Let the sun shine in...
So, this happened...
My father died about a year ago and after all his affairs were settled there was some money left over for my sisters and me.
Dad grew up in the Depression, and I think he was sort of amazed that a lifetime of hard work and careful planning had left him comfortably well off. It's not that he was a miser – he was generous with his family and his community, but I think he spent his whole life believing that if he goofed off, he was one step away from going back to wearing shoes a size too small and worrying about his next meal.
Be that as it may, his worry ended up being my benefit. And even that was a little bit of a problem. I've spent my whole life living basically paycheck to paycheck. I'd never had a lump of money sitting around with no specific need for it. I don't really know anything about investing, except in my own work. So, here's what I came up with.
I decided to install solar panels on the roof of my shop. Eighty feet long with a perfect southern exposure, it seemed like a good candidate. The cost wasn't cheap, but then neither is my monthly electric bill. After I did the math, fifteen or twenty times, my best guess is this should generate the same amount of revenue as a CD at 6%. That's not bad. Quite honestly, when I think of some other “opportunities” I've spent money on, a 6% return feels like a fortune.
Plus, I feel like I'm doing a good thing. Our world runs on electricity, and I don't see that changing. For most of my adult life, I could look to the west and see a yellow streak of...something...coming from the smokestack of a ginormous coal-fired power plant. A little further west, the horizon is obscured by hundreds of giant wind turbines. In almost any direction, huge powerlines march across the farmland, delivering the electricity from here where we produce it to the big cities where it's consumed. I understand that maintaining civilization as we know it is complicated. The environment is warming, giant dams kill fish, nuclear power plants have their own issues...the list of negative impacts from power production goes on and on and I can't fix any of it. What I can do is reduce my impact. I can limit my contribution to the problem and that seems worth doing.
It took a while to pull the trigger. The first company I contacted sent me a plan with the entire roof covered in panels, both the south AND north sides. That would probably work in a place like, you know, Uganda where the sun is directly overhead all the time, but in western Minnesota, the north side of a roof gets sunlight for about four days in the middle of July. That alone got them crossed off my list.
On about my fifth try, I found a company that seemed relatively competent as well as honest – an underrated combination. Last Monday, four guys showed up around noon and by noon on Thursday, the project was done.
Now I'm just waiting for the electrical inspector to sign off on the project and for my local utility to flip the switch to ON. Then we'll find out if I know what I'm talking about.
Copyright 2024 Brent Olson