We recently moved from Austin TX to Placitas NM. I was always interested in putting in solar / battery but the numbers I came up with for the house in Austin were daunting. Of course most of our bill was air conditioning in the summer plus a pool pump that ran every day for 8 hours. Here in New Mexico we dont have a pool and the weather is milder. Plus the house seems to be built in a way that uses less energy. We have only gotten our first power bill but my wife remarked that she hasn’t seen a bill this low since she lived in an apartment.

This brings up a conundrum for Going Green. The investment will be much smaller, perhaps as much as 5x smaller. But then the saving will also be smaller. It makes it less appealing in some ways. We will probably get a full years worth of electrical bills and then figure it out. We will probably go with solar / batteries either way, but now I am of the mind that building better houses that use more efficient appliances might be the bigger win in this energy transition.

In the US lots of crop land is used to grow corn for ethanol. This ethanol is mixed with gasoline for car and truck fuels. But suppose we just used that same land for solar? What would be the difference in energy produced? Turns out solar would produce 30x more energy. The story may be even more extreme. Car and truck engine are maybe 5x less efficient than electric. So given that all of this ethanol goes to transportation, solar could be 150x more efficient.

Ecologically informed solar enables a sustainable energy transition in US croplands