In the midst of pointing out how off-the-charts happy Costa Ricans are during his brilliant TED talk on the Happy Planet Index, Statistician Nic Marks casually lets it drop that 99 percent of electricity in Costa Rica comes from renewable energy sources. Wait. What!? Ninety-nine as in one less than one hundred? Did you know that? We must have missed the memo.
Solar industry growth has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of jobs nation-wide, and save homeowners tens of thousands of dollars on electricity bills. That’s why we’re so excited that Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell spoke out on behalf of the economic benefits of solar energy in the Philadelphia Inquirer right on the heels of the launch of our Philadelphia group purchase program!
In a fabulously powerful opinion piece published last week, Governor Rendell demanded that the Pennsylvania legislature increase solar energy’s share of the state’s alternative energy portfolio to six times its current size through House Bill 2405. Now that is something that we at One Block Off the Grid can stand behind.
We know it’s been a hard year Cleveland, but we just can’t bring ourselves to feel sorry for you about the whole LeBron thing. We just calculated how much money homeowners will make by going solar there and we’re totally jealous.
If you live in a neighborhood that has a homeowner’s association, you know that HOAs have a lot of power: they can control your home color, what kinds of plants you have in your yard, what kind of lawn furniture, even how many pets you can own. Some HOAs even say that you can’t have solar panels. We’ve laid out a strategy here for anyone working to get their HOA to change their solar policy. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you live in Ventura County, CA? Do you love energy efficiency and/or saving money? Well you’re in luck because today, Ventura County is one of the best places in the country to install a home solar system. Here’s why:
Under Governor Schwarzenegger’s Million Solar Roofs program, California has set the goal of installing 3,000 MW of new solar-power capacity by 2017. The California Solar Initiative offers Expected Performance-Based Buyout (EPBB) rebates, which offers a one-time incentive based on your solar system’s expected performance for systems under 30kW. CSI rebates are reduced as more homeowners go solar, so the sooner you act, the greater the savings! Be sure to check out the CSI trigger page.
Though renewable energy is growing fast, the U.S. still gets the vast majority of its power from conventional power plants. Most of these are coal-powered, making them a leading cause of smog, climate change, and toxic air emissions that can lead to serious illnesses like childhood asthma. Coal production is followed by nuclear power, natural gas, and hydroelectric power. We’ve taken a look at all the most common electricity sources here using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
We’re launching a brand new group discount on solar in Pittsburgh today, where the state’s lucrative SREC program makes it kind of ridiculous not to go solar. As you can see from the infographic, the incentives combined with the group discount make it cost about as much as a mid-range car, while the earnings back to you would be about $105,000 through avoided electricity bills and the state’s SREC program. It’s a no brainer.
One Block Off the Grid is bringing our rockin’ group solar discounts to Cleveland next week! We’ve heard that Cleveland ROCKS (it is, after all, home to the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame). We’ve also heard that solar power rocks. In our minds, more solar in Cleveland would be about as epic as, say, a Rolling Stones concert on the surface of the sun. Film that, MTV.
The Keystone State has been working hard to make solar power a significant part of its state renewable energy policy. In fact, they’ve implemented an incentive program similar to the one that’s responsible for making New Jersey the hottest solar market in the nation right now.
But while the really juicy policy stuff for solar is all lined up in Pennsylvania, there’s a distinct shortage of actual solar on actual houses in Pennsylvania at the moment [1]. When economists discuss this phenomenon, they say things like, “this creates a scenario beneficial to short-term SREC pricing.” Translation: Pennsylvania homeowners who go solar now stand to make a lot of money for doing so.
We’re not epidemiologists here at One Block Off the Grid, but we do think quite a bit about the social implications of electricity production. Lately we’ve been especially interested in the connections between standard grid power and our health.
Earth’s atmosphere is a complex system. There are tons of different physical, chemical, and biological factors that shape the air around us. As a result, it’s difficult to connect the dots from, say, the emissions of a coal-fired power plant to asthma in the lungs of a kid. This complexity, however, hasn’t stopped several researchers from trying to understand how these things might be connected [4].
