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One of the things I love most of all about Solar is it really doesn't matter how incompetent policy makers are.

Irrelevant of what they're doing, you can cover your roof in panels and stick in some storage and forget that a grid even exists.

People spend a lot of time complaining about things they should just ignore.



Of course, that's dependent on permitting, which can fine you or require you to tear everything down on a whim. It also has huge up front capital costs, with battery replacement being additional burdens going forward, and you probably need to change your lifestyle significantly and rework your house structurally to be more power efficient.

Certainly some of the local legislation regarding such permitting is affected by local electric companies wanting to dissuade that. But I would hope that the tides are turning in the direction of easier personal energy independence over the long term.


The problem is wasted potential. Why stop at some arbitrary capacity that may very well change with time? Better to cover the entire roof with solar panels. Use as much as needed and sell the excess energy. Why should people have to deal with energy storage? Let the power companies worry about that. The power grid can act as a backup.

The utilities foresaw this and didn't make net metering available to me. I presume my business model threatens the utilities somehow. They invented a kWh credit system to "pay" people with, and these credits expire every year if unused. Under these conditions, it'd be stupid to produce excess energy since I'd get nothing for it. Even if I were to somehow match production with consumption, I'd still have to pay them for the infrastructure.


Sure, until you have a week of overcast in the winter and suddenly the grid is very much occupying your thoughts.


51/52 ain't bad.

It's a benefit to still being connected to the grid. Though I'm sure you'll find "service fees and taxes" eating up a majority of the power bill you thought you were cutting (e.g. my natural gas bill costs $20 monthly to run @ 0 usage, regardless of only using it for emergency heat for the furnace).

FWIW, Tesla's (crude) Powerwall calculator suggests 3 powerwalls would account for an instance of this with 100% power generation via solar (7 + days backup, it says). Of course I'd hate to see that installation invoice, though.





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