Tell your neighbors to clean the bird droppings, gum leaves, mould, lichen and salt off their panels. And check for shading because although the installers would have done that when they put up the panels trees grow and only 5% shading can cause a 40% drop in output.
I put in 6kW of panels in 2012 and have recorded their total generated output every few months since installation just to check everything was working properly. The 1st 5 years generated 49 MWh, the 2nd 5years, 46 MWh (possibly assisted by the most vicious drought in living memory during '17 to '19 but that's 94%). The last 12 months gave us 8.4 MWh which is still 86% of the average over the first 5 years after nearly 12 years. We have an advantage living inland that apart from higher ambient temperatures is a better environment for solar panels but 60% after 5 years is ridiculous, they are either faulty or very very dirty.
After nearly 12 years my panels have generated 108 MWh, about half has been used directly saving us (at an average of around 25c kWh) about $13.5K in power bills and the other half fed back to the grid at a generous FIT of 51c kWh paying us $27.5K. Even if we were only on a FIT of 8c kWh that would have been $4.3K. The system cost us $14K back in 2012 but you can install a similar system now for half that. If that is a scam well give me more scams.
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