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Report: Solar savings through a SolarCity residential system
Having limited winter daylight hours combined with snow covered rooftops doesn’t make for good check out my huge solar savings conversation this month. But putting that aside, the overall economics behind my solar system tells a far greater story.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll recall that my journey with installing a SolarCity system dates back to late 2014. My system consists of 69 panels at 255W each for a total of 17.6kW (more specs on the system can be found on my Solar Generation page).
Solar Pricing
Massachusetts Electricity prices having been rising at approximately 9.5% year-over-year since 2008. When I started with SolarCity, my electricity price was set at $0.1627 per kWh including delivery, supply and taxes. Prices have continued to climb as seen on this chart.
The state went through a fun over-inflation and correction period in 2015, but the current rate I’m paying for electric is $0.1906 kWh with the best supplier I can find.
SolarCity sets their Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) prices based on your current electricity usage and comparable rates for the area that’s receiving their solar system. I had a number of options when I signed up including a variable rate, a fixed rate and an outright purchase but ended up opting for a 20-year fixed rate plan at $0.1420 kWh.
The way the PPA plan works is that I pay $0.1420 for every kWh generated by the SolarCity panels. The kWh they generate offsets the electricity I would consume. My savings initially worked out to be a difference of $0.0207 kWh or approximately 13% less. Recent savings have been in the $0.0486 kWh mark, or 25%, helped by the rise in electricity rates from utilities.
I incurred no installation or service costs when first setting up my SolarCity system, hence my entire cost for set up is based on the amount of power generated at $0.1420 kWh.
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Affiliate: Get a solar cost estimate and find out how much solar can save for your home and business in your area.
Solar Costs
In the last 22 months, I’ve generated a whopping 33.8 MWh (33,800 kWh) of power. My cost for that was $4,800. The SolarCity bill will fluctuate depending on the amount of daylight hour and weather conditions.
In that same period, my electric company reported that I used 23,800 kWh of power. Since the solar power offsets that amount, my actual power use for those 22 months was 57,600 kWh — I use a lot of power between my Tesla, pool, A/C and other electronics we have throughout the house.
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About 59% of the power I need for my house and my Tesla comes from my SolarCity system. I wanted a system that could cover 100% of my needs but National Grid (local electric company) blocked that.
For the 23,800 kWh I purchased from the electric company, I paid $4,595, or $0.1930 kWh (averaged over the 22 months). My total electric cost (money paid to electric company and to SolarCity) for the 22 months was $9,395 or about $427/month.
While I consume a lot of power, 59% of it is provided by the sun.
Solar Savings
When I first signed up with SolarCity, they provided a $1,000 bonus if you registered for a solar system after buying a Tesla. That’s what I did and that’s how I received my $1,000 check form SolarCity.
They also had a referral program at the time which credited you with $250 for each person that signed up for a new system. I managed to get one referral and one more check from SolarCity.
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All in all, I started 22 months ago with no money down and $1,250 in my pocket and a nice new solar system on my house. Not a bad start!
Had I purchased all my power from my electricity company at the average of $0.1930 kWh it would have cost me a total of $11,117. But thanks to SolarCity, my total cost was $9,395, so my savings was $1,722 over the 22 months. I expect savings and solar benefits will continue to grow over the next 20 years as the electric company continues to raise their rates.
SolarCity doesn’t fully capture the amount of savings that can be had through their system since the initial quote is based on current electricity rates, at the time of the quote. Rates climb over time especially in dense urban areas.
My savings thus far has been more than twice the amount SolarCity originally outlined! Now, if we add in the referral checks, my savings goes up to $2,972. The referrals don’t necessarily scale over time and may get updated so that needs to be factored into the equation.
Summary
For no money down and no risk, I’ve saved about $3,000 in just under 2 years (27% of what I would have paid) while generating green energy and taking load away from an already overloaded power grid.
When I did the math before signing up I knew the system would be a good deal and I’m very happy to see the results proving out. Since I’m on the power purchase program, I don’t have to worry about equipment depreciation, loss in solar cell effectiveness over time (I only pay for what they generate) or a whole slew of other things. By the time my plan is up, much better systems will be available.
If you’re interested in exploring solar power for your house and have enjoyed my posts thus far, please consider using my referral link to get started. SolarCity will do a free analysis of your situation and let you know if a solar system may work for you: share.solarcity.com/teslaliving
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May the Sun be with you!
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
