We have Solar panels on our roof! They’re not even wired up yet, but I’ve been excited by this project for a long while. So I’ve got a backlog of blog posts, covering some of our journey of getting solar installed in Edmonton in 2021. Hopefully some of these posts will be helpful to others one day.
The first post topic is:
Why Rooftop Solar?
The most concrete reason for us to do rooftop solar is that it’s an expression of our family’s values: Climate Change is a global phenomenon that requires our society to change. Rooftop solar is a concrete investment with measurable impact on climate change. At the end of a given year, we will be able to say: our solar panels contributed N kWh to the grid, with zero emissions, displacing M tons of CO2 emissions. I’ll give some forecast estimates of N and M in later posts.
Furthermore, I am a big believer that an appreciable part of the solution to climate change will be electrification. Electrification means that household electricity use will climb appreciably as parts of our household energy use transitions from gasoline and natural gas to electricity. For example, if we were to replace our car with an electric (which we hope to do in the next year or two!), I’ve estimated that our household electricity consumption would climb by 33%. I’ve also estimated that replacing our natural gas usage with electricity would increase our household electricity usage by anywhere from 3.5x to 7.5x, depending on the efficiency of the replacing technologies. Multiply this through our entire society, and it's clear: We need more power generation, period.
While it currently doesn’t make sense for us to completely replace natural gas in our house with electricity, Canada’s carbon pricing regime will make it a closer call by 2030. Adding solar panels will make electrification more cost-effective sooner.
Let me say clearly before ending this post: A rooftop solar system is nothing without sincere political effort to address climate change. I’ve been happy to see small incremental steps on this, but we need bigger ones.
Next Time: Learning about Residential Solar Systems.