Another factor for those of us living north of Tennessee and east of Oregon: snow. There's gonna be a lot of times where we won't get much out of our solar panels 'cause they're covered in ice and/or snow.
Simply put, it's WAAAAAY too expensive still. It's quite literally 4x more expensive than it needs to be before it even hints at mass market....and hasn't gone down in a decade or more. It's so not worth it up here.
There are two very good sources of power that are renewable and could be worth the coin: windmills and geothermal heating.
We now have tons of farmers pretty close to the big cities up here with wind farms. Get a bunch of them up with all of the wind we have and farmers are getting more out of their wind farms than they are crops, even with all the subsidies.
You can drive just a little north of Brampton, a northern suburb of Toronto, and literally see hundreds of windmills. It's proven, not too expensive, renewable, and has basically a negligible negative impact on the environment. There should be windmills in every street corner in Toronto. You know how much wind goes through that city (imagine if they installed them in Chicago...)? Instead they have just the one privately-owned one by the lake. Why? "They're an eyesore". Are you fucking kidding me? Prissy fucks....
I was at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec in July and there was a concept drawing of newly designed windmills that look sort-of like bubbled-out light posts with curvy blades in the middle. It actually looked good, served a purpose (can double as a light post), and generated power all at the same time. That's the type of shit, along with these road crystals, that we need to explore. The windmills are monitarily viable on a large scale, that's been proven many times over all over the world already. They just need to see if they can bring them down to lamppost size and put them everywhere within a city so the whole city can generate electricity. Particularly the large, coastal cities with tons of wind. Half the large cities in Canada and the US would qualify.
As for geothermal, it's quite expensive but if you put in the full boiler and electricity generator in your house, you could actually get credit for the electricity you put back into the grid (if you could get enough power, that is). But even then it's still got a 10-20 year payback at best. So it's good for the rich with estates and a little more reliable than solar up here, but it's a complimentary solution as opposed to a complete one
I was there on that fateful day, were you?
