Electric cost going up.. options for renewable ?

[HumanRobot]

the better option would be to just save electricity with those switch off outlets when you go to bed.

 

[rh71]

Saw another thread about this on a local forum. Cloudy and short days like in the winter mean you still need electricity. Someone posted their electric bill and it was still $40+/mo. Of course he had to either pay over $100/mo. to lease or alternatively paid some ridiculous thousands to buy the panels. I never go above $150/mo. in electric except 2 months of the year - last month was $90. It's still not a big enough savings for me to put those ugly things on my roof.

 

[dmcowen674]

I didn't know that. Is that due to children and quality of life assurance? Or..

4-28-2014

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/...utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

The Koch Brothers Attack On Solar Energy



"The NYT writes in an editorial that for the last few months, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, by pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.


'The coal producers' motivation is clear: They see solar and wind energy as a long-term threat to their businesses.

For example, the Arizona Public Service Company, the state's largest utility, funneled large sums through a Koch operative to a nonprofit group that ran an ad claiming net metering would hurt older people on fixed incomes by raising electric rates. The ad tried to link the requirement to President Obama.

Another Koch ad likens the renewable-energy requirement to health care reform, the ultimate insult in that world. 'Like Obamacare, it's another government mandate we can't afford,' the narrator says. 'That line might appeal to Tea Partiers, but it's deliberately misleading,' concludes the editorial.

'This campaign is really about the profits of Koch Carbon and the utilities, which to its organizers is much more important than clean air and the consequences of climate change.'"

 

[rcpratt]

The answer would be *or* you cannot continue to pay 40+ million dollar salaries to utility exec's if you allow the little people to use less of your product.
This Month, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed the "solar surcharge" bill into law on Monday, permitting utilities to charge an extra fee to any customer using distributed power generation, such as rooftop solar or a small wind turbine.

Or, perhaps our grid was never designed for distributed generation, and therefore, it's prudent to be cautious.

Nobody is going to care if you put a bunch of solar panels on your roof. But, you want the ability to pull from the grid when your solar panels aren't generating, I assume. You'd also probably want the ability to sell any excess generation back to the grid. These functions aren't free and are a service provided to you by the utility. Cry me a river.