Install Rooftop Solar

A: There are two main reasons to have a battery and neither of them fit my situation: 1) If you live in a state with high solar or wind penetration (aka intermittent renewables), having a battery (and participating in a Demand Response program) can be helpful in order to ensure grid stability, soaking up solar electricity during the day and discharging it at night, even when the grid power is "on." 2) The other reason to have a battery is if you have frequent power outtages and/or have critical loads at home that can never be offline. The PJM grid (what we have in Maryland) is less than 10% intermittent and we have infrequent outtages with no major critical loads, so I decided not to get batteries both to keep costs low and also to keep the project as environmentally favorable as possible (given batteries are carbon intensive and otherwise impactful to make).

A: REC has an "Alpha" line of panels that is lead free. These panels, and REC as a manufacturer, were recommendede to me by my vendor due to the focus on environmental sustainability. Doing my own research, it appeared that her assertion that REC was the leader in environmental impact checked out. More reading on the REC site.

A: This was also the recommendation of the vendor I selected (the other vendor I looked at recommended micro-inverters). There seems to be widespread disagreement amongst vendors about which is best and most reliable, but the deciding factor from me was seeing the spec sheets of each product next to each other and their respective temperature ratings. The key difference is the amount of heat that each can withstand before performance is impacted (this is called "clipping") and with the Mid-Atlantic sunshine on an asphault roof I was convinced that the Solar Edge Micro-Optimizers were the way to go.

A: When I first spec'd out the project, I used past 12 months electricity consumption data to estimate how much I would use...

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), you can get 30% off the entire project (parts and labor) in the form of a Clean Energy Tax Credit. Given I was adding an EV charger and Induction Range around the same time, and I knew I would upgrade my HVAC at some point with some other electrification projects, I took advantage of this tax credit by asking my solar installer to sub-contract a "heavy up" of my old 150 amp electrical panel to be 200 amps. By doing this I got a great rate (because my installer negotiated a better rate than I got from my normal electrician) plus 30% off the project as it was bundled in my credit. While I cannot give tax advice, I've heard you can do this with any other project that includes a credit, though you might run into maximum rebates with those project unlike solar.

Sense is a really cool home energy product that can detect how you're using electricity in your home, and it's something I sorta recommend to people regardless of having solar.

That said, if you do have solar I highly recommend having it. The reason is as follows: on your electrical bill you will now start to see "net metering" which tells you "net" how much energy you are consuming. While that's helpful economically, the hope is that you produce as much "clean" energy as possible but that you *consume* much less (so that excess energy production can help reduce GHG emissions for everyone AND so your system can pay you back more quickly).

Sense with a Solar module is very cool because it will give you both data points that the utility cannot give you (it's not an interface issue, it's a technical one): they can separate how much you produce from how much you consume (in addition to the cool data about *what* appliance is consuming the data).