I've always worked to integrate my "sustainability idea sharing" with my personal and professional life. Sometimes I've been very successful and other times I've been pretty lousy at it (I still drive to gigs a lot and that uses a non-renewable/non-sustainable energy source - oil). By the way, I don't believe that fossil fuels/oil is evil or even bad. It's actually amazing at creating energy and power through combustion, but it's NOT renewable, therefore it's not sustainable in the long-term. Recently, we had a VERY big sustainability success. I installed a
TenkSolar RAIS WAVE Photovoltaic system at my home and digital production studio in beautiful Frog Pond, Alabama. I'd saved money for this over the years and finally "pulled the trigger". It took about a month to get the entire system delivered, installed, patched in, signed off, and tested. The battery backup was a problem at first, but we worked those issues out and it seems to be working just great now. The cool thing is... on sunny days, my new array collects more energy than we use. On those beautiful sunny days, I sell my renewable/green energy back to
Alabama Power Co. They do not pay very well (less than 3 cents...even at peak), but I am generating renewable power and using it and even getting to share some of it with others. Coal (a large source of global energy) is not a renewable power source. Even natural gas (as abundant as it is) is not renewable and its supply is finite. Every time a business or homeowner or consumer makes the choice to go sustainable (ie resources used are renewable or recyclable and its use does not create pollution) we're steering our global economy towards a model that WILL sustain all 7 billion folks on the planet. Today I got to walk the talk just a little bit better. Happy.
5 comments:
Did you really pay for this or did government grants (taxpayer money) come into play?
Alabama offers no grants except for small ones in Madison County where homeowners have made certain energy improvements before installing a photovoltaic system. There is a small Federal tax credit, but this is much lower than all the Government aid oil, gas, and coal producers receive.
Borgy. No taxpayer money was used for this project (other than highways, the internet, and NASA doing the initial PV research in the 1960's and 70's). My greedy little capitalist hands worked and saved all the money 25K to pay for it. At the end of this tax year April 2013 I may get a 30% deduction off the cost of the taxes I owe, (I will receive no cash, just a tax deduction from what I owe the federal governement) but that remains to be seen. I am proud to have worked hard, saved money and put it in a direction that moves the US towards sustainability. The sun provides consistant renewable and clean energy. We just need to collect it.
Borgy. The 30 percent tax deduction is ONLY for the cost of the PV array. I will get 30 percent off the 25K that I spent.
Coal is not only un-sustainable, it is deadly. Most folks remember the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, but few remember a spill eight times worse in 2008. Just before 1:00 AM on December 21st, 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash including arsenic, copper, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and thallium, flowed up to six feet deep through nearby homes. Merry Christmas, everyone! It
Having visited China, I clearly remember the brown sunrises viewed through thick coal dust. As an asthma sufferer, I know how hard it is to breathe air filled with coal dust. I applaud Steve for helping to keep Alabama air and water a little cleaner. I hope lots of other folks follow his lead.
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