Going Solar

Thanks to plentiful sunshine and great solar incentives, Orange County homeowners are saving thousands by going solar. There are three popular options when it comes to adding solar to your home. The first being the traditional method where you add a couple of panels to your roof to offset all of your energy costs as well as being able to sell back extra energy to the state. The second being adding one or two panels to your home's roof to offset the cost of heating a pool and spa. Lastly, a newer method has been introduced to the market, the Solar Roof by Tesla.

Traditional Method

Currently, there are dozens of companies offering solar panels for residential homes. Besides saving money on your electricity bill or reducing your carbon footprint, going solar has been incentivized by the federal government and the state of California. From now until the end of 2022, the federal government is offering anyone who adds solar to their homes a major tax credit. What the government agreed to do is offer to pay for 26% of a home's solar system. Along with the federal tax credit, in the state of California, any extra, unused energy can be sold back to the state.

The cost of going solar varies, but in California, the average price ranges from $12,000 to $16,000 after the tax credits. What a lot of people tend to do is finance their solar panels, so instead of paying an electric bill, they pay monthly for their panels until they are paid off.

Tesla Roof

In 2016, Elon Musk unveiled his Tesla Roof. Today, Tesla offers two options for going solar. The first is the Tesla Roof. The Roof is made out of individual solar tiles that are designed to look like a traditional roof. With the Tesla Roof comes the Powerwall, a compact home battery that stores all the energy from the Roof. The Powerwall is designed to provide energy to the house day and night, as well as in a power outage. The Tesla Roof is eligible for the federal tax credit and state incentives that are applied to traditional solar panels. The cost of installing the full unit varies depending on multiple factors but can start at around $50,000 post incentives.

The second option that Tesla provides is traditional solar panels. Tesla advertises their solar panels as the “lowest cost solar panels in America”. Like the Solar Roof, Tesla’s solar panels are bundled with their Powerwall. The cost of the panels and Powerwall vary, starting at around $25,000 post incentives.