Going solar . . .


Item in the Times:

When Ed and Paula Antonio moved from a small home in Marine Park, Brooklyn, to a roughly 3,000-square-foot house in Belle Harbor, Queens, they realized that with all that space and a central air-conditioning system, their electricity costs would run much higher. So after intensive research and analysis and the bids of five contractors, they paid $72,000 to install 42 solar panels on their new roof.

Story here. (The story unfortunately does not factor maintenance costs into the equation, which can be considerable but are almost never mentioned. In this specific case, the cost to the homeowners nets out to $10,000, which sounds extremely low, but I'll trust the reporter for discussion purposes.)


Think abut that cost. Even in NYC, the payback (without credits and tax breaks) is . . . impossible to achieve.


While I think individual decentralize solar such as that explored in the article is part of the solution, a much better approach is to replace fossil fuel plants (including natural gas) with centralized solar energy plants, specifically those harvesting energy from space and beaming it to earth.


One such system is the "star" of my next book, The Helios Conspiracy, due out next year. Shameless self-promotion aside, it is possible to solve our energy requirements for a reasonable investment, if we can think slightly out of the box.