Comment Re:Sounds about right... (Score 2) 441
Home owners can't really lose with solar PV, unless they somehow get screwed on workmanship or installation costs. The panels with always pay for themselves in a few years and it's shear madness that new houses are being built without it.
If you're going to live in the house for at least the break-even time then yes, you probably can't lose. However, I'm less convinced that it adds so much to the value of the house: if there are 2 identical houses for sale, but one of them has a brand new £20K installation of PV panels on the roof, are people really going to pay £20K more for that one? I suspect not, because its an up-front cost and some people simply won't be able to afford that much up-front. (Ok, so people will tack it onto the mortgage, but that means convincing the bank to give you a bigger mortgage).
So that is why new houses aren't built with PV panels - because it almost certainly doesn't raise the sale value of the house by the amount spent on the panels.
In general, solar panels work well for the rich but not so well for the poor: If you've bought the house you're going to live in for a significant number of years and you can afford the large up-front cost of the panels then it's a good investment. But only the richer part of the population can do this, so subsidising solar power actually just ends up transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, which is why it's contraversial.