Solar Investment

Choose Solar For :

NYSERDA covers $3,500 of the cost.
The IRS gives you a 30% tax credit (same as cash when you pay your taxes in April).
NY State gives you a 25% tax credit (similar, but capped at $5,000).

Most communities have a 15-year tax holiday before adding to your property tax.
No retail sales tax on solar.
But incentives are going fast. The Administration levied a 30% tariff on solar panels this year that will increase prices by thousands of dollars, even for an American company like SunPower®. Fortunately, SunPower® has set aside a warehouse of panels that are at the old, pre-tariff price. But the supply is limited, so please act quickly to get yours.

In addition to your Home Equity and Credit Union sources, we can offer you some custom solar loans that let you go solar with little or no money down. With a typical loan, most solar systems go “cash-positive” after your next tax refund, meaning that you end up paying less for your remaining utility bill and solar loan than you had been paying for your utility bill. Then when the loan is paid off, you get free electricity for the rest of the system’s life. That is far better than any lease can offer.

If you pay $217.00 per month to the utility company, how would you like to pay only $17.00? (You still need to pay the basic monthly connection charge.) With the world’s most efficient solar panels by SunPower®, we can offset up to 100% of your usage, versus other brands that only do 50-75%. And as electric rates rise year after year, those savings increase.

Even if you borrow money to pay for your solar, your loan very quickly becomes Less each month than you would have paid the utility company if you’d just continued doing nothing. Over the life of the system, our typical customer gets back $4.50 for each $1.00 they invest; try finding a solid and safe investment like that in the stock market!

Although rates have not been “skyrocketing” (as some competitors claim) because petroleum prices are low right now, they have been going up steadily. OPEC and world events are out of our control. How much were your utility rates 10 years ago? What will they be like 10 years in the future? Imagine how much better off you’d be if you had been able to lock in those old rates. That’s what you can do starting now with solar so that you never have to worry about rising rates again.

For safety reasons, ordinary solar systems shut down whenever the utility grid stops working. But we offer two ways to stay up and running:

Can you get by with fewer high energy loads (like pool or electric heaters and excessive lighting) during a power outage? If so, our expertly designed battery systems will keep your furnace, pumps, lights, refrigerators, and other key appliances going day and night for as long as the outage lasts; no fuel needed!

If you live in a home or camp that isn’t connected to the utility company (or you someday just want to “pull the plug” on them) we can design a system you’ll love! We have been doing this since 1993 and are one of only a few installers in Upstate NY who have the expertise and experience to do these systems. For more information and photos of our attractive backup power systems, please see our Battery page.

How does this compare to other amenities? Much better! For instance, you may think that doing a kitchen overhaul would get you all your money back. Not so, because tastes differ (you may like blue granite counter tops, but the new owners want red, etc.) Or the prospective buyers may be afraid of that new swimming pool you built. On the other hand, everybody needs electricity, and you have that paid for! Solar houses sell more quickly, too.

A leased system lowers the value, whereas an owned one increases it. Likewise for the kind of solar. People are becoming smarter about what they get, and a poorly designed system with Chinese or other low cost panels is a detriment. Which of these solar houses would you rather buy? See more great reasons at our page on the SunPower® Advantage and on Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep and on Buy vs Lease. Your Choice: The brick house was done by a national
leasing company. The wooden house was done with SunPower® by this local dealer.

This is just common sense. Fossil fuel plants release millions of tons of pollutants every year. Nuclear is cleaner, until it comes time to dispose of the waste; and what about the poor people at Fukushima? Falling water is good, but how much power is lost along those high-tension wires running nearly 300 miles here from Niagara Falls? Solar electricity is clean. It emits no pollutants. Over the life of one of our 10,000 watt systems, it saves the planet from 403 tons of carbon pollution; that’s equivalent to 848 barrels of oil or the planting of 9,415 trees. It’s also local, and in the years to come, our electric grid will be more robust because the generation is distributed rather than centralized, making it more resilient to outages of various causes.

The SunPower® factory that makes our panels is the first and only panel manufacturer to achieve the prestigious rating of Silver Cradle-to-Cradle certification. That means that our factory operation is 99% landfill-free and is recycled instead. At the end of life, our panels are recycled for their glass, aluminum, plastic, silicon, and copper. Their “carbon footprint” (how much energy they make vs what it took to make them) is paid back in a record time of only 1.2 years. So, whenever you stop and feel smart about the sound financial investment you’ve made, you can also feel good about what you are doing to help your community, the nation, and the world. What a great legacy to leave for your family and future generations!
For all these reasons and more, we encourage you to join the smart home owners who have gone solar. Please call us or fill in the form below and let’s get started today.