http://www.oksolar.com/roof/ here is an interesting concept i looked at. solar shingles. the only problem i see is hail and keeping the snow off in the winter time. i looked at solar and wind power for my home when i built it. they will save energy but they will not save money. i finally decided to just build a conventional super insulated house with an air source heat pump. my heat and cooling bills average less than $50 per month for a 4000 sq foot ranch house in south dakota, one of the coldest states in the us. you simply can not make the huge investment that solar requires and have it return enough to offset a $50 per month electric heat bill.
It's a personal decision. If it only cost say $1,500 to eliminate the $50 and possibly get a $50 credit per month, I would do it.
Hello canyonman00. It is good to hear solar is moving into the South. It is where it can have a bigger impact than in the north. The Southern states have the sun for longer periods of the year than in the north. I remember buying my first cell phone in the late nineties. The thing was huge and bulky. It had lousy battery life. The reception quality had much to be desired. The per minute rate cost was disastrous. Now a decade later, I have a cell phone that is smaller than the palm of my hand. I can talk 3 days without having to charge it. I have unlimited talk time for the same price as I was paying a decade ago for a lousy handful of minutes. The reception is wonderful. I went hiking to a remote mountain area few weeks ago and I was able to use it. The moral of the story? We should not let oil owned regressive boot-lickers who have no brain of their own destroy this technology. As more individual homes use the technology, more people adopt. More companies will enter this sector. There will be more research and costs Will come down. Instead of giving $60,000 write off on Hummers, we should be giving write offs to home owners who convert their homes to solar. If the goverment started giving write off to existing home owners, the adoption rate for this technology will be exponential. The savings from lower oil imports and new taxes generated by a new business sector will more than offset the tax breaks. We will be free of the oil curse. We will no longer need to spend Trillions in military spending to protect and secure oil reserves worldwide. We will no longer need to support dictators and the hatred against us that this support generates amongst their populations. To top it all off, we will have created millions of new jobs in a new industry. Jobs that can not be outsourced.
The monster can be eaten one bite at a time. I had one of those brick phones. Everyone I knew laughed at me too. They said, "No one will be carrying around cell phones." Now the slim technology is everywhere. I don't even want to begin to talk about what talk time used to cost. If the government gave credits to folks who went to the new technology for homes a lot of things would make the jump. And the job creation would be great also. I'm doing my part!