Best Solar Companies in California

Basically, when you buy electricity from a utility, it might cost you $0.05 – $0.20 per kilowatt hour depending on your local utility rates.

Lets say in this example, you pay an average of $0.10/kilowatt hour. If you run a 1 kw hair dryer for an hour, you just added $0.10 to your bill. The big question is, how many kilowatt hours do you use over time? You don’t use the same amount of power all through the day or month. And most people know their monthly electricity bills as well, which is why its easiest to look at a month.

Let’s do a REALLY generic estimate of the cost of a system that will replace all of your utility power, just to help illustrate the math; but mind you, many systems are designed to just offset some of the costs, not necessarily replace the whole electricity bill, so you could buy a system 1/10th of the size of this example and be an affordable investment (assuming youre not financing the install).

The average Kwh consumption in America is around 900 Kwh or 900,000 watts (to convert, multiply by 1000).

Divide that 900,000 watts we want to have, by total sunshine hours per month (since panels only work in sunshine). The panels would have to generate:

900,000 watts / total sunshine hours per month which is 8 hours x 30 days

Which in other words is:
900,000 watts / 240

So we would need to generate:
= 3,750 watts per sunshine hour

If you are paying $5/watt, then the system that will cost:
$5 * 3,750 = $18,750.

True, there are a lot more factors that go into figuring out exactly how much solar you need based on things like where you live, the pitch of your roof, the direction your roof faces, etc…, but we hope to have a calculator for this soon.

Ultimately, this helps simplify how you shop for solar companies on our site since you can compare apples to apples.