Our new neighbors have just finished installing solar panels on their roof. When they bought the house, it had several solar hot water panels on the roof, but they had been there for many years. One of the panels had sprung a leak earlier last year and wasn't really functioning.
So the new owners had the roof re-done, replaced the hot water panels and also installed some photovoltaic panels on the rest of the roof.
I'm always happy to see people in Southern California installing photovoltaic solar systems. With the amount of sunshine we get in San Diego, it just makes so much sense to do that.
We're just finishing up our seventh year with our 4.1 kilowatt photovoltaic
solar system on our own roof. In that time we've generated 56,128.3 kilowatt hours worth of electricity, which we feed into the SDGE grid, then draw back the power we need from the grid. That translates to 69,599 pounds of CO2 we've avoided, or the energy to make 2,049,215 cups of coffee or power 1,117 homes for one day.
We would feel pretty good about that, except that I read recently that Germany, equivalent in size to the state of Montana, generates solar electricity at the rate of 22 GIGAwatt hours of electricity, powering approximately 8 million German homes. Considering that normal German weather is 50 degrees and raining, that's really amazing energy production.
German leaders attribute the growth of German solar power to the German Renewable Energies Act enacted in 2000. Their inspiration for passing the legislation? President Jimmy Carter's Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), which was later dumped by Ronald Reagan. If the U.S. had followed through with Carter's emphasis on solar and other renewable sources of energy over the last 30 years, the U.S. would be a lot further along the road toward energy independence than we are now.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-23/can-the-u-dot-s-dot-reproduce-germany-energy-revolution
But, it's good to see our San Diego neighbors doing what they can.