Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Solar power
I just reported the monthly electric production from the photovoltaic panels we have on our roof. We got these through a Massachusetts program that provided partial grants to cover installation; the grant money gets disbursed over time as the panels produce electricity.
The grants, plus a state tax credit, raise the whole thing from a bad to a mediocre investment, considered purely from a financial perspective. The payoff period is somewhere in the 15-20 year range, although rising electricity rates might shave a couple of years off that.
But no one who has a grid alternative gets into residential photovoltaics for the money. We did it for a couple of different reasons. We have an ideal roof for it - facing almost due south, with no shade, and pitched at roughly 45 degrees, which is more or less optimal for our latitude. It seemed a shame to waste the location. And we're in a pretty solidly middle class, not-especially-sought-after ZIP code, so it's nice to show that solar isn't just for the Brie-and-Prius suburbs.
And then there's the James Bay Cree.
In New England we get a certain percentage of our electricity (I can't find the figure right now, but I think it's around 5-10%) from a huge hydro-power complex in northern Quebec, that was railroaded through over the objections of the Cree Nation, whose hunting grounds got flooded out of existence, and whose fish are now contaminated with mercury, which concentrates in the lakes created by the dams. Needless to say, it's a way more complicated story than that, but the point is there is a cost to our electricity that doesn't get printed on the bill. Our piddly little solar panels don't undo any of the damage, but in some ways it seemed like the least we could do.
