that long, you might wonder if a solar panel installation will still make sense for you. The answer is yes because a solar panel installation increases the value of your property and can expedite the process of selling the property when the time comes. The housing market is filled with buyers excited by the idea of buying a home with a solar panel installation that comes with the benefit of zero utility bills.

Can You Power Your Entire Home With Solar Power?

Theoretically, solar panels can offset all of your energy use, but it isn’t realistic to expect that the level of solar power production coming from the solar panels every day. It is recommended that homeowners can factor in a 25 percent cushion when calculating their target for solar panel offset. The main reason for this: solar panels can’t operate at maximum efficiency every second of every day. There will be certain days when having your solar power system is connected to the grid is necessary to fully cover your power usage. Thankfully, net-metering is that you can benefit from surplus production days and never pay anything to your utility while relying on the grid for backup storage.