While the federal printing press goes brrr… do you worry about inflation? While we don’t see drastic signs of it yet, you may wonder how inflation effects your upcoming decision to buy solar panels.

Purchasing solar is a way to lock in your next 2 decades of electricity at today’s prices. If you expected no inflation and your local power company to start dropping their rates, then this would be a bad idea, but Georgia Power is asking for rate increase of several percent per year. And that is on the assumption that there is no inflation. With inflation the power bills will only go up higher.

The good news is that you can lock in lower rates by buying solar before prices go up.

Here’s an example with very rough numbers on the back of the napkin:
Let’s take my partially shaded roof. I look it up on Google’s Project Sunroof and find that I will get 1500 hours of sun per year. (Google suggests that I may not be ideal for solar 🙂 ). If I were to install a 5 kW grid tie system with fancy microinverters to get the most out of my partial shading, it would cost me about $20,000. I would generate 1500 x 5 = 7500 kWh of electricity per year (which has turned out to be about right so far). Over the life of the 25 year warranty on the system that would be 187,500 kWh of electricity. My $20,000 investment today means that I am paying 9 cents per kWh in 2020 dollars for my electricity during the year 2045! Under the very optimistic assumption that inflation for the next 25 years isn’t higher than it has been since 1995, that would be like paying $0.04/kWh.

TLDR: Buy now and lock in a guaranteed rate on your electric bill for the next 25 years.