Should All HOUSES Have Solar and Will It Affect Climate Change - Sage Advice From the Tractor Shed

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Welcome back to College Hill Farm. Well, it's time for another sage advice from the tractor shed. And today we're talking about should you have solar and will it if we put solar on every house in the United States, would it affect climate change?

[00:00:17]Let's talk about that and see where we go from there.

[00:00:22]Okay, where do solar panels make sense?

[00:00:26]Well, number one you have to have if you're going to put them on your roof, you have to have a roof with a south facing slope.

[00:00:35]Okay?

[00:00:37]Next uh you have to have the ability to live in the home long enough to recoup the cost. Solar's not cheap.

[00:00:51]Okay? So and there are so many rules for grid tie.

[00:00:57]Okay? You have to have an electrician, a licensed electrician. A homeowner cannot make a grid tie solar system.

[00:01:06]Okay?

[00:01:06]I'm going to make a solar system myself, but it will be stand alone.

[00:01:10]Uh and it will just run my my freezers.

[00:01:14]So, that's run my freezers and be my emergency backup.

[00:01:19]Uh but solar alone cannot cannot unless you've got a lot of solar, it's not going to run your house. As a matter of fact, let's take a grid tie situation for example. Grid tie doesn't have any batteries.

[00:01:37]So, if you've got a grid tie and it's lowering your electric bill because when when your solar's putting out good, your house is running on it.

[00:01:51]But at night you're running off the grid.

[00:01:55]Well, if the power of the grid goes off, your solar turns off. So, a grid-tie system does not provide electricity when the grid is down.

[00:02:08]Uh And finally, it only works out if your local electricity is pretty expensive. But, I think about everybody's local electricity is getting pretty expensive.

[00:02:25]Uh Crystal and I have been working on ours to to lower our expenses. Uh We've put in some propane to supplement our little electric heat.

[00:02:39]Uh we try and limit it to about $300 a winter of propane. And that keeps our electric bill from being 3, 4, $500.

[00:02:50]Uh we also, instead of in the summer, we have a turned on our big our heat pump air conditioner yet.

[00:02:59]Because what we're doing is we're using a small air conditioner in a bedroom that's up on the second floor. And as it runs, the heat comes from downstairs and the cool falls falls downstairs. So, it's we haven't had to turn it on yet. Now, I think next week we're going to get up to 88°. I'll have to turn on the big air conditioner cuz I have to have it because of my MS. Uh But, when is it less ideal? Well, if you live in an area that's got a lot of shade, uh solar panels aren't going to be very good. Uh if you rent, you can't put solar panels on a rental property.

[00:03:43]All right? If you put solar you Well, I'll just say fiscally, it would be improper for you to put solar panels on a rental property.

[00:03:54]Okay? That's pretty up front.

[00:03:57]And if you live in a northern climate where there isn't a lot of sunlight, then it doesn't make a lot of sense, either.

[00:04:05]Uh So, you should do we should have solar everywhere where it would work well.

[00:04:13]Uh We could have community solar.

[00:04:17]Okay? A shared solar farm in our community.

[00:04:21]Uh But, it only should be on places The best thing you could we could do, one of the problems I have is here in Garrett County, we have a solar farm. I think it's 310 acres.

[00:04:35]And they put it on some uh farmland.

[00:04:41]I would have rather saw that on top of our roads.

[00:04:46]All right? If our roadways were covered with solar, over top of them, I'm talking about.

[00:04:52]Build a build a scaffold system that's over top of the roadways, and people could drive under them.

[00:05:01]It would help keep the snow off the roads. It would uh Yeah, there's a lot of things we could do to develop community solar.

[00:05:10]Uh over parking lots.

[00:05:13]You know, if if parking lot had solar over the top of it, then we could generate a lot of electricity right in our communities who where the parking lots are.

[00:05:26]Uh And our local electric system needs to be involved in scaling up solar.

[00:05:37]Uh I know some people some people don't like that idea, but if we could generate enough electricity in our local community power all of our houses during the day.

[00:05:52]Imagine how much less our electrical cost would be for just running your electricity at night.

[00:06:01]Okay?

[00:06:03]If the power company would allow it to come down. We've had a lot of electric uh uh stuff put in here, but then we don't have a lot of uh reduction in our electric bill, though.

[00:06:20]Now, I wonder why that is.

[00:06:23]Now, would putting in solar on every house in the United States, would it help with climate change?

[00:06:45]I'll just call it climate change instead of global warming, because it is just climate change. It's a combination. When you get global warming, what you have is an erratic climate system, where is a where the jet stream is erratic.

[00:07:00]You know, it's unpredictable. In the last 10,000 years, we've had a pretty predictable weather.

[00:07:06]Uh but that's changing. Okay? And I don't care what uh you say is driving it.

[00:07:14]Uh some people don't think that that humans are affecting it, but humans are definitely affecting it. There's too much too much research to show it.

[00:07:24]But would putting solar panels on everybody's house in the United States change climate change?

[00:07:34]Well, in my opinion, no.

[00:07:36]Uh right now, right now, a lot of the climate change we're experiencing is from emissions from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s.

[00:07:47]Okay?

[00:07:48]And we have continued to put that kind of carbon into the atmosphere here now in the 2020s.

[00:07:56]So, >> [clears throat] >> I think the change that we're going to have is already baked in.

[00:08:04]We can maybe keep future climate change from getting worse.

[00:08:10]If we put solar panels on every house, but what are the advantages from solar panels? Well, solar panels could cut carbon emissions and generate uh electricity, but it's only going to generate at the most half of our electricity.

[00:08:27]Okay? Half because it's daytime.

[00:08:31]Nighttime's when we consume lots of electricity when the Earth is coolest.

[00:08:36]So, but it will reduce our need for coal and natural gas. Now, natural gas burns cleaner than coal, but natural gas emits as much CO2 as coal does.

[00:08:53]Coal emits some sulfur compounds as well as CO2. SO2 is a very strong greenhouse gas. Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas, which is natural gas, okay? Uh >> [clears throat] >> a very strong greenhouse gas, but when burned, it's carbon dioxide.

[00:09:12]All right, when burned in oxygen, it's carbon dioxide. So, coal does the same thing. Coal is carbon, and when it's burned, it produces carbon dioxide, ash, heavy metals. There's a whole bunch of things comes from burning coal.

[00:09:27]Uh Now, solar works best when paired with a battery, and we think about batteries, but what we don't think about is another type of storage system.

[00:09:41]We could do gravity storage.

[00:09:43]You go, "What the heck is that?"

[00:09:46]What you do is you've got solar panels, and they operate great big pumps.

[00:09:51]And the pumps pump water up into a reservoir during the day.

[00:09:57]As long as the sun's shining, those pumps are running and pumping water up.

[00:10:02]At night, all that water is stored as potential energy.

[00:10:08]And in the daytime, or in the nighttime, the gates are opened on the dam, and it allows the water out, and it generates electricity.

[00:10:17]That's called gravity storage.

[00:10:20]Okay? We've done it a lot.

[00:10:23]Colorado River, the Hoover Dam, you know, those things they uh uh Tennessee Valley Authority, Norris Lake, uh Cherokee Lake, they generate electricity from those dams.

[00:10:36]It's called hydroelectric.

[00:10:38]So, if we could take solar and pump additional water into a lake, and then as that drained off in the evening, you've got stored energy.

[00:10:50]There's always some losses.

[00:10:52]Uh Solar is limited.

[00:11:01]One of our biggest greenhouse gas producers in the United States is transportation. Whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, whatever.

[00:11:10]Transportation. And solar's not going to have much of an impact on that.

[00:11:15]Uh [clears throat] you might have some solar panels and charge an electric car, but I don't know that we have got enough I don't know how to put it. I don't know that our electric car business is advanced enough to for us to really take advantage of of uh solar for the electric car industry.

[00:11:44]Uh Of course, it doesn't produce power at night.

[00:11:50]And panels have their own environmental impact when they're manufactured.

[00:11:57]So, there there are it takes so much carbon to manufacture a panel that it probably takes about 3 years to recoup the carbon emitted making the panel.

[00:12:10]And so, it takes about 10 years to recoup the cost of the panel. And then, you get about 20 years out of a panel.

[00:12:18]So, it doubles its uh viability.

[00:12:23]But, there's a lot of upfront cost.

[00:12:27]Now, let's look at the big picture.

[00:12:30]The big picture, we could scale up solar and wind energy.

[00:12:34]And really help our country's energy infrastructure. Make us less dependent on oil, gas, and coal.

[00:12:43]Okay?

[00:12:44]Make us less dependent on oil, gas, and coal. Now, those industries are fighting that.

[00:12:53]All right?

[00:12:54]Those industries are fighting that because they have so much invested.

[00:13:00]Let's take a uh oil producer, for example. Oil, of course, is is for cars. And we've got a huge tariff on electric cars coming into this country. As a matter of fact, they're 100% some of them.

[00:13:17]100% tariffs to help our auto manufacturing industry. And it's the the truth is, our oil and ga- oil and gas industry have have I don't want to say bribed, but they they have invested heavily in a congressman and senators to keep electric cars off the road.

[00:13:45]Okay? They've invested in our congress and senators to keep cars off electric cars off the road.

[00:13:53]The oil and gas industry has. So, yeah, it's it's it's one of those things that solar, if we could scale it up with wind, could produce a lot of our electricity.

[00:14:07]Energy storage is the problem when it comes to solar. Solar is a great during the day and except when it's cloudy. Uh solar panels still put out when it's cloudy, but they don't put out nearly as much energy.

[00:14:24]So, if we look at solar, and you can go I've got a I've got a a channel called homes I've got a a series called homestead electricity.

[00:14:35]You can look that up. It talks about we're talking about solar panels and how much energy they put out and how much storage you should have and all that.

[00:14:44]Okay? If you're interested in that. Uh nuclear has been around for a long time. Nuclear energy can be very dangerous, but at the same time nuclear energy is very carbon friendly, but storing the nuclear waste is a problem that I don't know that we have totally worked out yet.

[00:15:08]But at the same time coal sludge is a is a problem that we haven't totally worked out yet, either. Uh like I talked about gravity storage could be a storage system. Uh could we put solar panels in space and beam the energy back down? There's one of those plenty of that thought out there because solar panels in space pointed at the sun could be on 24 hours a day. Okay, there's no shade up there.

[00:15:37]Okay, unless it's behind a planet, but if you put them in a in a synchronous orbit a geosynchronous orbit around the planet or a non-geosynchronous orbit just an orbit around the planet which they were always facing the sun they could generate a heck of a lot of electricity. The question would be how expensive is it to get them up there and how much space junk have we put in the in the orbit in low Earth orbit that would be a problem for us. We put a lot of space junk up there. Lots and lots and lots of space junk.

[00:16:11]Uh we need to electrify more of things uh homes uh electrifying them as well as scaling up renewable resources renewable electricity would be a huge bone.

[00:16:30]Uh and efficiency.

[00:16:33]You know, the more efficient a panel is and the longer its lifespan the more we could do with electricity that currently is operating our uh automobiles our planes our trains. Okay, I would love to see a plane that could work off electricity. I'm anxious to see somebody come up with that, but I don't look for it in the near future.

[00:17:01]Okay, uh unless gas prices continue to go up. If gas prices continue to go up, we might start seeing some planes and things switching to electric.

[00:17:12]So now, if you like this stuff this do-it-yourself kind of thing thinking about the future, thinking about how we can do things, how we can can move forward. We do this homestead stuff every week. Sometimes once, sometimes five videos. Just depends on what's going on the homestead that week. Now, if you hit the little bell, it'll be right up here. It'll notify you when we upload a video. We upload on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays with the occasional short on Friday, Saturday, and through the week. So, now time for me to get on to the next thing.

[00:17:46]I love you all.