Let us worship the sun god... the local sun god.

So I finished reading Deep Economy. It's about a lot of things -- well, money and happiness with some global warming thrown in. It makes a compelling case for the basic environmental and psychological sense in creating local economies. I have more than a few thoughts on this, but one that really grabbed me was the idea of making the power grid more like the Internet: decentralized, robust and something that people are familiar with contributing to instead of just consuming. (For larger buildings, one way this makes sense is that excess heat produced in power generation can be used to heat water and air for the building -- much better than letting it go up into the atmosphere unused the way it does in a big, centralized power plant). So cool!

One of the most exciting (if totally obvious) things I could do based on these thoughts is get some solar power going here. We had, last time I looked, 900 square feet of flat roof, with nobody taller than us near to cast shadows, and nothing on it. :) So here's some stuff I just read about tonight:

• NSTAR itself has nothing about solar or distributed energy on its site, even in the FAQ.


• However, this article clearly talks about people who have NStar as a service provider and also have solar panels. Meanwhile, this one talks about NStar even having a standardized application form for such a thing now (it's from 2005, but still).
  
• It's pretty clear we could get sizeable rebates available from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. The example stories I've seen usually show rebate amounts of about 40%; and a system should also raise the condo's selling price.


• From this guide: "Most PV systems produce about 10 watts of power for each square foot of PV module. This means that you can install a small starter system on as little as 50 feet of roof space, or as large as 1,000 square feet for a more powerful system. A typical two kilowatt system will need 200 to 400 square feet of unobstructed area..." We have 900 sq feet (although there's a chimney there somewhere). Looking at our NStar electricity summaries, we burned through 4510 kilowatt-hours in the last year (less two days). So we'd only need a 0.52 kilowatt system!


• We just finished our taxes; looks like if we had done this in 2006, we could have gotten a tax credit of 15% of the cost (including installation) or up to $1000. Also pretty sweet.

See, it's much more fun to own than to rent, precisely because you can think of doing things like this.

Taxachusetts

Ah yes, my favorite part of doing Massachusetts taxes.