Solar Power

Ever since I can remember, I've loved the idea of solar power. This is when I was 10 years old and there was no such thing as "green."

The reason I thought it was cool was from a technological/cool factor perspective.

Running all the appliances in the house on solar power? Sweet!

Check out this article on how much solar power can save you and the different ways it can be incorporated into existing or new design of a house.

What caught my attention is that a typical system can provide about 25% of a house's total electric consumption.

Want to know what's even cooler? Net-metering. It means if you produce more electricity than you consume, you can sell that excess back to the electric company for a profit.

I just went on a family business trip to a sugar mill in Nicaragua and they produce 40 megas of electricity while consuming just 15 (ignore what a mega is or what it stands for, it's a unit of measurement of a lot of electricity).

So not only are they being "green" by producing their own electricity (which they do by using every bit of the sugar-can process and being extremely efficient with it), they don't have an electric bill, they have an electric check that they collect every month.

Cool, huh?