$35 Cost of Energy for a Year, Now and Forever.

I hate what high gas prices and high utility bills do to our family budgets, collectivly ruining our national economy.  Newt and others promise gasoline at $2.50 a gallon if you elect them.  OK sure....

I have an even better "real world concrete" example of how our families and country can prosper if you simply read on.

Loving the BMW ActiveE,  missing the BMW Mini-E. Between the two fantastic cars, 40,000 miles of sunshine powered driving has been logged.  No gasoline car allows me to make my own fuel at home.

When Julie and I built our home almost six years ago, we made the smartest decision of our lives, to include a Solar PV system to power the home. Three years ago we got into the Mini-E program and added a second smaller system which serves as our home fueling station. We've nick named it, The "Sunco Station"   Combined system size is 7.5kw.

Both systems after five years of use are now completely paid for by offsetting our home utility cost and our gasoline cost.  Essentially the systems cost a little over 32k and we have been saving a little over 7k a year in home utility and gasoline cost.  From here on out, for the rest of our lives we live and drive on sunshine for essentially free.

Our case is an early example and an extreme case with a very energy efficient home, an electric car in the garage and no cost of energy. We live in sunny California and have one of the highest electric rates and cost of gasoline in the nation. I acknowledge that this solution is not yet financially viable across the entire country.  In just a few short years, across much of the country this will become the norm as builders build more efficient homes powered by solar,  and homeowners discover that they can "Grow Your Own"  for their electric car or plug in hybrid.

My dream is to grab our great country by the shoulders and say wake up!  Especially the angry, swearing, talking heads of the right wing who spew anti American ideals from their mouths, never having experienced what they tear apart orally, reveling in the idea of enriching other countries and weakening ours. Putting their political party and their hatred for Obama, ahead of patriotism and our national interest. 

rant over

There is a lot of data below should you choose to get your geek/nerd mode on.  I've included it because I want to back up what I say with facts and invoices, not the empty rhetoric of inflated "gas-bags"  (I guess the rant is not quite over)

The first page of the bill contains two important pieces of information. Our monthly bill of $4.93 cents (we pay or collect only one time a year) and our annual payment for energy used from the grid in the prior year of $408.89. We pay this usage amount once a year and then recieve a credit for our  excess energy generated and not used by the home and car.

The second page contains our monthly usage for February, and you can see this is against a credit of 2,800 kilowatts.   The winter months we use energy, the summer months we generate excess.

The third page is our Net Energy Metering Summary where they apply the credit for generation.  In our case the credit was $375 of which we have $333.56 remaining.

We used $408, and we got a credit for $375.  for a total cost of energy for the year of $35, less than $3 per month.  This is lower than minimal monthly payment of  $4.93,  because we were an excess generator and SDG&E paid us $0.0375 for each excess kilowatt over and above what we used for the home and car.

In summary, it's about $3 a month in energy cost for our family to live in our home and drive an electric car 18,000 miles a year.  That's the new school.

The old school was $430 a month of electricity, $275 a month for gasoline.

Cheers!

Peder