Electricity today
The vast majority of households still receive 100% of their energy from their utility via the grid.
In the US, half of all electricity in the grid is supplied from coal-burning power plants, and over 70% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil.
In California it’s a slightly different picture, with gas and coal accounting for about 60% of electricity.
It's difficult to imagine, but every time you switch on your computer, washing machine, TV, or toaster, someone at the other end of the wire is creating pollution, which contributes to poor air quality and climate change.
It looks like this:
Electricity and the environment
Electricity itself isn’t the problem. If we generated 100% of our electricity from the sun, there would be no environmental problems caused by electricity generation. But with 90% of electricity coming from nuclear power plants and fossil fuels, there’s more to pay than the electricity bill.
The greatest problem is climate change caused by carbon emissions. Over half of all electricity generated in the US comes from burning fossil fuels like coal, which spews carbon into our air. Because of this, electricity generation is responsible for about 40% of America’s annual carbon emissions.
Climate change from electricity
You can reduce your carbon footprint significantly with a home solar system without having to alter your lifestyle. Sungevity makes it easy. Enter your address above and our quote will show you how much carbon you could save with solar – it’s equivalent to not driving thousands of miles!
With Sungevity, you can make a real impact and help avert climate change.
Energy security
There’s another reason to consider going solar. Today the US imports an increasing percentage of its primary energy needs from abroad, and therefore feels the effects of availability and price increases.
There are other ways to meet our national energy needs. Other countries are taking the lead in renewable energy generation. Today Germany produces over half of global solar energy, yet has only .6% of the landmass of Alaska and receives the same number of sunlight hours.
Going solar reduces US reliance on overseas oil and gas and increases energy independence. It helps meet peak demand on our grid, creates local green-collar jobs, lowers our emissions costs, and powers the economy.
With resource crunches hitting the headlines, generating your own clean electricity is one small step towards shifting the world toward a more local, sustainable economy.
Make that first step now by entering your address above. We’ll design a solar system for your home that increases your energy independence – and your country’s. It’s an online service, and it’s free.
The solar solution
Clearly we need to act quickly to avert climate change.
Let a solar system make an environmental statement for you. When your solar system generates electricity, you’ll reduce the amount of electricity you draw off the grid and decrease the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, all without having to change your lifestyle.
It's important to remember that you don’t need to go 100% solar; in fact, sometimes it's smarter to make your home a hybrid: part solar, part utility-supplied. It works just like hybrid cars that are half gas, half electric.
Sungevity will create new energy-efficiency offers further into our service, to ensure you are continually minimizing your emissions and your bills.
For those sticklers out there, energy (which may or may not produce emissions) does go into making solar panels, but that energy is recovered in the first two years of their operation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2006), the amount of energy used to manufacture a solar panel will be generated by that same panel in only 1.67 years, when placed in California sunlight conditions.