I understand there is installation, maintenance and servicing costs, but shouldn’t the free power from the sun, wind and tidal eventually pay this off and start providing free power?
In: Engineering
You’re buying your electricity from a profit-making company. By definition, it’s not going to be the cheapest way of doing things.
Also, there is plenty of cost even before profit – maintaining the equipment, the grid, etc. etc. Solar panels degrade, need cleaning, even fail. Batteries degrade and fail even quicker. Wind turbines are literally in gale-force winds for most of their lives, some of them out at see and covered in salty water. Things don’t just carry on working forever, especially with regular checks and maintenance, which cost money. Oh, and tidal is ridiculously underpowered and expensive to maintain for the same reasons.
If you want to get free electricity you can do at least one of those items yourself – solar. You’ll find at that point that deploying solar to your house costs more than you’ll make back unless you live in a very sunny part of the world and even then it takes YEARS to pay back your investment by which time your panels need maintenance, replacement, etc.
I’m aiming to be utility-independent by retirement (20-something years away) because of this, but I will still need to maintain, repair, replace, renew, even buy new things. It won’t be *CHEAPER* than the grid, because the grid works at scale. But it will be *independent* of the grid. I’ll be able to decide how much I spend, when and where and what I don’t need to spend money on.
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