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Was the solar panel set worth it?
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In what sense?
I feel it was worth doing. It makes my comfort less dependent upon the government, power company, the weather, terrorists, etc.
Will I ever get my money back in my lifetime? At today's costs, probably not. But it is virtually guaranteed that electricity costs will go up in the future.
Also, the cheapest solution is not always the best. It would be cheapest to dump our household sewage into the local stream or the street gutter. But past experience has shown us that these seemingly cheap solutions usually lead to major problems later. Many of us just choose to ignore the problems being caused by our cheap solutions to obtaining energy and just hope the nasty consequences won't occur in our lifetimes or pretend that nature will somehow clean it up. Nature could clean it up when there were less than 50 million of us. With over 7 billion and counting, things are getting pretty iffy.
I also feel the grid is going to be less reliable in the future. 30 years ago, there was typically about 18 to 20 % margin between electricity demand and supply, both generation and transmission. Now, most areas of the US have less than 10% margin, with some areas, like California, having much less than 5% margin, particularly in transmission. We are becoming more and more vulnerable to upsets in the system, from weather, breakdowns, whatever.