Space Age Energy in the Suburbs?
Feb. 20th, 2007 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerSolar energy for the price of your regular utility bill?
-Ignoring for the moment the fact that this is a startup that may or may not be able to do what they promise,
-Understanding that if I actually put in my own solar panels, it would be free to get energy and I wouldn't be kind-of-arbitrarily paying the price my local utility charges,
-Acknowledging that this means I'm paying for the energy my house makes, semi-unrelated to the amount of energy I end up using,
-And recognizing that this would probably make my house uglier and harder to sell to a mainstream family, and not in fact save me money, just make me feel a little better about my footprint on the environment...
....am I missing something else, or does this look like it might be worth doing?
-Ignoring for the moment the fact that this is a startup that may or may not be able to do what they promise,
-Understanding that if I actually put in my own solar panels, it would be free to get energy and I wouldn't be kind-of-arbitrarily paying the price my local utility charges,
-Acknowledging that this means I'm paying for the energy my house makes, semi-unrelated to the amount of energy I end up using,
-And recognizing that this would probably make my house uglier and harder to sell to a mainstream family, and not in fact save me money, just make me feel a little better about my footprint on the environment...
....am I missing something else, or does this look like it might be worth doing?
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 03:02 am (UTC)Solar is ALWAYS more expensive than landline with current technology. The only reason to use solar power is if your residence is so far from a current electrical line that it's more cost effective to generate energy yoursefl than to pay to have a line strung through several miles of mountains, swamps, and forests. Ok, speaking of mountains, swamps, and forests, you might use solar "on principle" out of some earth-loving treehugging hippie reasoning or something.
You don't get a CREDIT AGAINST FUTURE CONSUMPTION if you produce more than you consume... you get MONEY. At whatever the rate is that you're paying now, I believe. I pay 6 cents per kwh, that means I'd get 6 cents per kwh I produced over and above what I consume. At that rate, modern panels have a pay-for-themselves time of a few years.
It looks like what this company's game is is that they get YOU to pay for the panels (via the rental fees) and THEY get the money from the electricity fed back into the system, cloaking the entire affair in a green, vegetarian, I-recycle-everything sort of way. When you've doen this for a few years, you will have paid for the panels (which are good for 20+ years), which are still the property of the company, and the company has gotten the benefit of using your roof as a generation location for the electricity they sell.
Your electricity is prolly hydroelectric anyway, so even that is a questionable reason for doing this.
(I'm gonna buy a 50 watt panel of my own to keep my radios and deep cycle battery charged... solar has its uses).
no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 03:17 am (UTC)So if I put in panels myself, and they produced more than I used, my utility company would pay for the energy? The biggest risk to me there is that I'm unlikely to be in this house for 20+ years.
My current energy is supposedly wind-based, for which I pay a kind of small random green tax.