I hear you, but here is the thing: Solar and Wind are expensive. Very expensive, even if you are factoring in the ROI on it.
The up-front costs are out of the reach of most American. If you can afford the up-front costs to get solar, that is awesome.
And, if you are the type of person who doesn’t go far from home, and don’t have to do a daily long commute, even better. (By the way, just to be clear: I am not “anti-EV” in the same way I am not “anti-vax”. I am simply anti-MANDATED EV and anti-MANDATED vax.)
But no matter how you slice it, forcing people into this without the infrastructure in place, which is exactly what they are trying to do for the reasons I outlined, is a loss of freedom, and they are the ones who have unilaterally decided they are the ones who get to decide what freedoms you are allowed, “for the greater good”.
I am wholly onboard with being self reliant, in all ways possible, so I admire you for that. I was even pricing out building myself a tow-able solar-array, but...well, my wife doesn’t see the need for it.
Yet.
For what it's worth, I financed my solar (and other things in a larger energy project like other energy improvements to my house, and difference in EV vs ICE when it was time to replace my wife's old ICE car) with a HELOC. But that was when you could get a low interest rate.
Before the energy project (but after Brandon instituted his energy polices) I paid a large power bill + large natural gas bill + bought a lot of gasoline at the pump. Now it's a large HELOC payment + tiny power bill + tiny amounts of gasoline at the pump (for what little we drive the ICE pickup). Because I put most of the cost into the HELOC loan, I had little "up-front" cost as far as my budget goes. To date I have spent $2,700 less from my budget (read: pulled less from our Roth IRA's) than I would have on sky high energy costs had I not done the energy project. That includes the up-front costs I paid out of pocket (what I didn't put into the HELOC loan) setting me back at first 2 and a half years ago when I started the project.
Every month when I get a power bill I track how much my true cost per kWh is, how much my solar inverters said I consumed without pulling from the grid (free power I used that month), how many miles we drove on the EV, how much that would have cost in gasoline if I had bought an ICE car instead of an EV, how much we paid for road-side charging if we drove the EV on trips that month, how much power the EV added to our overall power demand by charging at home (and other monthly costs like my insurance being higher by having full coverage on a new vehicle instead of liability only coverage on an old used vehicle, etc.). For example, in the past 12 months from Oct 2022 to Sep 2023 I've saved a total of $8,700 in power + gasoline + natural gas (I converted my two natural gas appliances to electric, which adds some to my power demand, but most of that power is free). With that $8,700 annual energy savings I'm easily making the HELOC payments and paying down the HELOC balance (which lowers the HELOC payments so that future months will cost me even less to save money).
Literally two years after starting the project, my up-front costs paid out of pocket were made up for with the savings I kept from leaving my pocket month after month. Since then it's saved me (read: more money staying in our Roth IRA's) more and more each month. I don't know what future energy costs will be. But I know what my future HELOC payments will be: lower than they are now (as the HELOC balance is paid down and the HELOC payments go down with them).
But you can't replicate this on the fly. This kind of project requires lots of analysis and planning on your particular needs and what would work best for you. In other words, you have to be as committed to making something like this work for you as the bureaucrats are committed to taking away our freedoms and making themselves richer at our expense. Freedom is never easy, and that includes energy self-reliance. As a code jockey, I'm used to solving complex puzzles and optimizing things that already work to make them work better. But at the end of the day, nothing I did for this project was anything dependent on homemade software or any special skill I learned in my numerical modeling course or computer science courses or anything like that. The only skills needed were simple arithmetic and patient analysis of what was consuming the most power from our home, what the best way to meet our driving needs and wants were, how many average daily peak solar hours we get in our area each month, what angle is best in my area for solar panels in the winter vs in the summer, how much of our power consumption is done in the evening (i.e. battery storage), and how much of each component was needed to optimize the build without running into the law of diminishing returns, etc.
So if you live in the south (read: good for solar), own your home, plan to live there at least 10 years, are you going to do the research to make yourself more energy self-reliant? I got tired of just fussing about the Dims and their stupid energy polices and their warmageddon cult. All the fussing wasn't saving my wife's and mine finances. It's past time for each of us to take action to wean ourselves from the things the government overregulates.