Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

I’ll let my friend Rob Styler, the president of Citizenrē, tell you more about the benefits of solar energy and how his company works.

Ed’s Green Friend: Citizenrē

Is the sun finally rising on solar power?

Way back in 1931, Thomas Edison had a conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. Edison said, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Over the last fifteen years, demand for solar energy has increased by 25 percent a year, while prices have dropped an average of 4 percent per year. But despite growing by record numbers, solar systems still represent only 0.01 percent of worldwide energy needs.

Why is this number so low when solar energy is such a plentiful, clean resource? In the past, solar power has been too expensive and too complicated. To switch to solar, people had to take out a second mortgage, invest their children’s college fund, or sell their second car to come up with the capital. Then, there’s the effort to make it happen—dealing with the installation, maintaining the equipment, getting permits. Who has the time, or the money? Not until solar power can reach parity with utility pricing will more people embrace this option.

Citizenrē has a bold plan to remove all of the traditional barriers to solar power. Our rental offer provides the benefits of solar electricity without the drawbacks: There’s no system to purchase. No installation costs. No maintenance concerns. No permit hassles. No performance worries. And no rate increases for the duration of your rental term.

Like most innovations, the Citizenrē model is so simple, it makes you wonder why no one thought of it before. You simply pay a rental fee that is based on the same rate per kilowatt-hour that you used to pay your utility company, with one big difference: Citizenrē guarantees that your rate per kilowatt-hour will not increase for twenty-five years.

With energy costs of all kinds increasing annually, this peace of mind can also save you money. You produce your own power from the sun and keep the savings every month. We even have a solar savings calculator on our website, www.citizenre.com, that will show exactly how much you can save.

In the past, “going green” usually implied sacrifice. You might feel good about saving the planet, but that good feeling came at a price, as many green products were more expensive than their “dirty” counterparts. With Citizenrē, going green can actually save you money.

State net metering laws make this possible. Through these laws, the grid acts like a huge battery. Your household meter is effectively spinning backward during the day when the sun is shining and forward at night when you pull back power that you have contributed to the grid. These laws were passed because residential energy production is one of the biggest causes of pollution in the United States. For solutions to be sustainable, they need to be simple and make sense on every level, including economic.

Solar power offers energy security, energy independence, no emissions, increased jobs, and economic benefits. Imagine a day when we can power our electric cars from our solar panels and decrease our carbon footprint to the point where each of us can once again tread lightly on the earth.

—Rob Styler

I’m such a big fan of wind power that I’ve owned half a Zond turbine since 1985.

Wind Power

In Chapter 2, I mentioned that a sailboat is probably the most efficient form of transportation there is—because it’s powered solely by the wind. That’s not the only way to put this resource to work; wind can be harnessed to generate electricity and power your home.

Before I put a single solar electric panel on my roof, I was already putting ten homes’ worth of green power into the Southern California energy system, and I’d been doing that since 1985. Not just enough energy for my house, not enough for two, but ten homes’ worth of power.

How did I do that?

By investing in a wind turbine, a portion of a wind farm in Palm Springs, California. Specifically, I own half a Zond, a Danish wind turbine. And that half of a wind turbine has produced enough energy to power ten homes this size—maybe half a home Candy Spelling’s size—since then.

If you put a wind turbine—a high-tech kind of windmill—in the right windy location, you can harness that kinetic energy. So the wind turns the blades on a turbine. Then, in most cases, the turbine spins gears in a gear-box (like a car’s transmission), and the gearbox turns a generator, creating electricity. It’s beautifully simple.

The idea has been around for centuries. Windmills have been used on farms and in rural areas to pump water. The windmill has even become something of a nostalgic symbol of simpler, more bucolic days. Modern windmills can actually bring back some of that bucolic lifestyle. Nobody wants to live next door to a smoke-belching power plant that’s burning coal or crude oil, but wind farms are actually quite attractive.

Wind farms also operate pollution free. They don’t create any harmful emissions that could end up in the air and water, and they don’t use up any natural resources, like coal or oil or natural gas. Wind is abundant and free.

Best of all, wind farms can be every bit as cost effective as a modern coal-burning or natural gas-burning power plant.

When I invested in my wind turbine back in 1985, I was no millionaire. I’m not a millionaire now. But if the people who do have the dough would do what I did—invest in this clean, green power—that would be the end of coal and nuclear. And by the way, that wind turbine has been a good investment, too.

Residential Wind Turbines

So far, we’ve been talking about commercial wind farms,