No need for permits for rooftop solar and the only dealings I had with the energy company was filling out an online form to register it. Took maybe 2 minutes.
I did not add a battery because at the time it would have doubled the price. Also, because I have net metering the battery never pays itself off.
(My installer ended up flaking on me, and then I gave up because NEM 3.0 was coming too soon to find a fallback.)
That’s the total cost including all materials and labour from scratch to a fully functioning system.
This setup would cost north of $50k (possibly north of $75k, depending) if installed by contractors. Labor costs are extremely high here, since COL is extremely high.
Matt Ferrell just did a video on this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3eEzdpi12I
I do wonder if having an electrician come by after the fact to inspect it counts as "supervising", though.
If you don't have utility approval to connect, you won't get net metering benefits, although you could offset active use (and if you had battery storage, I guess you could make it work). At least my meter doesn't run backwards, it has a count for energy in and a count for energy out. If we didn't have utility approval and had significant energy out, I'm guessing there would be questions. We have a fairly generous tarrif, and our system doesn't make sense without utility approval --- we generate on one meter and use on another meter and rely on meter aggrigation for the generation and use to offset, and they will offset 1 for 1, once the account gets fully set up.
Our utility is still offering 1 for 1 net metering for new installs (accumulated credit expires at the end of March every year) and have not proposed a new rate schedule. They say that existing connected systems will be able to remain on the current schedule indefinitely. That's the best I can do for the future at this point.
If it does change for us in a negative way, I'll have to bite the bullet and buy an electric car and charge when the sun is up. :P Hopefully negative changes happen later rather than sooner.
The plug in solar systems are small and usually mounted in ways that don’t capture as much energy as the same panels mounted on a roof. These systems aren’t going to get popular enough to make a big difference in anything.
I think it’s nice that they’re available for people to do some small scale offsets, but I think they’re more of a gateway to better solar installations. They also send people down the path of investigating battery storage add-ons, which might actually be a better long term solution for everyone.
If we can get to a point where we can buy plug-in batteries that are subsidized by requiring coordination with the grid, the power companies could get distributed, controlled battery storage to work with their demand curves. This can already happen with the bigger permanent install batteries.