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The first important step is just changing lifestyle so that you require less power. Believe it or not, folks once lived just fine without any electricity at all. Reducing demand is the first step to becoming 100% energy independent.

I agree 100% with part of the sentiment (reducing demand is part of the math) but not the other part (changing lifestyle).

Part of my energy project was doing things to make our home operate way more efficiently (sealed cracks, replaced old gaskets around doors, added insulation, installed a variable speed heat pump, hybrid water heater and directing the cold air byproduct from the water heater to my HVAC during the warm half of the year). Since it was time to replace my wife's ICE crossover anyway I replaced it with an EV crossover, choosing one that has a good miles/kWh throughput. And I set up two charging circuits (one constantly powered and one intermittently powered) to optimize charging the EV with mostly homemade power. About the only thing left to make the home more efficient would be to take down the sheetrock on all the walls so I could put real insulation in the walls. But that's cost prohibitive now that my power bills average $80/month in my all-electric, 2,300 sq ft home and charging the EV to drive 1,300 miles per month (with homemade power charged miles, not counting if we take it on road trips).

Rule #1 before I began this project engineering task was that mine and my wife's lifestyle wouldn't be limited. We'd still get in the hot tub as much as we want. We'd still keep the home temperature set to what we want. We'd still drive as much as we want (now that we do most of the driving in the EV, our driving habits are related to our solar throughput). So our lifestyles aren't changed.

What's changed is that the Dims' stupid energy polices and their warmageddon cult impact our monthly budget only about 20% as much as they used to. My small power bill + loan payment I took out to do the solar and other upgrades is equal in my budget to what my year 2019 budget was paying in power + natural gas + gasoline. In other words, I've removed the past 5 years' worth of dumb energy price inflation from my budget. As the loan balance is paid down the monthly payment amount goes down too -- but I still pay the same amount to pay it down early (again, freezing the energy cost portion of my budget like it's forever year 2019).

When the loan is paid off I'll probably still "pay" the same amount to an investment account to build up for repairs to the solar system or appliances. (What I'll probably do instead is just withdraw that much less from our Roth IRA's but designate that portion to being for the home energy project. That way a higher percentage of our wealth stays in our Roth IRAs growing tax free.)