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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."
Found your own country, or get over it, whiner.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Let me guess, your from California. The state with the occasional rolling blackouts. Causing companies to go bankrupt by artifically screwing with their bottom line, especially if it's the law is just plain retarded.
You're right of course -- there is no free lunch. And using MY air that I as a dumping ground for the byproducts of getting power your way is no different. Seriously man, fuck you. You really don't have even the slightest concept of how your actions affect others, of how fundamentally interconnected we all are. My kids are more likely to suffer from asthma because of the shit that's dumped into the air by neighbours that are such incredible cowards that they need a scaled-down troop transport vehicle for their daily commute. They're more likely to have serious respiratory problems because you're too much of an idiot to pay for the real cost of your power -- and the real cost of your power includes the medical bills for every child that gets a chronic lung disorder, people who any of the serious problems that arise from never seeing the sun because of smog, the lost revenue from every economically productive lake that is acidified to the point where life can not grow there, the lost revenue from every working forest that is scoured for a strip-mine, etc.
You'll ultimately have to start paying hefty, hefty taxes to pollute the commons, whether directly or indirectly. And you've just got to learn to deal with that. It's not stealing from you, it's making you pay the real costs.
But if you disagree, how about you let me dump my trash on your lawn where you can clean it up? Or how about I just run the vent from generator into one of the windows of your house? Because that's what coal and gas power are doing; they just do it on a distributed scale that affects everyone. Most of those people get absolutely no say in the matter. If I switch to nuclear and drive an electric car, will the state start keeping smog off of my property and out of the air that I breathe? Until they do, YOU FUCKING OWE ME. My lung tissue isn't free -- if anything, you're getting it at a bargain-rate price.