Thinking about the future…
August 20th, 2006I was thinking (after reading a couple sites, including Tesla Motors here : http://www.teslamotors.com).
Wouldn’t it be grand to have wind and solar generation on every house in the United States? Imagine all of that electricity generated on top of each and every house. Some people might use more, some might use less. If they use more than they make, they pull some off the conventional grid, if they make more than they use, they push electricity out onto the grid.
Then, imagine pulling up in a 100% electric vehicle. If you are like most people, 99% of your driving starts and ends at your house, and is less than a 100 mile round trip. Each and every one of those trips would be free, if your car was also being recharged off of your renewable energy. Free, and pollution free.
What is the cost of this far-out and so strange concept? Not a hell of a lot. For $20-30,000, you can have a decent sized renewable generation system installed on your house. Sounds like a bit? Maybe not so much considering how much houses cost these days…and think of it this way: each month that extra money on your morgatge is going to pay for your own personal power company, not being sent away to some faceless giant burning hundreds of millions of tons of coal every year to keep your TV and Interwebs running…reduced pollution, and you are subsidizing yourself and the future of the rest of the world.
Local generation is vastly more efficent than the current setup where power is transmitted hundreds of miles all over the country. We’ll always have a need for the old power plants, but it should be a signifigantly reduced need and reduced pollution. Industry will always use more power than it could generate on its footprint, but that is definately not the case with your average US household.
The future starts today. Actually, it started yesterday, and has been for a very long time. Don’t wait to tomorrow to save the future, it is here before you realize it…
If I ever build a house, you’ll be damn sure that it is going to have a signifigant renewable generation capability.
Some quick math: I pay around $60 a month for electricity. If it stays roughly the same for the next 30 years, I’ll have paid $21,000 to the electric company to keep the lights on. And have nothing to show for it at the end of those 30 years. Or, I could put on a renewable system that costs roughtly the same amount, help support manufacturers who make such equipment, instantly reduce the amount of coal, oil and gas which is being burnt (reducing pollution) and maybe even make a couple bucks pushing my extra electricity back onto the grid (possible with conservation and a large renewable generation capacity).
Oh, and at the end of the 30 years? Free electricity baby…
Every year the technology gets cheaper, more advanced, more efficent and more prevalent. This is only possible by people now actually purchasing and using the stuff. Hopefully it will be much like computers, and after a decade or two it will go from a luxury item to an inexpensive commodity. Can’t happen fast enough, in my opinion!
If you are interested in learning more, may I recommend :
http://homepower.org
http://investigate.conservation.org/xp/IB/savingbiodiversity/impact_quiz.xml
http://www.conservation.org/xp/CIWEB/programs/climatechange/carboncalculator.xml
Your points are very loud and clear.
In my current situation I could not do any of this. But, lets “think about the future”.
When the day comes that I find myself in the market for a house I could 100% find myself thinking about doing this. Just from reading what you had to say, my interest is peaked. I will check out those links, but allow me to wonder:
How much cost would be involved in converting a house to be self sufficient? I do not see me being able to buy a house from scratch (building) so the change over would have to occur.
All this makes me think of that house along 220 with all those solar panels.
It is absolutely possible to retrofit a house with local generation equipment. Sometimes it is slightly more difficult because there is no where to put the storage batteries, for example. Also, an existing house might not be really built with efficency in mind: the builder might have said “R-18 is fine for the attic” or “we don’t really need to insulate the hot water pipes!”, etc etc etc. Then, even though you are generating a lot of power, a lot is being lost a little at a time.
Take lighting for example. Compact flourescents are very inexpensive to run compared to incandensents, and last longer too. You’d absolutely NEED your lighting to be efficent, as it sucks a lot of power. Local generation is expensive, efficency is less so.
Homepower.org is more geared towards retrofitting, has a lot of info about projects large and small. Even if you aren’t 100% off the grid, any power you do generate is going to cut something off your electric bill…but that won’t make any difference if you have your hot water heater cranked to 160′F and don’t have any additional insulation on it!
homepower.org has some just getting started articles in their lower left corner, a good read for some of the basic ideas!
Great blog entry! I hope lots of people read it and start thinking about what they can do to help preserve the environment and make it a livable world for future generations to come.
Well done.
I hope we can someday build our dream house, green house :)