WP: Living Lightly on the Grid

Mike Tidwell's electric meter was spinning in reverse.

He was standing outside his Takoma Park house watching the metal disk count down. "I'm selling it to Pepco right now," he said one day recently.

Tidwell, an environmental activist concerned with climate change, has outfitted his home with energy-efficient appliances, a corn-burning stove and solar panels. Now, the two-story house sometimes produces more electricity than it needs and sends the surplus to Pepco's distribution system.

Across the Washington area, homeowners alarmed about utility rates and greenhouse gases are seeking to slash their power use or produce their own energy from renewable sources. Among them, Tidwell and a handful of others have succeeded in creating homes that require only minimal energy from power plants and fossil fuels.

Zero carbon homes do not widely exist at the moment but there are some aspiring to a carbon neutral life dotted around, either home to pioneering environmentalists or architects. There is also a development in South London, BedZed, created for the Peabody Trust Housing Association, which has 82 homes designed as zero carbon. The development was finished in 2001/2 but there have problems with its zero carbon status reported since, meaning extra power has had to be used to heat it and provide energy.

A semi-detached house in St Albans, Hertfordshire, has been billed as Britain's greenest house, with wind turbine, a roof covered with grass-like plants to keep heat in and other environmentally friendly measures. However, even this £140,000 project has not made claims to being a zero carbon property
...
In a bold pronouncement, Gordon Brown said that he aimed for all new homes built in ten years time to be zero carbon properties. To achieve this developers will have to buy into the idea in a big way. Problems with achieving this lie in the high cost of building these homes compared to traditional properties, at a time when the high cost of land eats into profits.
...
After releasing only a few cryptic sentences in the Pre-Budget Report last week, the Treasury says that Mr Brown will unveil more details about carbon zero homes in the full budget next year. Until then, don't expect developers to rush to build zero carbon homes, and even after that it is likely that a lot more incentives will be needed to get all new homes on the green track.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/mortgages/article.html?in_article_id=415463&in_page_id=8