We currently have solat to provide 100% of our annual consumption including car charging. No battery because MA has a pretty generous net metering regulation, we feed the grid for eight months of the year and supplement from it the other four, netting out to close to zero. Because we already have a backup generator and are mostly concerned about prolonged winter outages a battery provides no particular benefit in our case. A battery isn't much help in multi-day outages and short outages that a battery could cover are only a slight inconvenience. Big battery arrays are very expensive still.

When we ran the numbers we found that the system should give us a 6% annual return on investment over the first decade (the system will last much longer than that and the longer term return will be higher, but I may not last that long). That's a nice return on a very low risk investment that happens to also be tax free. -- as yet we don't get taxed on not paying for electricity. With our electrical rates (~32-34 cents/kWh) it seemed like a no-brainer.

Thank you for the feedback, @rwiegand. Now that you have solar, did that start you on a path for other electric upgrades like EV charging, heat pump etc.? My thought is that once I get solar, I'll start chipping away at my other gas appliances and start replacing them with electric.

We already had an electric car and charger. I'm guessing we'll switch to a heat pump the next time furnace replacement comes around. Our house is super insulated so we use relatively little gas for heating. They will have to pry my gas range from my cold dead fingers. ;-)

We have solar panels on the roof producing around 28kW and 6 Tesla batteries. We got solar to reduce energy bills as my DH likes to keep the house quite cold and since we live in FL that means the AC is basically running 24/7 year round. The batteries are for backup power during outages after hurricanes. We did the batteries instead of getting a propane generator.

We have a buried propane tank that runs our 2 water heaters, outdoor gas grill and pool heater (which we rarely use).

I have no plans to get an EV vehicle ... love my gas V8 too much!

It is much harder to evacuate with an EV during hurricanes when power is out. I can carry 20 extra gallons of gas on my trailer hitch cargo basket and I fill those cans just before the first storm, so I'm ready to go. An EV parked in a garage is also a fire danger when you get some coastal flooding from hurricanes. Our Tesla batteries are installed at least 4 ft off the floor in the garage.

During the last hurricanes in my area several people lost their homes from the EV catching fire in the garage and burning the house down, and not from the few feet of flooding or winds. Without the EV the houses would of had some water damage (depending on the build height of the main floor), but not burned to the ground. Your geographic location needs to be considered.

We have solar panels, in North Dakota, which buys back our excess power, but at a reduced rate (maybe that will change some day). We didn't do it so much to save money as to reduce our carbon footprint. We have a plug-in hybrid vehicle and a Level 2 charger, but unless I charge it off the panels during the day (on day Hubby rides his bike to work instead of taking that vehicle), it uses off-peak power.

Because I don't like to sell power back to the utility at a discount, I try to do things like laundry and dishes on sunny days (I'm retired, so I have flexibility). On our long summer days, we produce up to 38 kWh; much less in the winter, of course, but it helps. We also bought our system when we got a 30% federal tax credit, which also helped!

"I could eventually cut the gas line entirely"

I don't understand why someone would want to do this.

• Having two sources of energy provides redundancy.
• Wolf River Electric services Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota so you must live in a cold place and even daytime sunlight is limited.
• Electricity in many places is becoming more and more expensive.
• You can continue to use a gas cooktop (but not a gas oven) during a power outage.
• You can continue to use a gas furnace during a power outage if you provide power to the blower from a battery.