I’m an indifferent cook, so I don’t really have a dog in this hunt. But I’d like to continue to have natural gas to run my whole-home generator in emergencies.
For an individual today? Fine. Long-term at scale? It seems silly and prohibitively expensive to maintain a bunch of leaky natural gas infrastructure just for a handful of seldom operated generators.
If solar ever settles into a truly functional technology,
If solar what???
Solar beats the everloving shit out of any other power generation source. Not only that but batteries for solar backup are dropping in price right off a cliff.
If you haven’t looked in the past couple years you really should: If you can afford the initial capital expenditure it’s more than worth it in savings.
I look into it every few years. It doesn’t yet pay for itself, at least for me, and I haven’t yet found a company that I think will be around in 20 years to honor its warranties. I live in an area with hurricanes, so I need to know my equipment can be repaired or replaced in a timely manner. I would dearly love to find a system that lets me kick the power company to the curb, but it’s not quite there yet.
I’m an indifferent cook, so I don’t really have a dog in this hunt. But I’d like to continue to have natural gas to run my whole-home generator in emergencies.
For an individual today? Fine. Long-term at scale? It seems silly and prohibitively expensive to maintain a bunch of leaky natural gas infrastructure just for a handful of seldom operated generators.
Very true. If solar ever settles into a truly functional technology, we won’t need generators
If solar what???
Solar beats the everloving shit out of any other power generation source. Not only that but batteries for solar backup are dropping in price right off a cliff.
If you haven’t looked in the past couple years you really should: If you can afford the initial capital expenditure it’s more than worth it in savings.
I look into it every few years. It doesn’t yet pay for itself, at least for me, and I haven’t yet found a company that I think will be around in 20 years to honor its warranties. I live in an area with hurricanes, so I need to know my equipment can be repaired or replaced in a timely manner. I would dearly love to find a system that lets me kick the power company to the curb, but it’s not quite there yet.
Ah yeah hurricanes definitely become a limiting factor there.
You do get a 30% tax credit though right now if that wasn’t part of your calculus
Yeah. For now I can choose the wind and/or solar option with my power company which I do. Theoretically my power comes 100% from wind at the moment.