Following up..
Anything new to share?
I plan on speaking to someone to see if its worthwhile for me in NY.
I wouldn't suggest the installer I used. Everything will likely work out for me in the end, but too many hassles, delays, etc.
I started looking into this in May of last year. Signed a contract with my installer around a month later. I won't go through all of the details of the timing, but the bottom line is that the system wasn't operational (ie producing electricity for me) until nearly December. And since then I've had a full week of the system being offline, and issues where they had to come out to adjust the monitoring hardware. They appear to have submitted the necessary paperwork for me to get my NYC property tax abatement, but I'm still waiting on approval.
Other than that, the system is fine - I'm pretty confident I won't see reoccurring issues with it going forward. As I mentioned before, the system is a total of 4.9 kW with microinverters and monitoring. The actual purchase cost was $18,530. That was broken up into a loan with 2 components, which is done through Sungage (my actual loan is with NBT bank):
1) An interest free loan of $10,191.50 (30%+25% of the system cost). This is the exact amount of my tax refund for 2018, and it's is due in June.
2) A 5 year loan on the remainder ($8,339.50) at 1.99% for a monthly payment of $146.36
My projected energy production at current electricity costs (~$.20) is an average of $90-95/month. Layer on 4 years of NYC property tax abatement ($1,000 per year) and I'm actually already making money even in the first five years. Obviously after that point the whole system is just generating profit.
I believe the federal tax credit goes of 30% goes down to 26% (2020), 22% (2021), and then sunsets entirely. I don't think NYS's expires, but it is capped at $5k. Perhaps more importantly though, the way your system is treated regarding net metering in NY changes for systems installed (or maybe contracted) after 2020 - for the worse. There's also an installer side incentive that may be getting lower, but that should be baked into the price you're quoted. Between the federal credit getting lower and the net metering issue, if you're going to do it, do it this year.
Depending on your system size and the pricing, it can still be worthwhile even outside NYC. But if you don't have a lot of maximum sun space it can make it a lot harder to become profitable. My father got quotes, and while his roof has many times the amount of space as mine, none of it had the levels of unobstructed solar exposure to make it worthwhile. Bottom line, you have to get the quotes and crunch the numbers.