A company recently contacted us about putting on solar panels for free. It sounded too good to be true but I have been wondering about it. They only do it if your roof has enough sun exposure to generate a decent amount of power, and they recoup their costs by somehow taking/benefitting from the power your house is generating. Given how much people have paid to have solar panels installed I still feel like there must be a scam here somewhere though....
It's probably not a scam...but probably is a lease. In other words, they put the panels on your house for free but you pay them for the electricity the panels generate. So, (depending on the contact) it may lower your electric bill and it may keep the cost of your electricity from rising in the future but you don't own the panels. The good news is if there is a problem, you don't own the panels.
I don't know a lot about leasing systems so I'm sure there are other positives and negatives.
This is basically what we're doing: a 20-year lease from Solar City. Granted, I'm no expert, but I'm surprised by the negative response to leasing. In our case, it has worked out quite well, we've been saving money from the get-go, and I think leasing is a good option when you don't have the money to pay to own your own system.
We had our system turned on at the start of December, and although I was warned that we would only break even in the winter months, we've come out ahead every month. I have a feeling that might be due to an exceptionally sunny December this year, but that's fine; I'll take it! We didn't have to pay Solar City anything up front, so it felt like the installation and inspections were basically free, and now we pay them $57/month. Based on our average usage of 15 kw/day for months we don't use the A/C (because A/C seems to be the only thing that really jacks up our electric usage), we're paying Solar City $0.127/kw, which is still cheaper than $0.14/kw we'd otherwise pay to the utility. Since December, we have generated almost exactly what we use, so our utility bill has been WAY lower, and even you add in the $57/month to the solar company, we're coming out ahead. Even better, as the days get longer, we're generating more than we use as long as we don't use the A/C, which we haven't had to yet. Once the heat kicks in (I live in Southern California), we'll use everything we generate and then draw from the utility as well, but again, out net cost will still be lower than if we were only using the utility. Finally, that $57/month is fixed for 20 years. Given that I fully expect the utility's rates to rise over the next two decades, I feel like we've got a pretty good deal.
Sure, we don't get the tax breaks, and yes, we probably could have saved more in the long run by buying our own, but we didn't have the case on hand to buy solar panels, and honestly, this is just so easy that, for us, this was the best possible option. If we had wanted to, we could have paid Solar City $8600 upfront for the cost of the whole 20 years and THAT would have been an awesome deal. We chose to direct our money to paying down debt and investing for retirement, though, and we didn't have $8600 lying around that wasn't earmarked for something.
Not saying this is the ultimate best choice ever, but it works for us, and I'm happy with it. I was leery of leasing for many of the same reasons people have expressed here, and the more I looked into it, the more comfortable I felt. The Solar City rep I worked with admitted he had never been grilled on the nitty gritty as much as I grilled him, but all of that digging and research was what it took for me to feel like, "OK, this isn't a rip-off or a bad deal at all."