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My wake-up call was Biden issuing multiple EO's in his first week in office to make it harder to drill for oil and natural gas ... just a few years after Obama's EPA forced my local power utility to close down a coal plant and switch to power fueled by "clean burning natural gas". Basically, the Dims punished us for doing what the Dims forced us to do. Both my power bill and my natural gas bill shot up (power bill because they pass the fuel costs to the customer).

So 3 years ago I project engineered going solar with a small system to play with it and make sure it'd work as well as I researched (it did). So I replaced my 2 nat gas appliances with electric ones (variable speed heat pump with heat strips for the home, and hybrid water heater with a built-in heat pump to warm the 50-gal water tank). I did other, more simpler, energy improvements to the home like caulk sealing cracks, and adding insulation. Since it was time to replace my wife's gas car anyway, I replaced it with an EV. And on the 1-year anniversary of owning solar I crunched the numbers from the telemetry my inverter recorded in 5-minute candles. I then added onto my solar system to the full system I have now. ("Full system" doesn't mean it provides all of my power, but it's as much as I can have to take advantage of economies of scale, without spending on a larger system and running into the law of diminishing returns.)

Last year, 17% of all the power I needed had to be pulled from the grid (83% of my power was homemade). That includes charging the EV to drive it 16K miles on the charging done at home (not counting the other 10K miles we drove it charged away from home). No natural gas bill. Almost no gasoline cost (what little we drive the gas pickup). And small power bills. I do have a loan payment (HELOC) I pay to pay for the solar installation and EV charger installation costs. But that loan payment goes down as the balance is paid down -- unlike energy costs which go up. To date, I've saved $2,900 in my cash flow since my first solar project in May of 2021 (compared to if I was still paying a large power bill + natural gas + gasoline at the pump for all the driving we do). Next year it'll cost me less money (lower HELOC payments) to save even more money (higher energy costs that I avoid). Then the next year, and the next.

You can't replicate this unless you're in a good situation for solar and an EV. And you have to do lots of homework to tweak it for your particular needs to get a good ROI. IMHO it's worth it to wean my wife and me from most of the energy policies of the Dims.