Contrasting with Texas, where I have a federal tax credit on solar installation, I have zero incentives from the state, and very limited options for power buy-back.

Rant: I have hundreds of retail electric providers competing for selling me electricity, but only three willing to buy it back, and two of those are really the same company: Green Mountain and NRG. Green Mountain had the best deal, selling and buying power at the same price. If I manage to run negative, then it just goes into a virtual bank account. They'll never actually cut me a check.

Still, despite the decided lack of incentives, a few months ago, we installed solar. We have a 9kW system (36 panels, 250W peak each, and Enphase micro-inverters). I basically just wrote a really big check and now I get cheaper electricity for the next two decades.

Our house is a bit rectangular, with the longer sides facing east and west, so the solar guys decided to have an east-facing bank and a west-facing bank. This means that in the morning, the west-array is in shade and in the afternoon the east-array is in shade. Not exactly optimal, but the best they could do with my house.

What's nice about Enphase is that you get a seriously nerdy web and app experience to see how your roof is doing. They even include an optional public-facing thing (which you can disable if you're concerned with privacy). Here's my house. What that view doesn't show you is that on a cloudless bright day, I'm getting a peak of 4.5kW out of my roof, maybe half of it's rated peak power. When summer rolls around, I hope that number goes higher. Still, my monthly power usage in the winter tends to be in the 600-800kWh range, which is roughly what the solar system is putting out. In the summer, we'll get more light, and we'll be running the air conditioning more, so hopefully those continue to cancel each other out.

Curiously, Enphase uses power-line networking of some sort. You plug a box into your power mains on one end and your Ethernet on the other, and it does everything else.

More nerdy details:

Solar panels are kinda like giant batteries on your roof. Traditional systems just wire them in series, but if you've got a shadow on any one panel, it increases the resistance for the whole damn array. This is supposedly the big benefit for Enphase. Because each panel has its own inverter, a shadow on any one panel (e.g., from an exhaust vent on your roof) will cause only the one panel to produce less.

The only downside of the microinverter business is that Enphase's biggest modules only do something like 255W, versus the 350W panels that you can buy from LG and perhaps some other vendors by now. For my roof, where we've got plenty of space, it's a non-issue, but if you're very limited in your available roof and you decide to go with the bigger wattage panels, then you're not going with Enphase.