How much money can I make with solar power?

There are a couple of ways to make money with solar power. Of course you can become a solar panel dealer or an installer of solar power systems, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

You want to know how much money you can make from your own solar panels.

So first let’s talk about a couple of factors. The first consideration is whether your local power utility allows what’s called “net metering.” This is when you send any extra power you generate with your solar panels back into the electricity grid. Some utilities will give you a credit off your bill for any power you generate, and some will actually pay you for it. This is particularly likely if your state requires utilities to source a certain percentage of their power from green or renewable sources.

The second is how much excess power you can actually generate. Let’s say you build a 100 Watt solar panel (this can be done for not much money using these instructions for a do it yourself solar panel). A 100 Watt solar panel provides enough power to run a single 100 Watt light bulb (or about 50 low Wattage LED light bulbs). Anytime you’re using less power than this, you’ll have excess capacity that can be sold back to the utility.

So if your utility doesn’t actually pay you for the power you generate, but just takes it off your bill, the maximum you can make from your solar panels is the amount you usually pay for electricity. You can eliminate your utility bill (or at least the usage charges — most utilities charge a base fee, and that’s not going to go away). You can go through periods of using a lot of power (when you run your oven, for example) but if you generate enough solar power during other times of the day, this will compensate for it.

If your utility will buy the power from you, your income is only limited by how many solar panels you want to make or buy, and how much sunlight strikes your house. You’ll need to call your utility to ask how much they pay per kiloWatt hour (this is 1,000 Watts for one hour). Keep in mind that when you size your system you can only count on an average of 4 or 5 hours of direct sunlight per day. This is the figure solar installers use. So if you have 10 100 Watt panels on your roof, your daily generation if everything is super-efficient would be 5 kWh.