Here is the part most companies skip. Swapping an oil boiler for a heat pump does cut the fuel you burn at home. But the electricity has to come from somewhere, and if that somewhere is a gas plant three towns over, you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve moved the smokestack out of your basement and put it where you can’t see it.
That matters here more than most places. Natural gas produces roughly half the electricity New England consumes in a year, and in New Hampshire it’s about a quarter of in-state generation, with a little coal and oil still in the mix. Electrify a house on that grid and a real share of your heat is still coming out of a turbine.
Putting the generation on your own roof is what closes that gap. Not because it’s fashionable — because it’s the only version where the fuel isn’t burned at all.
The honest accounting
Nothing is free. Some things are close.
Making a solar panel costs energy. Silica sand is refined into polysilicon at high temperature, grown into ingots, sliced into wafers, printed with silver contacts, laminated behind glass and framed in aluminium. It is an industrial process and we won’t pretend otherwise. The question is what you get back.
That is the whole argument in four numbers. A panel spends one to three years paying back what it cost to make, then spends another two and a half decades producing power that costs the atmosphere almost nothing. A gallon of oil burns once. There is no version of it where you get the energy back.
What happens at the end
A panel doesn’t die. It gets taken apart.
Eventually the panels on your roof will fade past the point of being worth their space. That is where people assume it all goes in a hole in the ground. It doesn’t have to, and increasingly it doesn’t.
Pull a panel apart and it is mostly glass — around three quarters of its weight — held in an aluminium frame. Modern recycling recovers up to 95% of a panel by weight. The frame comes off first and is 100% recyclable, and remelting aluminium takes about 95% less energy than making it new from bauxite ore. Aluminium doesn’t wear out in the process; the same metal can go around again effectively indefinitely.
The glass separates next and comes back at around 95%. Then the laminate is heated to roughly 500 °C so the cells release, and the silicon wafers are etched and remelted — about 85% of the silicon recovered, along with the great majority of the silver and copper. Those materials go straight back into new wafers and new panels.
Batteries follow the same logic. A lithium iron phosphate cell can be dismantled and its metals recovered at high rates — hydrometallurgical processing recovers 95–98% of the metals from spent lithium-ion cells, at roughly 58% less environmental impact than digging new ore out of the ground. Collection infrastructure is still catching up, and honestly the recycling rates in practice are nowhere near the technical ceiling yet. But the material is not consumed. It is borrowed.
That is the difference, and it is not a small one. Fuel is a one-way trip. A panel and a battery are a loan against the same materials, paid back and reissued.
You don’t have to care about any of this
Plenty of people call us because their well pump quit in an ice storm, or because they are tired of watching a fuel truck pull into the driveway. That is a perfectly good reason, and we’ll build you the same system either way.
But it’s worth knowing what you end up doing regardless of why you did it. A roof that makes its own power is one less house drawing off a gas plant on a January evening. Multiply that by a road, then a town. You don’t need to think of yourself as an environmentalist to have quietly become part of the answer.
Plenty of companies advertise this. Fewer can show you the arithmetic. The numbers above are the whole case, sources and all — including the parts that aren’t flattering. We’d rather hand you those than a leaf-shaped logo.
The house you build this on outlasts you. That is the honest reason to do it properly.
Where these numbers come from
- IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Annex III — lifecycle emissions: rooftop solar 41 gCO₂e/kWh (range 26–60), coal 820, gas 490.
- NREL, “What is the Energy Payback for PV?” — energy payback of 1–4 years against a 30-year life, so 87–97% of what a panel makes is surplus.
- NREL & IEA PVPS Task 12, Circular Economy in Photovoltaics (2024) — end-of-life recovery and module recycling.
- NREL, Solar Photovoltaic Module Recycling (2021) — recovery rates for glass, aluminium and silicon.
- ISO New England resource mix — what actually generates the region’s electricity.
- New Hampshire Department of Energy — in-state generation and fuel prices.
Figures were current when this page was written and are worth re-checking. Where a range exists we have used the median, not the flattering end.
Keep going
Where to next.
The calculator
What you'd save
Thirteen sliders and your own fuel bills. Most oil homes land in the thousands a year.
Run your numbers →The equipment
What we install
Storage, arrays, automatic switching, generator integration and the service work underneath.
See the systems →If you already own one
Quiet the generator
A battery in front of it means a few hard-working hours instead of twenty-four noisy ones.
How it works →