It is naive to think a house like this will reduce the need for power plants (hydro, dirty, nuclear, or other). Regulations require power companies to buy surplus power from private producers, all well and good. But regulations also require the power company to have enough capacity to provide for the needs of the grid. The owner of a small windmill or mini-hydro dam is not contractually obligated to produce power at any particular time; he can sell power, or not, according to his whim. This means the power company cannot rely on independent micro-plants as part of their obligation to meet consumer demand. Even if every house in the country were "green" like this, power companies would still need the same number of power plants to meet the demand in case Joe Homeowner decided to buy power rather than sell it on a given day.
It's true that an energy-producing house will save fuel, but it won't reduce the need for power plants themselves unless the regulations are changed to make small producers have the same obligations as utility companies.
I learned this from power engineers during a physics club tour of a hydroelectric plant, back when I was in college. I doubt the regulatory environment has changed since then.
It should not be a surprise that when Linux developers try to play "catch up" with Windows' plethora of features, they eventually run into the same pitfalls of instability and bloat. Linux seems to me to be facing a dilemma:
Continue to try to become Windows and always remain 5 years behind M$.
Reject the trap of feature bloat and accept that it means features will remain minimal.
No one complains that Unix utilities like cat and grep are bloated; imagine a similar philosophy but with utilities designed to operate on "rich text" (God how I hate that term) documents, spreadsheets, etc.
What really bothers me is that the world lets M$ (and to a much lesser extent, Apple) define what "ease of use" is. And if "ease of use" means every feature you could ever want all in the same monolithic program, then of course we'll have miserable stability and huge bloat. The way I see it, the alternatives are massive bloat, or rejection by the unwashed masses. Given the choice I would rather be rejected by the masses.
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It is naive to think a house like this will reduce the need for power plants (hydro, dirty, nuclear, or other). Regulations require power companies to buy surplus power from private producers, all well and good. But regulations also require the power company to have enough capacity to provide for the needs of the grid. The owner of a small windmill or mini-hydro dam is not contractually obligated to produce power at any particular time; he can sell power, or not, according to his whim. This means the power company cannot rely on independent micro-plants as part of their obligation to meet consumer demand. Even if every house in the country were "green" like this, power companies would still need the same number of power plants to meet the demand in case Joe Homeowner decided to buy power rather than sell it on a given day.
It's true that an energy-producing house will save fuel, but it won't reduce the need for power plants themselves unless the regulations are changed to make small producers have the same obligations as utility companies.
I learned this from power engineers during a physics club tour of a hydroelectric plant, back when I was in college. I doubt the regulatory environment has changed since then.
It should not be a surprise that when Linux developers try to play "catch up" with Windows' plethora of features, they eventually run into the same pitfalls of instability and bloat. Linux seems to me to be facing a dilemma:
No one complains that Unix utilities like cat and grep are bloated; imagine a similar philosophy but with utilities designed to operate on "rich text" (God how I hate that term) documents, spreadsheets, etc.
What really bothers me is that the world lets M$ (and to a much lesser extent, Apple) define what "ease of use" is. And if "ease of use" means every feature you could ever want all in the same monolithic program, then of course we'll have miserable stability and huge bloat. The way I see it, the alternatives are massive bloat, or rejection by the unwashed masses. Given the choice I would rather be rejected by the masses.