Originally published on Cost of Solar.
Cropped version of photo by Kadath | CC BY-NC-SA
US Independence Day got me thinking a bit this week, and then a popular Bob Marley lyric came to mind that sealed the deal for this article (that is, convinced me that I had to write it).
I think it’s one of Bob Marley’s most famous lines (I’ve seen it on many a bumper sticker) — “emancipate yourself from mental slavery.” It’s a good one, probably a bit better than my new version, “emancipate yourself from electric slavery,” but I love the sound and message of the latter, too. And that is one of the key advantages of solar power, so it’s worth highlighting during this week of independence.
We talk a lot about independence and freedom in this society, and we highlight these as two of the great values of American culture. Our ancestors fought hard to provide us with the independence and freedom that we have today.
But I know I’m not the only one who wonders these days if we haven’t lost sense of that ideal a bit. We tie ourselves to systems and contracts that make us financial slaves to so many things.
One thing that many of us are slaves to is high electric bills. We assume it’s just a fact of life, that we have to send a good chunk of our monthly salaries to electric monopolies and we can’t do much to avoid their rising prices. But we don’t have to do this, and we can avoid those rising prices.
You can drop that monthly nightmare — you can “emancipate yourself from electric slavery” (okay, that’s the last time I’ll write it) — by deciding to go solar and get your electricity from the largest energy source in the galaxy!… er, solar system!
Have you thought about it before, checked the price of doing so, and decided that it was too expensive a switch? Well, if you did that awhile back, it’s definitely time to check again. The cost of solar has fallen through the floor in the past few years. It has actually fallen a lot just within the past few months. Solar panel prices have fallen enough that it would beinsane for many of us to keep sending our money to polluting power plants and money-hungry utilities.
Don’t sit back in your chair or on your couch and leave yourself shackled to electricity systems of the past. Lean forward, dig in with all your strength (that is, click a few buttons), and see how much money you could save by switching to solar power.
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