I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return.

Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future.

I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital.

I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.

It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.

For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.

Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.

Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.

For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.

But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.

> Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free

One could even say it is risk-negative. It decreases the risk one runs of future oil price hikes.

If you buy solar cells, you buy futures on energy delivery at a guaranteed price.