solar power????

[renea]

I was wondering how much sun I could get in Fern Acres. I would love to use as much solar power as I can, but I heard that it is kinda cloudy?

[JWFITZ]

Hi Renea,

I'm in Fern Forest, and have no panels at the moment. Panel prices are at a near all time high due to the fact of a world wide silicon shortage as well as high materials prices for some of the rare earth materials involved in the process. It's probably a good idea to wait a few months before investing in a few.

Yes, it's pretty cloudy up here. Importantly, from November to March it is most all the time.

I've lived on sailboats for the last 15 years where the sole source of electricity aboard was solar. I know the racket pretty well, and you know it better than most when your PV system has no backup whatsoever. I think it's important to understand that while PV panels are appropriate for some applications, marketing them as "ecologically" benign, in most cases, without respect to scale, is very very misleading. It's very likely that over the service lifespan of the system it will NEVER produce the level of power that it took to build it. As such, it's actually less "green" than burning gasoline.

The key isn't technology supplementing current ways of over consumption, the key is efficiency, and living on less. There's a lot of non-renewables involved in the manufacture of "renewables."

[renea]

thanks, I have read about how they are not as "green" as most think. My main goal is to live on less. I would like to use less, but what I do use be solar. Where I live now I use very litte power, just the computer[]. I saw the Rocket Stove that you built and I would love to do something like that with an outdoor kitchen.

[JWFITZ]

The only green answer is living on less. Everything else is a sales pitch.

[Bullwinkle]

"the only green answer is living on less. Everything else is a sales pitch"

well said

[Daniel]

Hello! What do you think they mean by "green"? We can "save the planet" and make a ton of money!

Daniel R Diamond