But when I spoke to other people who had put solar energy on their roofs, most of them had the exact same epiphany I had: They realized they had a lot more juice than they expected. And it had the same emotional effect: from feeling guilty and weird to the devilish worry.
Take the case of Christopher Coleman. A digital artist who teaches at the University of Denver, he uses massive amounts of power — sometimes turning a computer completely over for a day and a half to display a single piece of digital art. “It For real burns the GPU. My computer is on 24/7,” he says. If he were to rely solely on sources that produce greenhouse gases, he would be nervous about this energy requirement. But his household’s solar panel is so prolific that it covers his entire expenses.
“Goods a lot more lax and comfortable,” he says.
I polled my Twitter followers asking if I residential solar panels someone’s relationship with their energy consumption had changed. The majority said it had given them a similar sensation of abundance – and many joked about blowing up the air conditioning without thinking about it.
“We have 90-degree days, now and I walk in and the house is cool and I smile and I go ‘I don’t care,'” says Sandy Glatt, another Denver resident.
Many also told me that they are shifting their energy use to daytime hours so that they can use all those photons themselves instead of handing them over to the grid (where, unfortunately, we are often scammed by our utilities, who buy our electricity at a cheap price. rate and sell it back to use more expensive). So they charge Teslas and run all their major appliances during the day, installing electric water heaters to generate hot water all day while the sun is shining.
Solar installers typically notice that after a household gets panels, “their energy usage goes up,” said Charlies Collier, a solar installation project manager at Imperial Solar.
Given all the political barriers that renewable energy faces, it may seem strange to talk about their emotional impact.
But emotion drives politics. This is why some renewables advocates are now trying to proclaim – as loudly as they can – that a world powered entirely by renewables would be an overcrowded cornucopia, with fast, sporty cars and comfortable homes.
“It’s the agenda of abundance,” Griffith says. In Electrifyhe argues that a massive rollout of solar, wind and storage mechanisms (including millions of electric cars, twice as many as batteries) would make renewables reliable while at the same time being much cheaper than what we now pay for electricity from fossil fuels.
He’s already glimpsed it in his home country of Australia, where 30 percent of homes have solar power and the arrays cost just under a quarter of what I paid for mine. It could be just as cheap here in the US, Griffith notes, if cities cut red tape (mainly zoning and building codes) and states reformed their rules about liability and grid connection. The price barriers in the US are not labor or materials: “It’s all about regulation,” he says. “It can change quickly if people want it to.”
We should. Because take it from me: it is pleasure.