[mpholland]

Originally Posted by Not Insane

My old guitar player installs solar for a living. He has 40 panels on his roof and got them when China was dumping them. That being said, he believes that solar is more expensive than power from the grid (at least, where we live) when you take into account the cost of the hardware and its useful life span coupled with the sunlight we get. The reason he's a fan is that he is a bit of a survivalist.

That is, when the grid goes, he still has power.

My company is experimenting with solar farms right now to determine the economic feasibility of those farms. But the results won't be in for decades. The main reason for going solar with current tech is to make a political/cultural statement.

I am far from being a green extremist, though I do recycle and compost. Compost makes our garden soil rich, recycling is free at the dump and my trash costs me about 12 dollars every other month or so to dump. Spending 16K on my system to save 40K over the next 15 years makes sense to me. As a fiscal conservative all of this is done for financial reasons. None of it is political or cultural. I see no reason to retire with any bills that aren't necessary.

i.e. part of the solution is to convert one's life to one of using more energy efficient stuff like LED lighting.

My whole house and most of my automotive lighting as well is all LED. Again, all financial and safety decisions, not cultural or political.

I'm thinking of using automotive alternators coupled with a homemade windmill to produce power for stuff around my property. LED lighting can be 12 volt based so I could, theoretically, have 12 volt generators connected to 12 volt batteries and infrastructure that uses 12 volt power, bypassing the need for very expensive inverters. Frankly, just as many homes used to be wired with cat-5, one could wire their home with a 12 volt system that was pure solar/wind connected, separate from their normal 120 volt wiring. All of your lighting could be 12 volt, thanks to LED's.

Tried that already when I was much younger. Getting an alternator to spin at a proper rpm from wind will be quite a chore, and the amount of alternators and batteries you would need to power an average house would be quite a large number.

BTW, when LED lighting hit big, my power company noticed a drop in power consumption all over the grid.

Originally Posted by Chicks

Vanguard names names and backs some calls for climate steps

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN23P1T1

Glad to see that Vanguard is voting responsibly. Half my sizable holdings are in Vanguard funds.

I too have quite a sizeable quantity in Vanguard holdings, but they are also fairly diverse.

Originally Posted by Oerets

We locked in some of our into a Indexed Annuity with a guarantee of 15% in February. For only 12 months.
We will see!

I would have to look and see exactly where my portfolios were in February, but they have gone up over 25% since March. Of course that was when we had the Covid crash.