RECENT PROJECT

This one’s an oldie but a goodie, as I’ve heard my parents say.  I’ve made the chocolate raspberry torte from Kraft Foods (recipe here) several times before, and it’s a nice dessert.  If you’re looking for a restaurant-quality torte made with fine ingredients and leaving a silky, sweet taste on the tongue–well, you should look elsewhere.  If you’re just wanting some chocolate, a bit of raspberry flavor, and (even more chocolate) whipped cream, then this will serve your purpose.

Like a lot of Kraft Foods recipes, this one’s pretty easy.  Mixing of the batter was super easy, and then you just stick it all in a springform pan and let it bake.  It comes out of the oven looking something like this:

Once you release the spring, you take the torte and flip it over onto the cooling rack per the recipe.  Just to give you an idea of how big my torte ended up being, it was about 1/2 of a Juggernaut high:

That’s right, because when you’re a real manly baker, you measure things using X-Men characters.  For those of you who want something a little more ruler-friendly, it’s about 1.25″ high, as Juggernaut is 2.5″ high.  And yes, Juggernaut is totally rocking the bad guy look–though it’s somewhat spoiled by his one arm missing after being twisted repeatedly by a three-year-old.

What did the final product look like?  Mine ended up a little different than the picture on Kraft’s web page, which is fine by me.  I’ve got a little lighter frosting, and I laid out the chocolate pieces in a way that makes them look like a reef with raspberries (instead of fish) swimming between the chocolate rocks and coral.  I skipped the powdered sugar called for as a topping in the recipe as, quite frankly, this is one darned sugary treat already.

The verdict?  The wife isn’t a huge fan of raspberries, so this wasn’t a winner for her.  Our oldest really liked it, but he only had a little bit as, like I said, it’s quite the sugar bomb and we really value his not running around his bedroom on a sugar high when he should be sleeping.

TOPIC FOR TODAY

Just like I enjoy the chocolate sheets or panels on top of that torte, I really like seeing solar panels on the tops of houses.  There are a lot of different reasons, from many different perspectives, why I think solar panels are a good idea.  Personally, the wife and I were blessed with a gift, and an incredible set of financial reimbursements in Colorado, that allowed us to install solar panels on a previous home; they were fantastic, and reduced our electric bills to almost nothing for much of the year.  But that personal experience is just that, personal, and so I wanted to dig a little deeper here to indicate why I think they are great for everyone.

Please note that I’m just hitting the highlights in this post; each one of these points could be several pages of details on its own if you really start digging (or if I want to write about them in a future post–say, that’s a great idea . . .)

THE ENVIRONMENTAL REASONS

I really think of these as the “tree-hugging hippie” reasons for getting solar panels, but if that offends you, just go with the “environmental” reasons.  These are the pretty obvious ones, including:

1. Solar panels, along with wind turbines, are what most people think of when they hear “clean energy”.  They generate power from the sun, meaning you’re not requiring power from a plant that uses coal, natural gas, or another resource to generate power.
2. Solar panels do have an environmental footprint to create them, but long term they are created, installed, and ready to go for 20 to 25 years, depending on where they’re installed.  One of the “gotchas” on this that I found out when our panels were installed is that the inverter, which converts the DC power from the panels to AC power for the house and grid, will likely need replaced after 10 years.  It’s not the same as paying for the whole system again, but it’s not cheap either.
3. Once they’re no longer working efficiently, you can recycle them (Author’s Note:  I will admit that I’m in the dark as to how much of the equipment is recyclable, or what the cost and requirements are.  Another idea for a future post.).
4. Solar panels can help you go off-grid, if that’s your desire.  You do need to add in a battery or batteries to keep the excess power you generate so that you can have power overnight or for heavy-use times.

THE ECONOMIC REASONS

The economic reasons for installing solar panels go hand-in-hand with the tree-hugging hippie, I mean environmental, reasons, so let’s jump right into them:

1. You pay one time for the panels (and a bit more later for a new inverter), so assuming you’ve got enough panels to cover all your electricity usage you’re effectively paying for that electricity up front.  Even with this, you’ll still have to pay the basic connection/management fees to your electric utility, so your bill will be low but not zero.  Additionally, and this is another negative, the upfront cost is by no means trivial–I’ve seen quotes of $6,000 for small home installations up to about $30,000 for larger homes.
2. You also avoid the increases in the cost of electricity for the life of your panels, as you’re not having to buy any from the electric utility.  Over 25 years, even small increases can add up, so not having to pay for them is great.
3. If you are connected to the grid (and most people are), and you generate excess power, your electric utility will reimburse you for that overproduction (at least in the few states I’ve looked at).  With our panels in Colorado, the reimbursement was at a wholesale rate; other states such as California require that the reimbursement be at the market rate, which is even better.

THE PATRIOTIC REASONS

The environmental and economic reasons for getting solar panels were what I was already familiar with, and so they were easy to write.  There are several other reasons to install solar panels, though, that fall outside of those two categories.  While I cringe a bit at calling these “patriotic”, it’s actually the best term I can come up with for these items that others have written about that I hadn’t really considered–but strike me as just as important in the short term, and perhaps even more important than the other reasons in the long term.

I believe that buying local to your area or country is important.  The reason is that, if I am constantly buying goods of the same quality from another country because I can save say 10% or so on each of them, then I had better be comfortable telling all my unemployed neighbors who used to make those same products that my saving a couple bucks was more important than their job–and I can’t do that.

This holds true even for solar panels, which are a big-ticket item, but if you’re able to afford solar panels in the first place then why not also support your country’s (in my case, America’s) manufacturing employees at the same time?  There’s potentially more incentive to buy American panels lately as well, as President Trump imposed a 30% tariff in January of 2018 on all imported “crystalline silicon solar photovoltaic (PV) cells and panels”, with that tariff dropping 5% per year for the following four years (see this article).  While foreign and American companies could respond to this is several different ways, ideally it means that American panels start to look like a better buy for American consumers.

Now, it’s fair to ask, are there actually American manufacturers of solar panels?  According to this post, there are several in locations from as varied as Ohio, to California, to Mississipi, to Texas.  Just think, you have a variety of choices, and potential cost savings, by buying panels from any of these places in the U.S.!  It is true that, as pointed out in this Bloomberg article, buying U.S. panels won’t create as many U.S. jobs as the installation and maintenance of those panels creates, but every job (and neighbor) counts.

If the jobs argument doesn’t really ring a patriotic bell for you, then consider this:  The U.S. electrical grid has already been hacked.  You can look at both the New York Times article here and the NBC L.A. article here for details, but I’ll give the short version:  Russian hackers targeted U.S. utilities, as well as aviation and manufacturing targets.  It’s possible that, given the access they gained, they could have taken remote control of the utilities and caused mass blackouts.  The access (at least from the hack the New York Times article describes) was gained by hacking the networks of contractors who work with the utility companies, going through the software those contractors provide, and then tricking the utility’s operators into giving away their passwords.

So what do solar panels have to do with this?  Here’s my long-term view:  Solar panels allow each household to generate their own power.  Connecting a battery to those solar panels allows you to completely disconnect from the national power grid if you want, avoiding the impact of any hacks to the grid.  Even if you don’t completely disconnect from the grid, you are prevented in the near-term from losing power completely if a power plant goes down.  The really long-term view is that, by generating and temporarily storing their own power, households then alleviate power companies from the burden of having to build new power plants, even allowing them to offload their oldest and least “clean” plants.  With such costs out of the way, the power companies could then focus on upgrading their infrastructure such that they greatly reduce their risk from future hacking attempts, and allow more robust and flexible integration of variable clean energy sources.  I’ll admit that these long-term views are very idealized and simplified, but they are absolutely possible.

A BRIEF CONCLUSION

It’s my hope that this post showed you some of the reasons why solar panels represent a great investment for environmental, economic, and patriotic reasons.  There is also a list of reasons why solar panels don’t make sense for some people, some of which I described in this post (namely, cost) along with some I didn’t (average temperature in your region, sun exposure of a home, latitude, etc.).  As I mentioned at the start of this post, this is just the highlights, and there are many more pros and cons to dig into, including this interesting article that talks about the good and the bad of California’s recent mandate to install solar on all new homes.  Take what you’ve learned, think about it, and make your own slightly-more-informed argument about solar panels.

Thanks for reading this post, and I hope that you’ll come back to read future posts!