You just don't get it do you? I did it to "insulate" myself from future costs of energy for my home and vehicles.
I understand that. But explaining your motivations also isn't much of an argument for it as a general action. Also its an expensive way to insulate yourself from the costs. To do the same others would have to either spend a lot, and reduce their electricity needs by a lot, or they would have to spend even more, if they where not going to reduce their use of electricity.
Its also something that almost definitely isn't going to pay off in purely dollar and cents terms. I say that not only because I don't think fossil fuels will go up by as much or as fast as you seem to think they will, but because even if they do, people can go ahead and make the same sort of decision then. Your jumping in early, paying more (assuming costs are going to go down on alternatives, and if they aren't than its even less likely to make sense for others), and paying before we really find out what's going to happen to prices for electricity from the grid, of fuel for cars.
If such an investment was no or never, than you would be measurably reducing your risk, and for the very risk averse or those who are very pessimistic about other ideas for energy, than it might make sense, but its not "now or never", since people can always do the same thing once prices actually have increased by a lot.
Keep paying "The Man".
The whole concept of "the man", in the context of voluntary transactions seems rather silly to me.
Also I'm paying a lot less than if I tried to generate the electricity myself (whether I used fossil fuels or photovoltaics), or if I bought an electric car. (Well there is no electric car comparable to mine. The Tesla has better performance but costs a lot more. Others still cost more, and have much worse performance. And if I cared about the cost of gas that much I could always replace it with an econobox, and be ahead for the life of the car, compared to electrics, even if gasoline goes to $20/gallon (of course I'd give up performance, but I could keep my car, and buy an econobox and still pay less than it would cost for any real car electric, or plug-in hybrid).
I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm sure you get a lot of satisfaction from being mostly off the grid*, and that satisfaction can be worth a lot. In some ways from a certain perspective, and with certain assumptions, it makes some distant sort of sense, and in any case if your enjoy your situation that can be enough for it to make sense, if you can easily afford it. Its what you want, you go out and get it, nothing wrong with that.
* You can't be entirely off if you sell back to the grid, but your at least not grid-dependent if what you say is true, OTOH that selling back to the grid, at mandated prices is just another subsidy for you, which is one more reason for me to think the idea is not a good one. |
