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..
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..
Not every power company allows this sadly and some just straight up charge static rates
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.