Did you know that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace? A source of a constant stream of high-energy photons?

Did you know that PG&E is a gigantic racket with some of the highest rates in the state? We pay 61¢/kWh for electricity during peak times¹, about seven times as much as my wife paid at her old Philly apartment — given the US Energy Information Administration's estimate of 10.5MWh/household/year, that's between $3600 and $6400/year of electricity.

Suffice to say, we've been planning on putting solar panels on the roof since we bought this house. Thankfully, solar technology is amazing. Panels have gotten almost 40 times cheaper (accounting for inflation) in my lifetime! Emissions-free! Long-lived! Quite possibly the most remarkable technological development in my lifetime².

That being said, we had to do a ton of work on this house and it was my hope to hold off on solar for a year or two, reap some benefit of those plummeting prices. Then the country elected Orange Hitler for an improbable second term, and I took him at full faith that he was going to do everything in his power to kill the burgeoning solar industry as a favor to his friends in the earth-murdering industry, so I pushed as hard as I could to get the solar panels on the roof before it was too late.

I started by reaching out to other people who I know who've gotten solar panels installed, and their answers all came down to, We love our panels but our installers were meh so you should look elsewhere. While I did a crash-course on residential solar, I set up an account on EnergySage, which is sort of industry-sponsored aggregator for solar installers. I ended up getting quotes from seven companies through EnergySage, plus three others that I found elsewhere. There were a few dimensions to consider:

• Panels: most of the installers were quoting REC Alpha Pure 2 or REC Alpha Pure-RX panels in between 420W and 480W per panel; a couple were the Hyperion/Runergy HY-DH108P8 series at between 400W and 415W per panel. I'm really not qualified to evaluate the chemistry or physics of the panels, but bigger number = better, and better warranty = better; both of those favored the REC panels
• Inverters: the main dimension is string inverters versus microinverters; basically, string inverters take DC power off the roof and invert it to AC with big inverters at ground level; this is theoretically more efficient but makes it much more complicated to handle unbalanced power (e.g., when shaded); whereas microinverters invert the DC to AC in each panel on the roof and then take the (in-phase) AC off the roof and combine it with cheapish AC combiners at ground level. I can see the advantages of both approaches, and there are an infinite number of infotainment-quality articles arguing in favor of one versus another. I did talk to some electrical engineers who were basically all in favor of minimizing the number of AC/DC conversions.
• Batteries: Under NEM3, you basically have to have batteries, since PG&E will only pay you about 25% of the standard rate for electricity you sell back, so it's no longer cost-effective to overproduce during the day and then consume from the grid at night. The Tesla Powerwall is the 3000-lb gorilla in the room and dominates this market, but there are a few other players³.

Practically, for an integrated system with battery storage in California on short notice, there are two options:

1. Tesla Powerwall + SolarEdge string inverters
2. Enphase microinverters and batteries

I also got one very intriguing quote based on the Lunar Energy system, but we'd be one of the first customers in PG&E and I didn't really want to be a beta tester⁴.

Anyhow, after evaluating all the quotes and reading every BBB and Yelp review I could find, I decided to go with a fairly large company based in Southern California named Sunergy. I didn't (and still don't) want to give Tesla/Elon Musk any money, which meant going with Enphase, and Sunergy was both the best Enphase quote and one of two that was "Enphase Platinum" certified, whatever that means. I signed a contract with them on December 14th, 2024, and the system design was completed on December 19th. Then, we waited.

It took the City of Oakland about 6 weeks to review and approve the permit, but on March 3rd we were approved to proceed. In the meantime, I'd been busy. Installation was scheduled for March 31st. Come March 30th, installation was cancelled due to supply chain issues⁵ and pushed back to April 3rd. Then April 10th. Finally, on April 16th, the panels showed up and were put on the roof — only a few days before Cheeto Mussolini slapped a so-bad-it's-almost-funny 3,521% tariff on solar panels and nuked the entire industry. Not only had I gotten the panels installed, but I was in a beta program⁶ to have the batteries set up in "whole-home backup" mode using the brand-spanking-new Enphase IQ Meter Collar as a transfer switch.⁷

This whole experience so far is pretty frustrating; like basically all home-improvement contracting projects in the US, the homeowner ends up serving as de facto project manager and every site visit involves hours of coordinating between various sub-contractors and laborers. But at this point, when I was ready to declare victory in April, I hadn't even gotten to the worst of it. Let's recap the process of getting solar on your roof:

1. You pay a buttload of money
2. Someone puts panels on your roof that can't do anything
3. Someone with an electrician's license wires them into your panel so they can theoretically do something
4. The city inspects the panels and the wiring to make sure they're safe
5. You pay another buttload of money
6. The utility gives you "Permission to Operate"
7. You can turn your panels on

Do you see the weak link in all of this? It's step 6, where your utility (in my case, PG&E) has to give you "Permission to Operate" or "PTO". There's no particular timeframe in which they must do so, and it's a completely opaque process where your installer files some paperwork and you... wait. It took the city 14 days to inspect and approve the install, and then it took PG&E an additional 63 days to give me PTO, during which time I was legally forbidden from turning the panels on and had to keep paying PG&E out the nose. Having a company whose profits depend on not giving you PTO get to decide at their own leisure when you can turn on your panels seems obviously bad.

But wait, there's more! Remember how I was in that beta program for the IQ Meter Collar? It turns out that meter collars have to be installed by a PG&E electrician. In addition to being a beta for Enphase, this is also still a beta at PG&E (run out of the "SNEM Paired Storage" group), and all of this... beta-ness... is expected to be handled by the installer.

Unfortunately, while I was staring at some photovoltaic depreciating assets and sitting on my hands, Sunergy appears to have been imploding⁸. I got fobbed off to a series of account managers (all of whom ended up leaving the company) and at this point the only contact I still have is their long-suffering founder Chris Hammerstone, whose phone is literally always busy. Eventually I realized that the only way to get attention was to go make a fuss with Enphase, which I did, and then Enphase and Chris somehow joined forces and got PG&E to come plug in the meter collar. That was... last week, August 8th. The final (post-meter-collar-install) setup bits were done this week and the system has been online since Thursday August 14th. Exactly eight months between contract signing and system completion. Eesh!

Anyhow, the power's on. Some takeaways:

• These panels can produce 40 kWh on a sunny summer day⁹ and 25 kWh on a cloudy day
• I have 15 kWh of batteries and I can already tell it isn't going to be enough on winter days
• My house uses like 400W just sitting there empty. I guess that's the fridge¹⁰, the NAS¹¹, and the Ubiquiti gear¹²? Seems high! I bet I could get that down by 50% if I went and put a meter on every power brick in the house.
• Phases A and B are also way out of balance; I think all of the big single-pole appliances I have are on the same phase. Oops.
• Electric dryers are brutal; we (unthinkingly) ran the dryer last night and burned something like 8kWh of battery on two loads. Once this dryer dies (it's a 10-year-old LG, how long could it have), I'm definitely getting a heat pump dryer, since they're supposedly around 80% less energy per load.
• The Enphase iOS app (Enlighten) really sucks¹³. I'm making my own and will be posting about that hopefully in a couple of days.

Will any of these companies be around to support these products in a few years? Are we all going to end up in a wasteland playing a double-necked flamethrower/guitar on the front of a semi truck for the amusement of our god-kings? Who knows!