As a Texan I agree! Now, I love the idea of renewables, but not as any sort of main power source. I’d be ok if more homeowners used renewables and there were some credits for that. Our grid needs more resilience tho, less reliance on renewables.
You can cut your power bill pretty decently by building your own solar panels from broken cells (cosmetic flaws, but they still function) that are dirt cheap on ebay, and a wind turbine on the roof as backup.
You can hook it all up to your house and the power grid, and they'll pay you for the excess power you generate. Realistically you're not going to make any money off of it, but you can try to at least pay off or greatly reduce your own power bill.
You set it up so basically you're using your solar/wind primarily, but whenever it's not adequate your house just automatically uses the regular power you always had from the grid.
If I had a house and yard I'd totally be doing this. The solar panels are basically just a weekend project. Really not difficult to put together. You'll need batteries, but people are giving away old boat and car batteries all the time. Make a big bank of those on the side of your house.. like ten or twenty old batteries... they'll store enough.
Keep the regular grid, reduce the load on your own.... why doesn't every house do this? Why doesn't the government give everyone a stimulus check to pay for such things if they care about the environment so much? How about a Green New Deal where we just pay everyone to put up some solar panels in their yard or on their roof? You don't do anything ridiculous like make that the primary power source, but if everyone had a few solar panels, how much would that reduce the grid power usage? Grid is still there, just to be clear... nobody's taking that away..
You can buy complete panels for less than a dollar a watt. They are already dirt cheap.
You can invest in a diy system for about 10k for an average house and you will never have another electric bill.
They charge about 20 to install.
I priced them already.
Batteries are a different story. Life of batteries are pretty short except for “Edison” batteries and those are really expensive and heavy as shit. No “free shipping” on those
And you are correct about the wind as back up. We just went through more than a week with no power. Need a gigantic battery bank to run a house for a week without recharge.
You need a secondary backup. Always have a gas engine ready to roll out and plug in. A 3k - 5k genset is fairly inexpensive and most come with an RV plug which you can setup as an input to your house's electric system.
Someone has to pay for infrastructure. The grid tie in idea is basically trying to use the grid as a battery for free. No big if a couple parasites try it, catastrophic if solar becomes popular in an area.
Wind, solar and electric vehicles arent even useful as a bridge away from fossil fuels and towards clean renewable energy.
Mining of rare earths is as dirty a process as any on earth. When the panels and turbines and batteries reach the end of their lifetimes in 20 years or less, none of the parts are reusable or recyclable. Look for images of the massive landfills used to bury the composite components. Components that will sit there for eternity because they do not biodegrade. Electric vehicles arent carbon free as they would like you to believe, it actually makes them coal powered vehicles.
Then consider the massive outlays of land that are stripped barren for use as wind farms and the wildlife and their habitat that is destroyed.
Its all a scam to enrich them and their cronies by stealing from the taxpayer and to provide them with the means to enslave us. Renewables, as they now present themselves, are an ecological disaster.
As near as I can tell, geothermal is the only proper renewal energy source, a reliable and 24/7 base-load type facility. Until fusion power from seawater deuterium or regular old hydrogen becomes safe & viable in a commercial sense.
Wind is inconstant and as we have seen, the damn things freeze up and become useless when they are needed most.
Solar is also inconstant for similar reasons. Snow dumps and precipitation and cloud..
Hydro is no good when its more important to have drinking water rather than spending that elevated water store on power. And is still unreliable as it depends too much on precipitation.
On the other hand, the earths core heat is infinite in any sense of human consumption, at least when it comes to tapping it for the next million years. Even if you dumped all the words oceans and ice into it all at once in one place, it wouldn't really do much to deplete the energy. It doesn't go away at night, or in hurricanes, or when there is too little or too much rain or cloud. Pump water down, receive hot and high velocity steam up, run through turbines for power and vent it wherever.. pumps that handle water and standard turbines are about as simple as a power plant can get.
Who said oil & gas are not renewable? The so-called "fossil fuels" are renewable. The Russians have proven that. This whole "renewable" canard is just gaslighting by the Left.
As a Texan I agree! Now, I love the idea of renewables, but not as any sort of main power source. I’d be ok if more homeowners used renewables and there were some credits for that. Our grid needs more resilience tho, less reliance on renewables.
You can cut your power bill pretty decently by building your own solar panels from broken cells (cosmetic flaws, but they still function) that are dirt cheap on ebay, and a wind turbine on the roof as backup.
You can hook it all up to your house and the power grid, and they'll pay you for the excess power you generate. Realistically you're not going to make any money off of it, but you can try to at least pay off or greatly reduce your own power bill.
You set it up so basically you're using your solar/wind primarily, but whenever it's not adequate your house just automatically uses the regular power you always had from the grid.
If I had a house and yard I'd totally be doing this. The solar panels are basically just a weekend project. Really not difficult to put together. You'll need batteries, but people are giving away old boat and car batteries all the time. Make a big bank of those on the side of your house.. like ten or twenty old batteries... they'll store enough.
Keep the regular grid, reduce the load on your own.... why doesn't every house do this? Why doesn't the government give everyone a stimulus check to pay for such things if they care about the environment so much? How about a Green New Deal where we just pay everyone to put up some solar panels in their yard or on their roof? You don't do anything ridiculous like make that the primary power source, but if everyone had a few solar panels, how much would that reduce the grid power usage? Grid is still there, just to be clear... nobody's taking that away..
You can buy complete panels for less than a dollar a watt. They are already dirt cheap. You can invest in a diy system for about 10k for an average house and you will never have another electric bill. They charge about 20 to install.
I priced them already.
Batteries are a different story. Life of batteries are pretty short except for “Edison” batteries and those are really expensive and heavy as shit. No “free shipping” on those
And you are correct about the wind as back up. We just went through more than a week with no power. Need a gigantic battery bank to run a house for a week without recharge.
You need a secondary backup. Always have a gas engine ready to roll out and plug in. A 3k - 5k genset is fairly inexpensive and most come with an RV plug which you can setup as an input to your house's electric system.
Not every power company allows this sadly and some just straight up charge static rates
Someone has to pay for infrastructure. The grid tie in idea is basically trying to use the grid as a battery for free. No big if a couple parasites try it, catastrophic if solar becomes popular in an area.
Many charge you just based on your profiled usage, not even your actual usage. This is one of the reasons for the move to smart meters.
Even that changes if you are dubbed a high user.
I know I'm dubbed a high user too which is really annoying since people are doing so much shit in their homes nowadays on my street.
No way to change that without basically cutting everything either.
Government is giving a 26% tax credit for solar already.
I wish I could. My HOA bans solar panels.
Just looked for broken panels on ebay and couldn’t find any. Do you have a link or a good search string to use?
Broken cells actually, not panels. You need to wire them together to make a panel yourself, but it's easy.
Wind, solar and electric vehicles arent even useful as a bridge away from fossil fuels and towards clean renewable energy.
Mining of rare earths is as dirty a process as any on earth. When the panels and turbines and batteries reach the end of their lifetimes in 20 years or less, none of the parts are reusable or recyclable. Look for images of the massive landfills used to bury the composite components. Components that will sit there for eternity because they do not biodegrade. Electric vehicles arent carbon free as they would like you to believe, it actually makes them coal powered vehicles.
Then consider the massive outlays of land that are stripped barren for use as wind farms and the wildlife and their habitat that is destroyed.
Its all a scam to enrich them and their cronies by stealing from the taxpayer and to provide them with the means to enslave us. Renewables, as they now present themselves, are an ecological disaster.
Have you ever seen a wind farm and how ignorant was “stripped bare”
Reminder that nuclear power exists and is the only viable solution to energy requirements, yet that politicians are ignoring it for some reason.
As near as I can tell, geothermal is the only proper renewal energy source, a reliable and 24/7 base-load type facility. Until fusion power from seawater deuterium or regular old hydrogen becomes safe & viable in a commercial sense.
Wind is inconstant and as we have seen, the damn things freeze up and become useless when they are needed most.
Solar is also inconstant for similar reasons. Snow dumps and precipitation and cloud..
Hydro is no good when its more important to have drinking water rather than spending that elevated water store on power. And is still unreliable as it depends too much on precipitation.
On the other hand, the earths core heat is infinite in any sense of human consumption, at least when it comes to tapping it for the next million years. Even if you dumped all the words oceans and ice into it all at once in one place, it wouldn't really do much to deplete the energy. It doesn't go away at night, or in hurricanes, or when there is too little or too much rain or cloud. Pump water down, receive hot and high velocity steam up, run through turbines for power and vent it wherever.. pumps that handle water and standard turbines are about as simple as a power plant can get.
Nope, nuclear is just as good. But yeah, ocean power and geothermal are indeed great sources of power.
Do you know the source of that heat in the earth? You might be surprised that you are advocating for natural fission power.
Who said oil & gas are not renewable? The so-called "fossil fuels" are renewable. The Russians have proven that. This whole "renewable" canard is just gaslighting by the Left.