By generating their own electricity, homeowners throughout Arizona, including Scottsdale, Casa Grande, and Maricopa, stand to benefit enormously from the cost savings associated with solar panel installation on their homes. By reducing or eliminating monthly electricity bills, the average person could save close to $17,500 over the lifetime of their solar system!
But for many people, the environmental benefits of solar energy are just as important as the money they’ll save. People who use solar power energy are turning away from finite fossil fuels and carbon emissions and towards a clean, renewable energy source: the sun.
Want to know exactly how much you could affect your carbon footprint if you installed solar panels? Let’s do the math, using real alternative energy solar power information and statistics.
How Much CO2 Does Electricity Generation Create?
The first thing to acknowledge is that everyone’s residential solar panel system is different. The number of solar panels, the location of the panels on your roof, and the amount of energy your household uses will all affect how much CO2 you’ll save by switching.
For this exercise, we’ll also need to figure out the amount of CO2 created by electricity generation in the state, which requires knowing how much electricity was generated in Arizona, as well as the total carbon dioxide released as a result.
The good news is that, looking at data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (or EIA), we can access yearly records of electricity and fossil fuel emissions for every state, including Arizona!
Using those numbers, we see that for every 1 kWh of standard electricity produced in Arizona in 2018, an average of 0.919 pounds of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere.
Calculating Your CO2 Savings with Solar
Now that we know the average amount of carbon dioxide created by the generation of electricity in Arizona, we need to find out how much power an average sized solar system would generate over the course of a year.
In Arizona, your solar panels can produce a lot compared to other parts of the country—about 1,750kWh per year for every 1kW in your system. If we assume that you have a 10kW system installed on your home, that means that you’ll be able to generate an average of 17,500kW every year of solar power clean energy.
If the average solar panel system lasts for approximately 25 years, we now have enough data to make our final calculations:
17,500kW/year x 0.919 = 16,082 pounds of yearly CO2 emissions
16,082 x 25 years = 402,062 pounds of CO2
The average solar panel system in Arizona would save more than 182 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is the carbon equivalent of nearly 40 years worth of driving a car!
Upgrade Your Home with Solar Energy from Energy Solution Providers
Compared to energy generated from fossil fuels, solar power is a viable and renewable alternative energy source that can reduce both your utility costs and your carbon footprint. The advantages of using solar power energy will actually increase over the decades-long lifespan of your panels, as you pay off the initial upfront investment of installation and are left with years and years of free electricity.
To help with installation costs, available solar financing, rebates, and tax credits are making it easier and easier to convert your home to electricity from a clean, renewable source. Arizona solar tax credits include the Federal Solar Tax Credit, for example, which allow homeowners to deduct as much as 26% of their total solar installation costs from up to two consecutive years of federal taxes due.