Net Positive -One Year and 13.1 MWh

Our photovoltaic system has now been in place and operational for one full year and as you can see below, it generated a whopping 13.1 MWhrs of electricity!

As shown in the illustration, this amount of power is equivalent to the energy consumed by 435 typical homes for a single day or the amount of carbon stored by 233 trees.  Even if you could care less about the issues around energy security or climate change, those numbers have to make you think.

To add to the story, we only consumed 7.80 MWhrs (see below) of electricity, giving us a delta of 5.3 MWhrs of positive electricity production that we sent back to the grid.  Actually it probably went to my neighbor's house and his 8,000 Christmas light. I won't bore you with the calculation, but that 5.3 MWhrs was more than enough to offset the energy we consumed in propane to heat our home. So it's official, in my own mind anyway, that our home is net positive.

Our PowerHouse Dynamics eMonitor System

The 7.8 MWhrs we consumed was also over 1.2MWhrs less than we consumed during the same period in 2010. At an average price of $0.11/KWhr, that saved us $132 in electricity. Add that to the 5.3 MWhrs of electricity that we sold back to the power company and it adds up to $715 in my pocket that otherwise wouldn't have been there, and this is before the sale of my renewable energy credits, which at the price I locked in at, adds a few thousand dollars more to the business case per year.

My whole reason for writing this blog is that there is a tremendous business case to be made by investing in renewable energy before you factor in the societal costs associated with other forms of energy.  I agree that the case is often complicated to understand, but that's an excuse! The fact of the matter is that I do not worry about the price of oil rising because people that do not like us block a canal where a large supply of the world's energy originates from.  I'm in control of my own costs and there really isn't a reason why the rest of this country couldn't be in the same boat... pun intended!

I only consider myself a wealthy person in the sense that I am blessed to have a loving family, good friends, and a job that I love.  If my family can do what we did just by adding some panels to our roof and without needing to make any sacrifices what-so-ever, so can others!

This isn't the kind of story you see on the news or read in so-called mainstream publications, which is really a shame.  Energy has been, at least on the surface, so cheap in this country for so long that we lost the motivation to innovate our way out of a problem we couldn't see.  Truth is that we've paid dearly for it and will continue to do so unless we collectively make smarter choices.

Anyway, I'll step down from my soapbox and leave you with something to read (other than this blog), if you want to learn more about alternatives to the same old story.  Check out the book Reinventing Fire.  It lays out the picture of where we could be if we start taking energy security seriously.