Slashdot Mirror
Running Your Electric Meter Backwards
kog777 writes to note a story in International Business Times about "net metering," or generating your own power without disconnecting from the grid. Forty states have laws allowing individuals to do this, and many of them offer subsidies and tax breaks for people who do. From the article: "When the sun shines bright on their home in New York's Hudson Valley, John and Anna Bagnall live out a homeowner's fantasy. Their electricity meter runs backward. Solar panels on their barn roof can often provide enough for all their electricity needs. Sometimes — and this is the best part — their solar setup actually pushes power back into the system."
One big issue is: how long will they take to pay themselves off? They aren't cheap. All you have done is pre-paid your electricity for the next 5-10 years (however long they end up paying themselves off over), and that is only on the sunny days. Unless you have energy storage (maybe you can fill the roof with lead acid batteries...), on every bad day you'll be draining juice back from the electricty company, so the time its taking to pay itself off is just getting longer...
In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats.. most people don't give a rats ass, and so solar panel prices will stay up. Maybe the goverment should make it mandatory that new buildings have solar panels installed (does that already exist)? Here in Aus, new buildings have to have solar powered heating and sunlights.. but then again, we live in an oven of a country..
The forces of nature. That is, physics and economics. Physics because it limits the efficiency of storing energy in batteries to impractical amounts, economics because batteries that size are frickin' expensive.
>>
All you have done is pre-paid your electricity for the next 5-10 years
>>
60 months worth of your electric bill, call it an average of $100 a month, is $6,000. If you "pre-pay" that by rolling it into your home loan ("Build me a house and make sure it has a pool and solar power!"), it will end up costing you more (rough guesstimate is $7,300). If instead of buying photovoltaic cells you buy shares in your local electric company, you'll get about $120 to $240 a year in dividends (power companies often have a 2-4% yield), and your while your photovoltaic cells depreciate every year and require maintenance, your shares will probably appreciate and you'll never have to patch them up. (You'll have to pay the electric company for those 10 months of the year that dividends don't... then again, you get the security of knowing you'll never have to pay them extra just because its cloudy.) When you move in 15 years, rather than uninstalling or replacing them at your expense, you can just sell them and take your profits.
>>
In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats
>>
I don't give a rat's hindquarters for Green theology but don't mind conservation. Thats why I buy shares in companies which own nuclear power plants. Its cleaner than solar and has economies of scale. Yes, I said cleaner than scale: the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste. I don't invest in solar companies because at the moment they still haven't licked the whole "Making our products net energy producers" problem and until they do my only hope to profit from that investment would be hoping solar's massive government subsidies continue and expand. While I think that is certainly possible, I feel that if the current or a future administration wants to dump a couple billion into the solar industry, my nukes will get a similar largesse.
Sidenote: If you have an aversion to nuclear power, I understand and accept that. I don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent and we can both agree that our separate faiths are mutually harmless. One piece of advice though. Spend your money on a decent job of insulating your house -- you'll require less kwh from the grid, and on a per-dollar basis you'll save more kwh spending on insulation (and installation) than you will on buying solar power.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well, I'll be the greenie socialist then.
The reason taxes work when they do is that some things fall under the "common good". If we just asked everyone to pay only for services that benefit them personally, we'd have only private schools, few medicines, and likely no roads or traffic lights.
Some things just only work if everyone is forced to pay a bit for them. But look at the benefits in this case. If the government takes some of your tax money to pay all the people who want to make their own power, everyone benefits through lower load on power stations, decreased demand for power (which lowers prices!), decreased pollution and demand for foreign oil.
Obvious win-win.
Perhaps you're one of those that call taxes "stealing" and yet get anal when someone calls copyright infringment "stealing" ? It's a common thing.
That might be because taxation actually removes our money from our own use, whereas duplicating digital data does nothing of the sort?
You're right though, it's not stealing. "Taking money/possessions from a victim under threat of violence" Sounds more like armed robbery.