I would be very suspicious around claims from people trying to sell you solar panels. There are a lot of incentives in the US such as tax credits. This is good but a lot of people in green energy industry include that into calculations, which is fine except its under the assumption that the incentive will persist. Even Tesla shows you "net effective" price of their car by calculating the gas savings (e.g. Model 3 purchase price is 47k but they "potential savings" price is 38k which include potential incentives and gas savings of $8,600)

There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.

I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.

Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.

I have been living fully off solar (and some wind here and there) for 10 years. Its amazing. Never do I stress powerlines going down, brownouts, etc.

You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.

It's not wildly far off but I think his battery costs are a stretch. In fact double that would be a challenge to have a quality and reliable system. But it is definitely lass than 3x. Right now the best value for batteries I'm getting is 0.18 per w/h. To get 0.08 you would have to doing something like recycling small cell or ev batteries which isn't necessarily scalable and comes with some risks.

Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.

For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.

Why is this hard to believe?

Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason.

In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.

I'm not sure about the US as installation costs there are very expensive, but in my part of Europe I had 10kW of roof mount solar installed for €10,800 at the end of last year.

The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.

The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.