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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (603195)	3/10/2011 7:05:31 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573942

If your amortized it like your house it could be! No moving parts - it might last 50 years. The ORIGINAL photovoltaic cells are STILL working!

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (603195)	3/10/2011 9:19:42 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1573942

It would only cost me $56,392 for half of my power, but then I just have a townhouse. Kindof hard to find the 1000 square feet of space to put the solar cells. Also the cost they give you is after tax credits, the real cost would be $80,560. They estimate that I'd save the majority of my electricity costs even though the capacity is only supposed to be half of my power (and what about night, cloudy weather etc.) so I don't know how that would work, but even with the savings they project (and they consider me a good candidate), and with a big tax credit, they estimate its a 17 year break even. They also ignore interest or time value of money costs by assuming I'm paying all in cash (and not considering other things I could have done if I had $56k burning a hole in my pocket which I don't. Counting the total costs rather than the costs minus the tax credit savigns (for it to really be a productive investment in and of itself it needs to have a real return, otherwise its tax credit farming, which may make sense but is closer to rent-seeking than something productive). And counting interest on borrowing the money would push things back even further. If my savings per month are not as high as they suggest, which seems likely, the break-even point could be never (esp. when you add in the fact that the cash flow to service this debt could have paid off other debt that I'm paying higher interest rates on).