I know some people were talking about solar power for their homes....

Might be a good time to look into it again.

http://www.wivb.com/dpp/money/your_wallet/NYPA_will_pay_half_for_solar_installs_20090915

Getting it 50% paid for would certainly help the ROI.

OH SNAP!

When you only get 60 sunny days per year, $25-50,000 for a solar kit just doesn’t seem worth it. I’m sure you won’t save anything on utility bills.

That is a little better than before, I was looking at $50,000 and getting $20,000 back.
Maybe costs have come down a bit as well.

it’s still too soon.

It is still pretty hard to justify in Buffalo, though.

This is a really shitty area to try and use solar panels. If the technology advances a bit and becomes more than 12-15% efficient like that are now, then maybe. But not yet.

Wind is a usually a better option for the area, but putting up a turbine is such a pain in the ass with all the restrictions.

Similarly the nyserda incentives last year covered 45-50% or solar installs, before the funds were reallocated.

We get about 3-4 hours of sun on avg. per day while the southern states get closer to 6 hours sunlight/day.

we just installed photovoltaic on the roof here. it barely produces any of the electricity we use here but we had a shit ton of incentive to do it that it hardly cost anything. the other reason we had it installed besides the “look at us were green cuz we have solar panels” is that we are going for leed silver certification after the rennovation is complete.

I like this comment:

Thank God for the New York Power Authority ! ! ! ! !

I wonder where we’d be without them giving all that money to Higgins to build us a waterfront, bailing out New York State in their budget crises and now offering $2 million in subsidies for solar panels.

I wonder where they get all their money ? ? ? ? ? Ohhhhhh yeah! From the over-inflated rates they charge New York State TAXPAYERS! ! ! !

Wake up people! This AUTHORITY isn’t Santa Claus! They over-charge for electricity for the purpose of redistributing your wealth to politicians so people like Higgins, Paterson and company can get their hands on more of your money! If the New York Power Authority has that much money they should be lowering our power rates!!!

That sounds like BED…

^As I was reading it I thought, did I write that? lol

Is this on top of the NYSERDA incentives or have those gone away? Also you get some sort of tax breaks too. Maybe all at once they’ll be paying us to use these. Panel prices have really come down some recently too because of the economy. So much wrong information here though. You don’t need full sun for the panels to produce energy. And we actually have pretty long days in the summer here where the panels will produce power longer than they would further south, so it balances out somewhat the shorter winter days.

the nyserda incentives are gone as far as I can tell. I saw something about the funds being re appropriated…