My "Nepo Baby" Secret For A Zero-Dollar Electricity Bill

Renewable energy in flyover country is easy, under certain circumstances

you live in a trailer park, i park trailers all around my life, we are not the same

Sometimes I think there are only two kinds of “influencers” in the Internet: the “fake ballers” using rented supercars and AirBNB vacations to portray wealth and success they don’t have, and the “nepo babies” who pretend they created their own success via “staying humble” and “hustling” while their Mommy or wife (or, in one famous case, a civil settlement from stepping in front of a city bus) pays their real bills. I have a lot more sympathy for the former than I do the latter, honestly. It makes sense to me that you might “fake it until you make it” — what I don’t understand is “faking that you haven’t got it made already”.

I mention all of this because I’m about to tell you a solar success story that will completely destroy the racist, science-denying, flyover-country white supremacists out there — but there’s a Roger-Maris-sized asterisk at the end of the numbers. Since I’m neither a dime-store hustler nor a momma’s boy, however, I won’t try to keep that secret from you.

Let’s start our story today, February 27, 2023. I live in northern Ohio — in fact, I live in a tiny patch of north-central Ohio that is so much colder than the rest of (already cold!) Ohio, the USDA gives it a worse “zone” on their plant hardiness map. We don’t get a lot of sun, even by Midwestern standards. It’s the middle of winter. And yet I am net positive on electricity used for the month, thanks to the SCIENCE MIRACLE! of solar power. Considerably so, in fact.

I don’t have a Tesla Powerwall — Tesla won’t install in Ohio — or even one of the LG/Generac substitute, but I do have a “bi-directional meter”. So I am allowed to “trade” electricity during the day for an equal amount back at night. I am also allowed to sell electricity back to my utility co-operative for about 65% of what I’d pay them for the same watt-hour, with one caveat; I’m not allowed to do any better than “net zero”. They won’t write me a check. Ten months out of the year, however, I don’t expect to pay a single penny for electricity. In fact, I expect to fully recoup my costs within 24 months — or less.

I’m saving at least $1500 a year. Maybe $2000. Insofar as I only have $3000 in the solar setup, I’ll be in the black for real on year 3. Maybe even year 2. Plus I am significantly reducing the amount of CO2 emissions occurring on my behalf; a full 81% of Ohio’s power is generated by burning coal or natural gas. My solar panels prevent approximately 8,500 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, every year; this is a little bit better than the environmental impact I would see if I replaced both my 7.3-liter F-250 and 3.6-liter GMC Canyon with Toyota Prius Prime plug-in hybrids.

It’s a solar success story for the ages!

How’d I do it?

Here’s the tech side: I have a 40x80 barn mounting 44 Jinko panels with a max rating of 320w each, slightly over 14kW total, feeding a SolarEdge single-phase inverter with a maximum throughput of 11.4kW. The panels are oriented south and can easily max the inverter in February sunlight. It’s rare for me to draw more than a few kW at a time, so all day I’m feeding the grid at least 4-5 kW, and sometimes more.

The average house in America uses at least 11 megawatt-hours a year, but I also have a barn with twelve LED lights putting out 34,800 lumens each. (To provide the same amount of light with traditional 100-watt incandescent bulbs would require… two hundred and sixty-one bulbs!) I also have a two-post Rotary lift and a welder plug. You get the idea. Sometimes we draw a lot of power. And yet we are still better than net zero.

So what’s missing from the story?

Well… nothing’s missing! I am a self-made solar success! Respect my hustle!

Okay, you caught me. That’s not even close to being true, and I’ll show you why.

Caveat Zero: I’m on propane heat. Although I use a heat pump down to freezing-ish temperatures, below that I draw from my propane tank, which is sort of double-bad from an environmental perspective, since it’s fossil fuel that is delivered via a a truck. Could I rely solely on the heat pump and still go net zero? Maybe. It depends on the weather.

Caveat One: it’s wintertime. The amount of solar energy I get will go up about 30% in the summer, thanks to the longer day, but I don’t yet know how much electricity I will use cooling the house down during the summer. I’ve stacked the deck as hard as I can in that regard, from blown-in insulation and 2x6 framing to a Carrier Infinity heat pump, but it’s still anyone’s guess.

And the big one, the Nepo Baby relevation:

Caveat Two: I got the solar panels for free. The original cost of installing the panels on my barn was $45,000 and some change, incurred in June of 2020 by the person from whom I bought my barn and land. At that point it was eligible for a 26% tax credit, so the net cost was $33,300. The seller originally wanted me to cover the cost of those panels, but I refused and told her to remove them, because I’m a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal (at least 10%, anyway) hick who doesn’t believe in renewable energy. Turns out the cost of removing the panels and repairing the barn would have been more than the panels are worth, so… free solar!

And yet, despite the fact that I got $45,000 worth of solar for no charge, it will still take me a couple of years to break even, because it cost three thousand bucks just to get the solar hooked up into a new bi-directional meter. And my co-operative charges a minimum of $57 a month just for the meter and transmission service. My electricity bill is not actually zero.

The moral of the story

Considering all of the above, it’s still pretty hard to make the case for renewable energy in Ohio. Had I bought the panels myself, I’d be looking at a 10-to-15-year payoff period, assuming nothing went wrong, and ignoring the fact that investing the cost of the panes in something as prosaic as US Savings bonds would generate more income every year than the panels save me in electricity cost, plus I’d have the original capital back at the end, rather than a nightmare disposal of worn-out trash panels off my barn roof.

What about from an environmental perspective? Hard numbers are difficult to come by, perhaps deliberately, so all I can find is a reassurance that solar panels repay their carbon cost of production and transportation in three years. God only knows how that’s calculated; likely by pretending that the panels magically levitate from China to here, rather than via container ships burning old road asphalt.

(To be fair, I believe my Jinko panels were made in Jacksonville, FL, but much of the raw material is still sourced from China.)

Could I do “more” with the panels?

I could get more benefit from the panels in two ways. The first would be by installing a battery system — but the cost/benefit ratio is even worse for batteries. It would cost $30,000 or more for a system that can “carry” me overnight. Keep in mind, I already have a “zero” bill, so I would just be reducing emissions, not cost, with the batteries.

Alternately, I could get an EV and plug it in — but if I use that EV to commute to a job, then I can’t charge that EV during the day, when the sun is actually shining. So I’d have to charge at night, which means I have to generate 1.3 kWh for every kWh I put into it in order to get that electricity for “free”.

If I could get a half-decent EV for $10,000, let it charge during the day, and use it only after work, the numbers kind of work — but a significant percentage of my after-work driving involves a trailer, a couple of large mountain bikes, or home/farm errands. None of that is easy to do with, say, a Fiat 500e or used Nissan Leaf. Getting something like a new Tesla Model 3 would be an exercise in financial self-flagellation.

Elsewhere, the story is different

While working on my numbers, I spoke to another automotive enthusiast who went full-solar in California a while ago. His numbers are different, as you might expect. He’s paying nearly one dollar per kWh at peak rate from California utilities — using solar and Powerwalls allows him to “time-shift” his power so that even when he is drawing some utility power it’s not at peak rate. (My co-op is barely charging me a tenth of that.) He swapped out an Integra Type R and an Elise for a BMW i3 and a rebuilt Tesla Model 3, which allowed him to use his solar power in the cars as well. His solar costs are considerable, and above even the $45k initial whack for my barn solar, but given the high cost of electricity and gasoline in California, and the vastly better “insolation”, his numbers work just fine.

Except, of course, he’s no longer driving an ITR and an Elise, which has to incur some sort of spiritual cost in and of itself, right?

Will “flyover” solar ever make sense?

It’s common for the I Fucking Love SCIENCE! crowd to assume that all technology follows some sort of wacky Moore’s Law cost-and-capability curve. That is absolutely not true for solar panels, which are only now recovering from cost increases during the pandemic period. Somewhat ironically, there was about a 300% price bump in the price of Chinese silicon production — because they couldn’t get the electricity.

Moving to silicon alternatives could lower the price of raw materials, but so far the alternatives are not long-lived in actual use. The cost of manufacturing is likely to stay high for a long time. It’s a lot more like building a car than building a computer, in terms of material usage and physical effort.

Let’s not ignore the fact that most people don’t have the luxury of a barn roof where a full 1,600 square feet of it just happens to face the sun at the most efficient angle, because it was deliberately built that way. The average 4,000-square-foot McMansion has maybe a third of that available. Multi-family dwellings, of course, have even less per tenant.

All of the rules will change, of course, if the real cost of generating power in Ohio reaches a dollar per kWh, which seems unlikely.

The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded

My “solar story”, like the nepo baby stories behind your favorite YouTubers, come from a place of immense privilege. It was all paid for by someone else and I just inherited it. I never would have paid my own money for this setup, nor can I justify any expansion of it.

How much would I have been willing to pay? Given a real-world net savings of under two grand a year, I think $10k would be the maximum. That’s less than the labor markup on the system I have now — so if solar is going to be installed by real people instead of imaginary AI ChatGPT robots, the real-world cost of solar panels and inverters has to be close to zero in order for it to make a difference.

So what’s the lesson here, other than “try to get free stuff whenever you can”? I’d suggest there are two lessons. The first is that solar isn’t a “scam” or a “treehugger fantasy”. It really works. It just doesn’t make a lot of economic sense — but neither does a swimming pool, and a lot of people have those. I wouldn’t look down my nose at anyone who bought solar just because they wanted to have it, the same way I have six PRS Private Stock guitars because I like them.

The second, and broader, lesson is that life as presented on social media is rarely like real life. Very few of the influencers and personalities we follow are honest about how and why they do what they do. They misrepresent what they do for a living, what their parents gave them, the luck they’ve had, how they really earn or spend their money, and the considerable safety nets that often let them “live the dream”. Don’t compare yourself to them; don’t line the unexpurgated and messy story of your life up with their Instagram greatest-hits collection.

This is doubly and triply so for autowriters and auto-influencers. From the fellow who used a civil settlement to buy a Ferrari to the writer whose wife supported them with literal sex work until he landed at a magazine to the YouTubers who have grudgingly admitted the existence of eight-figure trust funds a decade or so after making their public debuts, there’s always more to the story. I can vouch for this in an odd negative sense; for years I worked three jobs at once, often putting in 18-hour days, only to constantly read carping on VWVortex and elsewhere about my “trust fund” and family money. Let me, as the man once said, make one thing perfectly clear; if I had a trust fund, you wouldn’t know my name and my only Google results would be from racing LMP2. Like most sane and normal people, I have no desire to be famous and almost no need to be adored. I can’t tell you why others are different. I can only recommend that you be cautious around them. Power is a funny thing, whether solar and financial, and it’s prone to shock the unaware.