Please don't call a penalty (piling on) B U T I too am the bearer of sad tidings. I have been studying solar power as in PV systems as well as various passive solar applications in energy efficient architecture since the eighties. Get your hands on "Home Power" magazine. They publish articles on various solar installations. Their advertisers are the folks who you would get your "stuff" from. When it comes to electricity, I think (I don't wanna fight with other posters) that you will be lucky to get a payback on any major solar electric project in much under 10 yrs (if you build to code). In "Home Power" they give schematics, actual parts used, sources for those parts and lessons learned, etc. Many of the projects are carried out because someone has the money and wants to, N O T because it pays. Wind, if you have enough, or water if you are that lucky are both more feasible alternatives. Unfortunately, not everyone has enough of either to generate a meaningful quantity of electricity.
In the desert I get 12-14 amps at 12 volts from the panels on the roof of my camper. This is sufficient to run an evaporative cooler through the heat of the day(5-6 amps). Luckily if the sun shines enough to make it hot then it shines enough to run the cooler. It keeps my 225 AH at 12volt batteries (two Trojan 6 volt golf cart batteries in series) fully charged till sundown even with satelite TV, stereo, or ham radio going much of the day. 225 AH carries us easily through a long winter's night of TV, cards, chatting with other campers, etc. I also have a regular mechanical refrigerated air type A/C on the camper and I could run it for about an hour before the batteries would be dead (if I bought an inverter big enough for the job. If we go into a humid situation then we have to fire up the propane powered generator to get the power for the A/C.
If you were off grid and a great distance from commercial power, then perhaps solar would be cheaper than a long run of wire and the poles to put it on. Even off grid, diesel is probably cheaper than solar (it just isn't green enough for a lot of us). No one likes to hear it but conservation saves much more than trying to build an alternative source. Are you using compact fluorescents in place of filament bulbs. Wanna invest in some technology? Buy LED lights. Last a loooooong time, lots of light for a watt, contribute little heat (in summer lights cost you twice, once to run them and again to run the A/C to remove the heat).
Anyway, unless you have very low relative humidity you aren't going to use solar electricity to air condition and certainly not to heat.
Patrick