Slashdot Mirror
Getting the Most Out of Your Green Buck?
batobin asks: "My dad is thinking of installing a solar photovoltaic system on the roof. After tax credits, it'll cost $12,000. In Santa Barbara, where we live, our power company grants credits when the meter runs backwards and saves the credits for 12 months, reducing our monthly power bills year round. If the contractor's math is correct, the amortization period (when our power bill savings equals the installation cost) is about 12 years. With environmental and geo-political concerns in mind, is this the best use of our money? Will reduced consumption translate into cleaner air / less dependence on fossil fuels? What other environmentally proactive investments could be made with 12 grand?"
To illustrate, here's a thought experiment: if every other source of energy quit working, and we had to restart the world economy off of solar PV power, we could round up every PV panel in the world and put them around a big factory in Arizona or the Sahara and start making more PV panels as fast as possible. However, the ring of panels around the factory would slowly and inevitably shrink away -- for each 10 panels that wore out, the factory would have only made 5 or six panels to replace them.
Somewhere a factory is burning even more natural gas or coal because you chose to buy energy-expensive PV instead of having a smaller amount of coal or natural gas burnt closer to your home.
Now, in the US at least some of the silicon and PV production is in the northwest where there is cheap hydroelectric power. So that offsets it a bit.
If you live miles from the city, it's possible that PV makes more sense because of the power lost in transmission.
However, the vast majority of those California tax breaks are being spent to burn more fossil fuel. (Figuring out why the same scientists who claim to believe that human action is causing global warming don't lobby against pointless installation of PV in residential homes is left as an exercise to the reader.)
If you care about saving energy, the best solutions are boring: carefully seal your house, and put an extra 6 inches of insulation in. Don't buy more car than you need.
If you really insist on being on the cutting edge of alternative energy with your own hands, I suggest you build a windmill.
You could buy $12K worth of pollution credits from these guys. This would likely result in a greater net reduction in pollution, but of course you don't get any financial return on investment.
"The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program." - Niven
What are you using so much power for?
Temperature control (heating and cooling) can be better done through passive means, ie: insulation, shading, ventilation, low-e windows.
Use the kiss principle, don't buy electronic gismos for every little thing. Do more manually, the human body is designed to manipulate manual tools. Don't throw away the gifts that all those generations of evolution have given you.
Move to a tiny apartment within walking distance of jobs, schools, restaurants, bars, theaters. Lose the car. Shop less, live more.