Since I’m in municipal light district a lot of the incentives in Mass don’t apply. I will get the $1,000 state tax credit, but I’m ineligible for the SMART program. The rebate I’m using is through the DOER in partnership with the municipal light dept. The program runs until June and there are limited funds, so it’s a first come first serve basis.
The biggest downside I have is the “net metering”. There really isn’t anything “net” about it. The muni will pay me the wholesale rate for any electric I send back to the grid. However, it’s metered minute by minute. So there is no using the excess production during the day to offset the night, much less rolling it all up at the end of the billing cycle.
You are right about the battery, but when we looked at it with the installer I still couldn’t justify it. We pay $0.16 per kWh from the grid which isn’t too expensive, especially compared to California time of use rates. I will sell back at $0.04 per kWh. Batteries are still expensive - my installer uses Tesla and that would be $10k after the tax credit. For me that’s about 7-8years of electric bills without solar. That just kills my solar payback calculations. I live in an area where outages are very rare and never very long. So the only real benefit to a battery is to deal with the less than ideal net metering. My thinking on that is that I could finance a battery or I could “rent” a battery from the grid for the differential between the consumer rate and the wholesale rate. We couldn’t really make the numbers work with the battery. Also, if the muni ever improves their net metering plan then the battery would be a sunk cost.
Under the current plan they are encouraging me to use electricity during the day. I have the choice of paying nothing during the day or paying $0.12 at night ($0.16- 0.04). That goes against their efforts for customers to shift their use to the night. I can choose to run my pool pump, a/c, charge a car, run the dishwasher etc. during the day as much I can. I’d also like to get a heat pump I can run instead of / supplement to the oil boiler that would run higher during the afternoon to preheat the house for the night. I hope eventually they will figure this out and adjust the net metering rules. The local solar companies have been pushing them. Hopefully I’m timing it right to get the rebate and the tax incentives before they move to a more favorable arrangement. If not, battery prices will hopefully continue to decrease and at some point in the future it may make sense.