In Washington State our Governor Dimsley and his merry band of Democrat thieves have mandated that all of our electric power be “100% carbon neutral by 2030”. They are banning any new natural gas infrastructure. They are also mandating homes that are currently using oil, natural gas or propane for heat to switch to electricity. And of course coal will be banned completely.
Solar of course is one of their favorite “alternative energy solutions” despite the fact that we have approximately a quarter of the solar potential than places like southern Arizona where you live. Because of nearly constant drizzle and rain 8 months out of the year in Western Washington, failures from corrosion, mold, algae, fungus, moss, and other moisture related issues assure failure before the projected life spans of these systems. This means that even heavily subsidized solar systems have no chance of ever penciling out in this area.
My wife and I live in the foot hills and typically have several power outages a year due to wind storms causing trees to knock down power lines. Often the power is out for days and sometimes weeks. Fortunately, we have natural gas and we along with most of our neighbors have generators that are hooked to our gas lines. This means that the inconvenience and expense of having the power out for extended periods is far less.
Like you... this experience helps to give us a better perspective and understanding of our actual power usage patterns and what it takes to live our lives in a normal way given the limitations power generated at home. Most people do not have a clue.
We have friends who live completely off the grid all of the time. Most started out sinking small fortunes into huge solar systems with battery backup that they thought by the specifications would provide them with enough electricity to live their lives in a completely normal way. Sadly most discovered the hard way that solar in this area does not live up to the hype. Despite huge solar arrays in some cases... almost every one that I know living off the grid has a backup generator hooked to a large propane tank that they use daily to charge their banks of batteries. The one exception is a guy who charges his Electric Vehicle for free every day at his government job. At night he uses his Electric Vehicle battery to top off his solar system's backup batteries. He does not believe this is theft; he brags about it, but not to his supervisors.
The authorities make it sound like our area has almost as much potential for solar as Southern Arizona. Where we live we have a “sun number” of 70 and Phoenix in Southern AZ has a score of 90. This makes it sound like Phoenix has only around 25% more solar potential than areas near Seattle. When in reality Phoenix has approximately 4 times the potential for solar power than we do. The "Sun Numbers" are a marketing and leftist ploy. They are an absolute lie meant to mislead.
Seattle has a sun number of 70? lol. Wow, that’s one of those, piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining, type of lies.
As we all know, alternative energy is much more expensive than conventional energy. And they only way for the left to push wind and solar is to increase the cost of conventional energy up to the level of wind and solar.