Solar Energy for Homes

The cost of completely isolating a house off the grid and being self-powered through solar energy is a pretty expensive endeavor. Some estimates put that cost around the $25,000 point for the average home in the United States. Most people see this as a no-win situation. If your average electric bill is $150 a month then it will take you almost 14 years to recapture this expense and start actual savings, assuming no financing was used in the purchase of the solar system.  There are ways to incorporate renewable energy, homes with solar power, residential wind power and geothermal power just to name three.

So how can we use energy, home solar in a more usable fashion? Maybe we can piecemeal our solar system? The biggest users of electricity in our homes are generally the heating/cooling devices, ovens and hot water heaters. Isolating these items off of the grid would be the quickest way to reduce energy costs. Installing solar systems in a modular fashion may be a less upfront capital expenditure way of moving our house to be energy independent.

One of the major costs associated with a solar system is an energy storage solution, usually batteries. Most of our energy costs for our homes is associated during the day, when the sun is shining. Just increasing our homes energy independence during the daylight hours can also go a long way in reducing our expense output for energy costs. Spending $150 a month for electricity is $1,800 a year and $36,000 over 20 years. Trying to reduce these costs might call for large up front expenditures but doing it in a modular fashion can reduce this pain and at the same time we should see quicker returns, or savings, from our investments.

Waiting for governments to increase solar energy supply will be like holding your breath; it isn’t going to be good for you. If you look at the trends of how long it has taken the United States to switch energy sources (wood to coal to oil) it has taken, in general, 40-50 years each time. Even if we say that we started converting to electric solar power 10 years ago, just to pick a start date, then we still have 30-40 years, historically speaking, before a complete conversion is completed. That is IF we could supply all of our energy needs with solar, which has been argued that we can’t. There are estimates that say that we will only be able to supply about 20% of our energy needs with solar AND wind. Even if the government were to create a really strong initiative to switch our energy supplies over to solar we will still be charged a month by energy providers and this is what we can ultimately move away from by creating an energy independent home.

By increasing the energy independence of our homes we can accomplish several things. The first would be lower energy bills for us as individuals. The second would be lower harmful emissions of local power planets, which inevitably leads to cleaner air and a less polluted atmosphere. The third would be decreasing the amount of money we send out of the United States to purchase oil.  I believe these are some might strong arguments for home solar energy regardless of the upfront costs.  Over the past 10 years or so the costs of a solar energy home have decreased rapidly, though the prices of solar energy homes have not yet met the lower costs of fossil fuel energy prices, yet.

The best thing the government can do in the scenario is to promote, tax incentivize and give grants to companies that start building solar products on our soil. Why? If we change our habits of sending money off shore for oil to spending money in country for solar that can only increase the quality of life of everyone in this country. This creates jobs, which pay salaries, here, which in turns employs installers, maintainers, shippers etc. We keep our money in house instead of sending it out to foreign countries.

I believe that over the next 10-20 years that solar home energy will be common place.  Right now there are whole communities that have a majority of the homes being a solar home within those communities and that it will not be long before those communities expand and increase the number of solar homes within the community.