Forcing Your Neighbors to Pay For Your Electric Bill

When you buy the system they tell you to expect a small percentage of decline in efficiency year after year due to the natural lifespan of these devices. It’s a couple percent per year kind of thing. And the useful lifespan of the panels is estimated 20 years. They should be still generating plenty at that point and I bet many years onward.

When you buy solar, part of the expense of pricier companies is the length and details of warranty of the system and the components, and also guarantee of production—that means that you should get at least x percent of the estimated production of your system all things being equal minus the annual decline. Like Putnam we out-produce our estimates most every month–only occasionally is there a month where it rains tons and you underproduce, but for the year we’re still ahead.

When you have a system there’s an app or web interface where you can see in real time what you are producing, what your historical production is, down to the day and even to each moment.

Because ConEd is a massive tangled bureaucracy, their smart meters a ren’t actually very smart and can’t handle net metering apparently (and live view is wrong too) and so they have someone manually calculate and send you monthly statements. It’s beyond absurd.