I have an electricity bill of $0/month during the summer months after getting solar panels about 3 years ago. It was expensive to buy the system outright, but every year the electricity rates go up, the panels become more valuable. While I’m very happy with my personal results, I became immediately aware that those at the lower end of economic spectrum would benefit even more from this.

A friend and I started to see if we could to solar panel installations for free for those that were most at-risk financially. While we came up with a workable modest hardware system we could install, we found charity solar installation would be extremely risky for us to undertake. With rooftop installations it would mean taking on the liability of interacting with people’s roofs which means falls for people doing work, but also poorly maintained roofs including roof penetrations for fasteners and water leak liability. Even going “ground mount” didn’t remove the risks because we’d have to be interacting with the homeowners electrical systems with possible fire risks from aging or unlicensed modifications from prior owners. This ignores the risks of copper theft from easily accessible ground mount systems. In the end we had to abandon the idea of giving others what we could afford for ourselves simply because it was took risky to us trying to do good.