My partner and I have been planning on buying rooftop solar panels for our home for years. We had been saving up for it for a while. We were hoping to save up more, so as not to have to finance the project very much (if at all). But when Donald Trump was sworn in as president again in January of 2025, and promptly began to disassemble the federal government and replace it with a single-party, authoritarian police state, we figured that home solar and electric vehicle tax rebates would not last much longer. We moved quickly to spend what we had to get the ball rolling on solar panel installation before the administration would inevitably terminate federal tax credits for solar installations, which they did in August.
We tried moving as fast as we could, but there were delays in the installation due to defects with the house's roofing tiles. We just hoped that projects that were initiated before the announcement of the tax credit repeal would be grandfathered-in. Thankfully, Republicans were "kind" enough to keep them going through the end of the year.
In any case, we finally got the project completed at the end of August, and now have functioning solar panels on the roof of the house!
We also now have a couple months of lower energy bills due to the panels. Unfortunately, we did not get the panels installed early enough to take advantage of all the summer sun this year, but now that we are in the autumn, and the air conditioner isn't running as often, we should start seeing credits on our power bill for the electricity we are exporting back to the grid. By the time next summer rolls along, the expectation is that we will have banked enough credits that our energy bill will be down to little more than just the baseline connection fee (which I think is currently $18.50). We should still be able to qualify for the 30% tax rebate next year, which should put another nice chunk of cash back in our pockets.
We now have functioning solar panels and have taken the largest step to reduce our carbon footprint.
At the end of the day, though, we didn't do this for financial reasons. We did it because it's the right thing to do. Even if I knew for a fact that I would never get a return on investment from installing solar, I would still have wanted to do it in order to reduce my personal contribution to the carbon emissions that are contributing to climate change. The fact that it will provide a financial return on investment within a few years is just icing on the cake.
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Tags:renewable energy, climate change, solar panels, solar, solar power, rooftop solar, electricity, utility, demand charge, electric vehicle, air conditioning, NV Energy, Public Utility Commission of Nevada, OpenHAB, Home Assistant, mid-life crisis, Porsche Taycan, Chevrolet Corvette, Donald Trump, tax credit