Finance Options
The suns energy is free for everyone, not like the electricity that is sent to you via the electricity grid. The only thing stopping you from harnessing this free energy is not owning the technology to make it usable. Of course the technology isn’t free, however there are some constructive ways of acquiring a solar power generating system that you may not have thought of and there are also still some government solar rebate schemes available which could give you a discount as high as 30% on your system.
USING A BANK LOAN TO PUT MONEY BACK IN YOUR POCKET FROM DAY ONE
If structured correctly, a new solar PV system owner can actually get themselves into a situation where the savings on their energy bill is more than the cost of servicing the loan to buy and install the system. Let’s check out an example to show you how it works.
We will use the same household from the Investment Benefits page for this example. This household uses about 37.9 kWh of electricity per day and the electricity usage component of their bill was $989. After the installation of a 4 kW solar PV system at a cost of $8,000, they were able to reduce their consumption from the electricity grid to 23.5 kWh. The 4 kW Solar PV system produced 19 kWh of electricity on an average day, some of that electricity is used for the household’s consumption and any excess power generated is sent out to the electricity grid for a small credit on their bill. The sum of the usage cost and the small credit gave the household a new quarterly electricity usage component of $582. So they are saving $408 per quarter. To see how all the figures are derived, we encourage you to review the Investment Benefits page.
Now let’s assume they funded the $8,000 capital cost of the solar PV system by use of a loan from one of Commercial Utility Solutions trusted partners at a rate of 8.39% p.a. over a 10-year term, this interest rate is current in October 2015.
The quarterly repayments on the loan would be $297 (that’s $23 per week). So the household is paying $297 per quarter as principle and interest repayments on their loan to save $408 per quarter on their electricity bill. They’re ahead by $111 per quarter, from day one (that’s $8.5 per week). Then, once the loan is fully repaid, they own the solar PV system outright, and from then on are saving the whole $408 per quarter on their electricity bill. Also it is worth noting, by this time electricity rates will probably be higher, which would magnify the returns even more. For the amounts used in this example, every cent per kWh electricity rates go up, the savings increase by about $10 per quarter.