Solar Panels alone? Or Solar Panels plus a Home Battery? Or even a Home Battery alone?
Which would lower your carbon footprint the most?
This non-technical guide delves into exactly this question - read the posts in order to examine the issues.
An overview of the case that home batteries are just as important as solar panels in terms of lowering our collective carbon footprint.
A brief look at what it will take to take to make most of our electricity from renewable sources.
My name is Casey Moothart. I am a Primary Care Physician, husband, and father of two living in Cincinnati, Ohio. I have no connection to any electric industry nor governmental agency. I do not have any significant relationship with anyone in the Electrical Utilities, nor in the Solar Panel or Home Battery Industries. So why do I have this website? At a certain point my wife and I decided to call Cincinnati home for the long haul and started to look into building a new home. We were fortunate enough to find an ideal lot and build a very energy efficient LEED Gold home, which was completed in 2015. We really went for it in terms of energy efficiency, and initially my idea was to go "net zero." But then...
Inspired in part by Michael Pollan's "Ominvore's Dilemma," I started trying to trace Cincinnati's electricity back to its sources. With a little research I found that approximately 68% of my region's electricity was coming from coal. So I read up about the kind of coal plants we have in the area, learning that they are sluggish to respond to peaks or valleys in demand, taking hours or even days to change their "speed." So that lead me to wonder... if we were to put solar panels on our roof here in Cincinnati, how much CO2 would we actually be offsetting during the time that the panels are making electricity? And would a home battery be better? This website is an attempt to address these questions. Contact: casey.moothart@gmail.com
"To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first take responsibility for our personal carbon footprints" -- Confucius (lightly revised, but no less pertinent)
