The cost of doing nothing

• $200/month today~$87,500 over 25 yrs at 3% growth
• Rate driversWildfire mitigation, grid hardening
• Cost of delayOne year of a finite-life asset
• When to waitAgeing roof, short tenure, small bill

The comparison almost nobody runs

Every solar proposal compares the cost of a system against the savings it produces. Almost none of them state the alternative plainly: doing nothing is also a twenty-five year financial decision. It just does not come with a quote attached.

If you spend $200 a month on electricity today and rates never rose at all, you would spend $60,000 over the next twenty-five years. Rates do rise.

What Sacramento electricity rates have actually done

California retail electricity rates have risen substantially over the past decade — considerably faster than general inflation. The drivers are structural rather than cyclical: wildfire mitigation and liability costs, grid hardening, transmission investment and undergrounding programmes. None of those are finishing soon.

SMUD, as a community-owned utility, has historically kept rates below the California investor-owned average, which is a genuine advantage of living in Sacramento County. But SMUD rates have risen too, and its board has approved multi-year increases more than once.

Illustrative arithmetic on a compounding annual increase. It is not a forecast, and nobody can tell you what rates will do. The point is the shape of the curve, not the precise figure: at any plausible rate of increase, the twenty-five year cost of doing nothing is a large number.

What you are choosing when you defer

Years you do not get back

A solar array has a finite productive life. Every year you delay is one fewer year of production from a twenty-five or thirty year asset. That is the clearest cost of waiting and the one least often stated.

Exposure to the rate curve

Generating your own power converts a variable, rising cost into a fixed, known one. Whatever happens to rates between now and 2050, the kilowatt-hours you generate yourself are not affected by them. That predictability has value quite apart from the arithmetic.

Control during outages

Public safety power shutoffs are a real feature of life in the Sierra foothills — Auburn, Placerville, Cameron Park, El Dorado Hills. Solar with storage is one of the few things a household can do about that directly.

The honest counter-argument

Deferring is sometimes right, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

• If your roof needs replacing, wait. Re-roof first, then install. Doing it in the wrong order costs $2,000–$4,000 more.
• If you are moving within two years, the resale premium rarely returns the full system cost that quickly.
• If your bill is genuinely small, the fixed costs of an installation are hard to recover. Below roughly $80–$100 a month the case is weak.
• If cash is tight and the only available financing carries a heavy dealer fee, waiting for a better borrowing option may cost less than acting now.

What is not a good reason to defer is waiting for a better deal in the abstract. Panel prices have been broadly flat in real terms for several years, the federal residential credit has already ended, and each year of delay is a year of production you do not recover.

Written by the Sacramento Solar team for Sacramento-area homeowners. We install solar; we are not tax advisers, accountants or financial advisers. Figures are ranges current as of early 2026 and are offered as orientation, not as advice about your own situation. Verify current programme rules with your utility, the relevant agency or a qualified professional.