Thanks for the thread, Live and Learn.

as more people get off the grid, not to mention the environment.

if you want to pay a huge amount of money, yes, you can get off the grid, but that means you will have to maintain the batteries yourself. Not as easy as it sounds. But if you are up for it, go for it.

Generally speaking, getting solar panels that are tied into the grid cost about half of what it costs to "go off the grid"

I have panels that are tied into the grid. I haven't paid a dime for my electricity for almost 2 years now.

what I don't use, goes back into the system and is used by my immediate neighbors.

they want to sell not buy
Their investment in dirty technologies will crash if everyone goes clean/renewable. They have a lot invested and need to pay for that nuclear reactor and that coal fired smoke stack. They need to refinance, shut down the reactors and dirty burning stuff but they are fight us every step of the way. We need to stop them from changing the laws that require them to take your excess.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

give it another shot and perhaps I will see your point.

on edit: I think I see what you are saying. I have to ask you one simple question: do you have solar?

I live in a medium-rise condo that is 40+ years old building and we are looking to retrofit and are finding that no one in the area has much help to give us.

The power companies want to slow solar and other renewables down because they have a huge investment in oil, gas, coal and nuclear power. When we all want to install wind, solar or hydrogen they see that as a threat to their business model. Sorry if I was not totally clear in my first response. Some states are now passing legislation that says that monopoly power companies don't have to buy your excess power, forcing home owners to maintain their own batteries and go off the grid.

But the utility companies never really "paid for that" nuke plant. Rather the Fed government offered up monies for their R & D, and rate payers like you and me ended up reimbursing them for whatever putting the plants online cost them.

And of course, for decades now, the nuke industry has been relieved of any liability expenses should one of their plants ever Fukushima us into oblivion.

they will buy back. I know going off the grid is prohibitively expensive right now but the point of the article is that it won't be in the not to distant future.

Everybody knows solar energy is just a dumb, "hippy-dippy" pipedream on acid that
will never amount to anything and will just waste taxpayers' money.

And we should all live in trees and play the flute, too.

Energy from the sun----Preposterous!!!!

Go solar.

Imposed tariffs on solar panels, to "punish" them for subsiding the solar industry in china.

He did this ostensively to protect the US solar industry.

Those are government owned though

and all the houses were "winking" at me. At first I didn't get it, than it hit me, every damn house has solar panels..

We decided to protect central production of energy. They decided to give distributive production a go.

Why we have massive even green developments, which are not effect free, even if some here like to live that fantasy. They have utilities in trouble and a few green large developments. There are places in the country where this German route is quite obvious, the Southwest....but what is Sempra energy to do?

There are places, like the NorthEast, where more centralized energy production makes sense, due to local weather patterns.

Truth be told, it is a basket to replace fossil fuels. But we have, at a policy level, decided to protect very large private utilities. The first step in my mind...is nationalizing those utilities and removing them from the for profit model at a policy level. Then we need a slew of changes and review of green sites where fraud seems to have happened, and prosecution if such is the case. Mind you, the speed these plants have been put in place, a small amount of fraud is quite likely in the overall picture. To pull numbers out of my behind, 10% is not that crazy once you start looking at energy companies. That number is just an educated guess by the way.

Also centralized power production is a strategic national defense blunder in my view. A few points of failure, and you can bring the economy to it's feet. See the great lights out we have had in the East and South west.

It would also allow us to do something no private company with a quarterly report will do if they can avoid it: underground lines. It is extremely expensive at the front end of it. Even if the savings are there, justifying the trillions to underground the wires ain't gonna happen.

Thanks for the link.. The solutions are out there, we need to stop stifling innovation.

this as a country instead of things like "star Wars" or nuclear bombs.