Most households spend significant amounts of money to supple their house with electricity. What most people don’t realize, is that they can actually produce, or generate to use a more correct term, this electricity themselves. How does one do achieve this? With a combination of geothermal heating and cooling, wind turbines, and solar panels, this is actually very possible. Let’s dig in deeper.
Geothermal Heating and Cooling
Just a few feet below the surface, we find temperatures that are somewhat stable, especially if you compare them to the fluctuations above. Smart people figured that we could use this stability to actually regulate the temperature inside our house (or a commercial or any other building for that matter).
Pipes can be laid underground; usually about 50 feet, and heat energy can be transported from the ground and into your house during the winter when outside temperatures are low. During the summer, we can do the exact opposite – move heat from a building below the house.
The pumps that transport the energy we are talking about uses very little electricity if you compare them to the amounts that are used in conventional heating and cooling systems. This has the potential to drastically reduce your electricity bill.
I recommend reading up on this method in the following article: Pros and Cons of Geothermal Energy.
Solar Cells
Solar cells, also know as photovoltaic cells, have the ability to convert sunlight to electricity. I’m not digging further into how this technology works, as it turns out it’s quite complicated. The important thing is to understand that by installing these systems in your house you could potentially end up generating a lot of clean “free” electricity.
Wind Energy
How can we generate electricity from the wind? The wind contains large amounts of kinetic energy, the motion of the wind. By using catching this wind with large turbines, we can convert this motion into electricity with induction. I recommend checking out Wind Energy Pros and Cons if you are interested in these methods.
Residential wind turbines have long been on the market, but the demand has exploded in the last few years due to lower prices. These devices are very cost-competitive in some areas when it comes to the energy delivered.
Battery Systems
There is one missing factor if you want a base load of clean electricity in your house: Batteries that store electricity and provide stability even though the supply of wind and sun is limited. The windy and sunny days where electricity generation is in a surplus, we store some of it for use when the days aren’t good for providing electricity.
The potential of renewable energy ways of generating electricity should not be overlooked – even residential systems are able to make a difference if enough people invest in them. The truth is that these devices not only have the potential of saving you a lot of money long term, but the use of them is also incredible important if we want to conserve this planet for later generations.