Money – Let’s just get this out of the way. Install solar, and you will save money. My savings, as my system cruises into the 10-year-mark, has officially paid off my original investment. Going forward, it’s pure profit.
Security – Not only does my family enjoy energy security and economic security by producing our own power from solar, but we also help with the security of the electricity grid for everyone else. Big, centralized power-generators are vulnerable to failure or attack, affecting everyone on the grid, but there’s no way thousands of individual solar arrays could be targets all at once.
(Almost) Endless – The sun will eventually burn out . . . in about 5 billion years. That’s probably a bit outside my solar panel warranty anyway. But until then, it’s there for the taking.
No Inputs – Once a photovoltaic system is installed, it requires no input but the sun, whereas fossil fuel plants will require fuel and all the blasting, mining, drilling, refining, and transport every moment of their operation for decades to come.
Quiet – I’ll stop chattering for a moment so you can “not hear” my solar panels.
Effortless – Once a solar array is installed, there’s very little for a homeowner to do. There are no moving parts, and today’s systems have very high reliability ratings. Aside from having a look at the display on the inverter now and then, you’re good to go.
Safety – You know what they call a massive solar energy spill? A nice day. It’s definitely not a nice day when the same thing happens with a pipeline, oil tanker, deep-sea oil rig, or in a fracking-waste truck-wreck. Chalk another one up for solar!
Related: http://www.allyelectricandsolar.com/blog
Clean Air – Solar energy produces none of the carbon dioxide, deadly fine particulate matter, or toxic mercury that come from burning fossil fuels. On top of that, did you know that 1% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. comes from methane released just in mining coal and from abandoned mines? It’s a no brainer – solar cleans the air!
Clean Water – Photooltaic solar uses very little water. Consider this: only about 3% of the world’s water is fresh, with only 0.8% available to be tapped for all human uses. Of the total amount we use, 45.3% of the water drawn from lakes, rivers, and underground aquifers in the U.S. is used to cool off thermoelectric nuclear and fossil fuel plants. This doesn’t even count the vast amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing (commonly known as “fracking”) in oil and gas wells or in the mining of coal. Going solar conserves massive quantities of our scarce fresh water resources.