If your electric bill is less than $100 per month, and you were quoted $60,000 for a rooftop solar power system, you were being targeted by a scam.
The system is supposed to be scaled to the historical usage, and it sounds like you were being quoted a system on the order of 10x what you actually would need. My electric bill was about $125 per month, and my power system was about $9,000, so it will pay for itself in about 6 years, which is a bit on the high end for a few different reasons. It’s usually a bit shorter. Your system should cost only about $7,000 total after tax credits, and probably less, but that‘s about the ballpark for the maximum you would need.
I agree with you on some of your other points about never being able to recoup the cost of a more efficient item based on the energy savings. My wife and I bought a Camry Hybrid in 2018 and paid close to what you said — $34,000. We knew that at the rate we drive, we would never pay off the difference with gas savings, but we still wanted the hybrid. It’s a great car, and I’m not sure if it’s true for Camry’s but some hybrids have better performance than the gas version of the same model due to the electric motor working with the gas motor to boost acceleration. I like how the car drives. The mileage is awesome. We got home from our 1,000-mile road trip yesterday, and it cost almost exactly $100 for the gas which was $3.99 for a complete fill-up from almost empty at the beginning and $4.69 for a partial fill up partway through, and there’s still over 150 miles range left on the tank. To me, that’s a nice price for such a long trip. I’ll never make up the cost of the difference in the car prices, but now that I’ve paid for the hybrid, I really don’t care much about the fluctuation in gas prices.
