The disadvantages of solar panels, honestly

The old promise of solar was one-for-one: every kWh you exported at noon cancelled a kWh you imported at night, at the same price. Most states have moved off that. Under net billing and export-rate tariffs, the utility buys your surplus at something well below what it charges you, so overproduction is a bad trade rather than a neutral one.

This has two consequences people rarely hear at the point of sale. It caps how big a system makes sense — building past your own consumption means selling cheap to buy back expensive. And it makes the timing of your production matter: an array that produces hard at midday while the house is empty is worth less than the same array on a house that runs its air conditioning then.

Export rules are set by your state commission and your utility, not by your installer, and the terms you sign up under are usually locked for a set number of years. What net metering is and what replaced it is the longer version.

A modern array is warrantied for around twenty-five years. If the roof under it has ten years left, you have bought a future job: taking the array off, re-roofing, and putting the array back. That cost is real, it is not in the proposal, and it belongs in your payback maths on the day you sign, not on the day it happens.

This is the single most common structural mistake in residential solar, and it is entirely avoidable. Find out the age and remaining life of the roof. If it is close, do the roof first. Most reputable installers will tell you the same thing, and the ones who will not are telling you something else.

Penetrations are a related question. Panels are bolted through the roof surface. Done properly it is a solved problem with a workmanship warranty behind it; done badly it is a leak that appears two winters later. Ask specifically who warrants the penetrations and for how long, because it is often not the same party that warrants the panels.

Cash and finance are genuinely different purchases. A twenty-year solar loan at an advertised low rate usually carries a fee the lender charged the installer to hit that rate, and that fee lives inside the system price. It is why the same equipment is often cheaper in cash, and why the only fair comparison is cash price against total of all payments.

Leases and PPAs go further: you do not own the system, so the resale conversation changes. Your buyer has to qualify to assume the agreement, or you buy it out at closing, and there is typically a filing against the property that has to be cleared before the sale completes. Buyers and their agents have learned to be wary of this, which is a market fact whatever you think of the underlying economics.

None of that makes leases indefensible. For a homeowner with no cash, no tax appetite and a long horizon in the house, they can be reasonable. It does mean the decision is about the contract, not the panels — which is the opposite of how it gets sold. The tactics are catalogued in solar scams and sales tactics.

For balance, because a page that only argues one way is as useless as the ones that only argue the other. Solar is a prepayment on twenty-five years of electricity at a fixed price. If your rate is high and climbing, that is a genuinely good trade, and it stays good with no subsidy at all. Panels degrade slowly and predictably. Maintenance is minimal. And the risk you are hedging — a utility rate rising faster than inflation for two decades — is a real risk that most households are otherwise fully exposed to.

The point of this page is not that solar is bad. It is that the answer depends on arithmetic that takes about ten minutes, and that nobody selling it has an incentive to run that arithmetic honestly in front of you.