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To: Tell It Right

Your electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro and solar/wind in that order.


19 posted on 11/15/2022 10:10:13 AM PST by entropy12 (Food is most popular anxiety drug, exercise is the least popular.)
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To: entropy12
"Your electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro and solar/wind in that order."

Not so. Since I upgraded my solar array and other related equipment at the end of August, literally 91.8% of all the power we consumed came from solar. The other 8.2% came from the grid -- however my power utility generates power. My house (including charging the EV at home) has consumed 3,978.3kWh, pulling only 327.9kWh from the grid because the rest was provided by solar. During the first year I owned solar (but no EV, and for half the year I had 2 natural gas appliances before I converted them to high-efficiency electric ones), the solar provided about 55% of all the power I needed.

It's not for everybody. You have to live in a good place for solar, own your own home, plan to live there for at least 10 years to recoup the costs, etc.

But it's given me a hedge against energy inflation. Basically I've replaced most of my future energy costs (which are unknown what they'll be) with a somewhat fixed known cost (the HELOC payment I pay each month to pay down the HELOC loan I took out to buy the solar equipment last year, do other energy improvements to the house, and add onto the solar equipment this year after studying the data for a year). So if energy costs go up 3% per year per kWh and per gallon of gas and per cubic foot of natural gas (since part of the project was me converting my natural gas appliances to electric), by avoiding most of those costs I save more money next year than I did this year, then more the year after that, then more after that. Of course, if the Dims make energy costs go up a lot faster than a reasonable 3% inflation rate, my savings in future years is even more.

Meanwhile, my costs go down. The cost is the HELOC payment. As the HELOC balance is paid down, my minimum payment goes down too (much like when paying down a credit card balance). So next year it costs me less money than it did this year. Then the next year it costs even less, then even less after that. Basically, think of the HELOC payment as the cost for saving on energy inflation. As the years go by, it costs me less (lower HELOC payments) to save more (the skyrocketing energy costs I'm avoiding).

21 posted on 11/15/2022 10:28:50 AM PST by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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