...AND CHEAPER...:

Thinking of putting your money into the stock market? Think again. Solar panels may be a better bet.

With the price of grid electricity going up, and the cost of home-generated solar power going down, the case for investing in PV panels has never been better. In fact, it's so good that the savings may be higher than what you could make with a typical basket of stocks, a new report finds. The N.C. Clean Energy Technology Center at North Carolina State University compared 25-year returns from Standard & Poor's 500 stock index with projected returns from a home solar system. In 46 of 50 cities, it found that solar came out ahead.

The analysis says solar power is frequently cheaper than grid electricity. "Of the single-family homeowners in America's 50 largest cities, we estimate that 9.1 million already live in a city where solar costs less than their current utility rates if they bought a PV system outright--and nearly 21 million (93% of all estimated single-family homeowners in those cities) do if low-cost financing is available," the report says. (Low-cost financing means interest rates of 5% on a 25-year lease.)

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that the median cost of residential solar has gone from about $12 a watt in 1998 to about $4.70 a watt in 2013. The calculation is based on the cost of a solar system over its lifetime, adjusted for inflation, and a typical household's power usage.

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