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Originally Posted by BE911SC
Capitalism at its finest! Monetization! Nice try trying to "go off the grid" and lower your energy bill. You're not going to get away without paying. The whole system is propped-up by rates and fees and if you try to cleverly avoid paying them they'll catch up to you and make you pay.
Before you get upset that it's government regulators doing this, they are under intense pressure from traditional energy suppliers to keep solar (and wind) from getting too popular too fast. Ronald Reagan had Jimmy Carter's solar panels removed from the White House roof because Reagan's corporate energy pals/donors told him to. State regulators answer to energy providers, not voters.
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Every looked into the maintenance costs of the white houses solar panels vs the cost of the energy they produced? They didn't make economic sense. At lest they were for water heating rather than electrical generation which at the time was absolutely horrible technology in terms of energy to produce the panels vs energy gotten back from them.(They made sense if you stripped the atmospheric losses and put them on a space ship).
The solar the white house had was running water through conduits that were heated by the sun, it wasn't efficient due to installation reasons, poor exposure, and the panels were painted over for appearance reasons.
While solar water heaters are one of the most effective uses of solar energy(broad wave lengths accepted rather than narrow bands for photo-voltic), the system in the white house had quality problems with the install and implementation. I believe, that several of the panels are in use else ware to this day, although mainly re-used and installed as a publicity stunt, I have no figures on their usefulness today. At least they aren't being wasted. Style was more important to the white house solar than functionality, you weren't allowed to see them. This meant the panels were partially painted for a drop in efficiency. The 3,200lb's of them on the roof also only produced hot water for a few tasks at the white house, and were used for little else.
They were an expense with little actual use relative to cost of production and operation. Had they been installed properly, the story might be different.
They were removed when the roof needed to be resurfaced. It would of been additional expense to put them back up again, and it didn't pan out what they saved vs what it would cost.