There’s a nice little article about green energy homes over at Greenprofs.com. The author makes a nice point that home owners have many options when it comes to choosing carbon-neutral energy sources: he mentions solar, wind and even hydroelectric power. I cannot help but submit, respectfully, that this article completely misses the point.
There are, conventionally, five different sources of energy, four of which are carbon-neutral and only three of which can be said to be completely renewable:
But, as Thomas L. Friedman mentioned in his excellent Hot, Flat and Crowded (see my review here), there is a sixth energy source: the energy that we do not use.
And the key challenge we face as a race for the next century or so is to shift our energy consumption patterns more and more towards that sixth source, instead of trying to draw more and more energy from the four carbon-neutral ones.
We have the technology and we have the means, particularly when it comes to the energy needs of homes and buildings; it is only a question of bringing those possibilities to the global awareness, instead of letting people believe they will eventually be able to simple replace all coal-powered plants with wind mills.