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Plus a note on batteries.
Rooftop solar is not like other types of consumer technology. Even though the end result is having a bunch of electrical equipment installed on the roof of your home, the process of getting solar is more like doing a bathroom renovation than buying a flat screen TV. To get the results you’re looking for, the most important decisions you’ll make are not the brand or model of the panels, but rather who you hire for the job, the size of your system, and how you finance it.
There’s a bunch more choices you’ll have to navigate along the way, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. One expert I spoke with told me that sometimes the customers who are the most excited about getting solar end up bailing, the victims of decision fatigue.
We created this guide to save you from that fate. So take a deep breath, take my hand, and let’s walk down the metaphorical hardware store aisle and get you the rooftop solar solution you’re dreaming of.
Roger Horowitz is the director of Go Solar programs at Solar United Neighbors, a national nonprofit that serves as an unbiased resource for homeowners interested in solar. Horowitz manages and provides technical support to the company’s Solar Help Desk team.
Tony Vernetti is a senior trainer at Enphase Energy, a company that produces inverters, batteries, and EV chargers, where he trains solar sales and installation teams. Before joining Enphase in 2020, Vernetti spent 12 years working for rooftop solar companies in California.
Nate Bowie is the vice president of residential sales at ReVision Energy, an employee-owned solar company operating throughout northern New England. Bowie has been selling solar for ReVision for 15 years.
While the actual installation of the system should only take one to two days, the entire process from initial outreach to grid connection takes two to four months on average, according to Solar United Neighbors.
Example: The highest rated solar panels for 2024 according to EnergySage.com are SunPower's M-Series 440 watt model. If you install 20 of these, the system will be capable of generating 8,800 watts, or 8.8 kilowatts in direct sun.
When you start searching for information about solar on the internet, you might come across advertisements or commercials promoting free solar panels. There is no such thing. These ads are typically schemes to collect your personal data and sell it to solar companies looking for leads, and the federal government is starting to
crack down on them.
It is possible to install solar with zero up-front costs if you lease the system or take out a loan to finance it, but in both cases you will still owe monthly payments. It is also rare that anyone is able to offset 100% of their utility bill. You can get close, but you will likely still owe at least a connection fee to your utility company.
Most homeowners in the U.S. can benefit from installing solar as long as local energy policies are favorable. Placing the panels on a south-facing roof is optimal, but not necessary. If your panels face due west, you’ll only lose about 10% of potential generation, according to Vernetti. “They still produce a ton of energy. They’re still very effective. It's just a little bit less than if they're facing south,” he said. An east-facing roof is also viable in most cases.
You don’t have to worry about shoveling snow off the roof or anything like that. But like any other electronic devices, solar panels, inverters, and batteries can break or malfunction, and your system may require servicing at some point. Pay close attention to your warranties (more on that later). If you lease the system, you do not have to worry about this as much because the third-party owner will be responsible for maintenance.
In order to design a system that meets your needs and budget, solar companies will ask for a copy of your most recent electricity bill or, ideally, your annual energy consumption history. Make sure you have this information handy before you reach out for quotes.
Some utilities include your annual energy consumption, broken out by month, at the bottom of your electric bill. If you don’t see it, you should be able to log into your utility account online and download either your statements from the past year or a spreadsheet of your monthly electric meter readings.
In most of the U.S., you will find you have the option either to lease your solar panels or buy them outright. You don’t have to decide which way you want to go before you get started, but it’s helpful to think through the pros and cons of each.
Heatmap Recommends leasing if: You’re fairly certain you’ll keep your house for the next 15 to 20 years; you can’t afford the system outright, but you don’t want to take out a loan; your priority is to generate clean energy and reduce emissions, but you don’t want to spend too much time figuring out what you want or worrying about the system’s maintenance.
Heatmap Recommends buying if: You have the cash in hand; you might sell your house in the next 20 years; you know you want to have control over the details of your project.
The federal government offers a 30% tax credit for solar installations (and batteries) that covers parts and labor. It can significantly reduce the cost of getting solar, even if you don’t have a lot of tax liability in the year that you install the system. The credit will roll over to subsequent tax years.
Example: If you spend $25,000 installing solar in 2024, you’ll be eligible to take $7,500 off your federal income tax bill. If you only owe $3,000 in federal taxes in 2024, you’ll get $3,000 back and will be eligible to claim the remaining $4,500 for the 2025 tax year. If in 2025 you only owe $3,000 again, you can claim the remaining $1,500 in 2026.
Additional tax credits and rebates may also be offered by your state energy office, city, or utility. Contractors should be able to help you figure out what you’re eligible for, and you can wait to talk to them to learn more. However, incentives change frequently, and contractors don’t always keep up, so you might want to review the options in your area independently.
It will also be helpful to understand your state’s net metering policy, as that will determine how quickly your investment in solar will pay off and may also dictate how big your system can be. Some states, like New Jersey, also allow homeowners to generate additional income through the sale of solar renewable energy credits, or SRECS.
Where to look for more information:
One of the worst things that could happen is you install rooftop solar panels, and then later find out you have a leak or some other problem with your roof. “Removal and replacement of an array for a reroof is expensive and could significantly impact the owner’s return on investment,” Bowie told me. While metal roofs last a very long time and are unlikely to need a replacement, asphalt shingle roofs generally have a useful life of 25 to 30 years, Bowie said. You should be fine if your roof is less than 10 years old, but if not, you may need some roofing work done before your solar panels are installed.
If you don’t know how old your roof is, Vernetti recommended having a roofing contractor inspect it. He added that there’s varying opinions on this, with some solar experts recommending replacement if the roof is only 5 years old. “In my opinion, scrapping a 5 year old roof is wasteful and goes against the goal of sustainability,” he said.
“A good solar contractor will help evaluate the roof conditions and should recommend replacement when necessary, even if it is just to replace the roof on the roof plane where the solar panels will go,” said Bowie.
Solar contractors range from local mom and pop shops, to regional providers like ReVision Energy, which operates in multiple states in the Northeast, to national companies that install across the country like Sunrun and Sunnova.
“The advantage of going with a large company is that they have the ability to offer financing the smaller companies might not be able to. With a regional company, you can actually walk to their office and knock on the door and talk to somebody if you want to,” said Vernetti.
Heatmap Recommends: Contact at least one local company and one national company to get a good sense of your options. Always get at least three quotes!
If you are calling installers directly, here are some tips for what you should ask for or look for in a quote. (If you are using an online resource like EnergySage that finds quotes for you, use the following to help you ask follow-up questions or refine the proposals.)
A few questions you should ask:
One of the first questions an installer might ask you is how big you want the system to be. You may want to see quotes for multiple options in order to compare them. Options include:
Heatmap Recommends: Oversize your system if you can afford it.
Why?
Exceptions:
Most installers will include a financing option in their quote. Horowitz noted that some installers advertise very low interest rates that are below market rate. They are typically able to do this by paying a “dealer fee” to the bank, which they incorporate into the price of your installation — in other words, if your interest rate seems too good to be true, the total cost of your installation will likely be higher than it otherwise would be. To get a better sense of the true cost, ask for quotes both with and without financing options.
Adding energy storage, a.k.a. a battery, to your solar array can add another 10 grand or more to the project cost. But there are a few reasons it might be worth it:
In conclusion, if you just want back-up power, any battery that’s large enough to power your essential systems should do. If you want to pay off the investment, look into time-of-use rates. If you want your investment to go further for decarbonization, ask your contractor if there are local grid services programs available, and if any of their products are compatible.
After you get a few quotes, you’re going to want to spend some time comparing them, asking questions, and potentially soliciting additional quotes with variations on the system. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or you don’t have the time or patience to sort through the details on your own, you can also call the Solar United Neighbors Help Desk, which offers a free quote review service.
The most important number on the quote is the price per watt, not the total system cost. That is the number you should be comparing between different installers, as the quotes may be for differently sized systems.
You should also compare the annual bill savings. If two different companies quote you significantly different savings for systems that are roughly the same size, one of them has likely done a more detailed analysis of your roof than the other.
“It doesn't matter what module you have, from which manufacturer, or what inverter you have. There really is no difference in what your system can produce if it's the same size,” said Bowie.
Lastly, if the quote is for a solar lease, or includes a financing option, look at the monthly payments.
Every installer has certain brands and types of equipment they work with. Our expert panel agreed that it’s important to look at the brand names the installer is offering for the solar panels, inverters, and batteries, and to make sure they are from reputable companies that have been around for at least five years — even if it means paying more. A quick internet search of the top 10 residential solar panel brands should give you a taste of what those companies are.
“It is definitely worth paying a little bit extra to have really good equipment,” Vernetti said.
You may also see installers advertise that they offer “Tier 1” solar panels. That means the manufacturer has been designated “bankable” by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The designation is more related to finance than product quality, but many solar companies use it as a rough proxy for reliability.
That being said, don’t get too bogged down in comparing solar brands.
“There's not a huge difference, typically, between one solar panel and the next of the Tier 1 manufacturers,” said Bowie. “A lot of solar companies will maybe offer one or two different manufacturers, and then maybe beyond that one or two different sizes.”
When it comes to inverters, you do want to pay attention to whether your quote includes string inverters, microinverters, or power optimizers. In a system with a string inverter, your panels will all be wired to one central inverter. This is generally the cheapest option, but it is less durable and may need to be replaced, said Vernetti, whose employer, Enphase, is the leading producer of microinverters. String inverters can also limit the output of your system if part of the roof gets more shade.
The other two options are more expensive but get around the issue with shade. A system with power optimizers is similar to one with a string inverter, but each panel will also have a small device attached to it that regulates the output and maximizes your system’s performance. By contrast, microinverters are small inverters attached to each individual panel. Both of these options also allow you to monitor each panel’s performance.
Bowie said the two were comparable in terms of performance and price. A key consideration, he said, is that your choice of inverter can begin to lock you into using the same brand of equipment on other home upgrades you might do down the line. “If you're an EnPhase customer, you're likely going to be going down the track of an EnPhase battery storage system,” he said. “Whether the customers know it or not, they're kind of being pushed down a path towards this manufacturer for more things in their home, like batteries, whole home controls, electric vehicle charging."
Your quote should provide information about warranties offered by the manufacturers of the panels, inverters, and batteries, as well as by the installation company. 25-year warranties are standard, but the details vary by installation company and by manufacturer. For example, your inverters may have a 25-year warranty, meaning you can get replacement inverters for free if any of them fails within that time period — but if you don’t have a warranty on labor, it could cost you several hundred dollars to get them installed.
“It's really important for customers to read the fine print and to talk with their local solar company who is quoting the system for them to uncover what the warranties mean,” said Bowie.
This is especially important if you are installing batteries. Ask your installer about both the equipment warranty and their policy is for servicing the equipment.
Most solar installers offer financing options. Your quote should include the name of the lender the installer works with, the down payment, monthly payment, financing term, and interest rate. However, you may find a better deal elsewhere. Horowitz noted that installers like using their own financing companies because it speeds up the sales process — they can approve you for a loan just by putting in your social security number, and sell it to you at the same time as the contract. But you may find a better deal elsewhere.
“Talk to your bank, talk to your credit union, look at home equity lines of credit, see what other options you have out there, and if those have lower interest rates or better payment terms,” said Horowitz. “You are not required to use their finance.”
After you’ve found an installer, settled on a system design, and secured financing, all that’s left to do is sign your contract. Then, you wait. Your installer will have to obtain permits from your city, county, or state, as well as an interconnection agreement with your utility.
One way to try to minimize the wait time is by working with an installer with lots of local experience. They’ll be better equipped to navigate the permitting process. For example, if you want Tesla solar panels but Tesla hasn’t done many installations in your community, it may take longer for the company to get through this stage.
After these two steps are complete, the solar company will reach out to you to schedule the installation, which should only take a few days.
After the system is installed, you may have to wait for a final inspection from your utility or a verified third party for permission to operate the system.
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.