Buick and Deere has an excellent point. You can buy 100W solar panels for $75 each, and a "grid tie" inverter for $100. The "grid tie" inverters are "plug and play" and automatically disconnect when line voltage is lost so you don't shock the utility workers when the power goes out. That obviously doesn't help in the event of a power outage, but you can have a backup generator for that. So for $400 you can be up and running with a 400W system. In my snowy, cloudy zip code, at my local 11.7 cents/Kw-hr, that system will pay for itself in about 7 years. A typical house will need a 3600W system, but you can build the system incrementally with the money saved after the first investment.
"Saving" money through solar or wind energy is much easier than "making" money. This is because if you grid-tie, you're essentially selling your own power to yourself at retail rates. However, any excess is sold to the utility, typically at wholesale rates. The utility is legally not allowed to pay more for power it is buying. So if you size your system to provide maybe 80% to 100% of your daytime need, and buy your power at night, you'll *save* money. But if you want to invest in batteries, storage, and over-sized solar arrays to provide *all* your energy needs to go off-grid or stay on-grid and sell some back, then you're in for some big money. Unless you live in prime solar territory like Arizona, it will be very difficult to make this system pay. You might be energy independent, but it will be very expensive.
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Today's Featured Article - Reflections of the Fifties - by "Country" Elliott. I remember rowing up in the 1950�s in a small, rural town in northwestern New Jersey. The closest town to ours was only 3 miles away, and there were seven dairy farms in the areas of these two country towns. We had 5 acres, and because my Dad was a salesman and not a dairy farmer, he let the Bockovens, who owned the Willow Tree Dairy farm most of our land.
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