Our Secret Sauce to Lowering Off-Grid Solar System Costs

Our last post explores the four “usual suspects” that may drive up the cost of an off-grid solar solution. But we also have a few more tricks up our sleeves besides helping our client understand what’s drawing power and how to make changes to lower their power production and storage needs. 

Many of these go against the grain, but then, Caliente isn’t a cookie-cutter place either.

A ground-mounted panel array

To maximize solar production, your solar panels must point in the right direction and inclination. For folks living in rural areas like Caliente, where land is abundant, we recommend a ground-mounted solar array to achieve optimal placement instead of constraining yourself to the direction in which your roof points. A ground-mounted frame is also cheaper to build, easier to maintain, and more flexible for future expansion.

Additionally, we help our clients with site selection and solar trajectory calculation to maximize solar production without spending thousands on wires. We run simulation models to find the best orientation and inclination based on each client’s requirements (e.g., heavy A/C usage during summer late afternoon).

What about those “solar trackers?” When solar panels cost an arm and a leg 20 years ago, installers put them on swivel frames to squeeze every watt out. But those frames are mechanically complex and expensive. Using one to squeeze 10% more out of a few dingy panels is way more costly than adding a few extra ground-mount ones. Plus, they often create a bottleneck by limiting the number of solar panels in your solution.

Dimensioning for 90 - 95%

Like any asset, the harder you work your solar equipment, the shorter your “payback time.” The capacity for covering the first 80 to 90% of your power consumption will work very hard. The closer you get to 100%, the more likely the additional capacity will sit idle.

For example, a system designed to cover 100% of all usage scenarios can easily cost 4X more than one dimensioned to cover 90 to 95% of all use cases.

For clients on our Resiliency Kit, we design the solution to cover daily usage comfortably, making their equipment work as hard as possible to lower ongoing electricity bills. “Splurges” like power tools and spas (i.e., things they can live without for a few days during outages) remain on Edison. This approach allows us to help most clients make their money back in saved utility bills in ~2 to 3 years while letting Edison do the heavy lifting when the needs arise.

And for completely off-grid clients, it’s more of a qualitative conversation. What does the last 5% mean to you, and are you willing to pay $X of extra capacity to cover it? How frequently do you use it, and can you put it on a generator? Additionally, we can implement a system in phases so that a client doesn’t have to buy everything in one go, covering the essentials first and optional items later.

A data-driven iterative approach

Instead of designing a big system that might have a lot of spare capacity, we collaborate with our clients to push the boundaries (a little) and grow their systems based on real-world usage.

For example, a client has a completely off-grid solar system with a generator backup. We added panels and battery capacity during phase 1, but we expected the generator to kick on once in a while. Then, we collected data to see how much fell short in solar production and storage capacity, and accounted for his “ideal state” (e.g., being able to use a mini-split in the summer) to dimension phase 2.

This iterative approach is far from what most people are used to: Having a technician come in, turn a few screws, and say, “Good luck with that.” However, it’s an essential and empowering exercise to help our clients achieve energy independence without a cost-prohibitive upfront investment.

Plus, you can define how much you spend and how fast you want to go (and what “flush with power” means to you). For example, we help a client get started with $600 worth of materials. In less than one year, she expanded her system to power a pump, a window air conditioning unit, a fridge, Starlink, and more!

We apply the same overarching approach to each project to help our clients get the most out of their investment. Get in touch to see how we can help you do more with what you have, whether you want to build an off-grid system from scratch, fine-tune an existing installation, add resiliency to SCE, or perform an energy efficiency audit.