Hooking into the power mains

I know that it's nice to aim to be completely self sufficient power wise, but I'd like to suggest some consideration for the benefits of not being completely disconnected from the city power. Every estimate I've heard concerning batteries and electrical storage is that they're terribly inefficient. See our discussion on this post.

Many clean electricity projects aim to look at net consumption of power from the mains. This means that they hook themselves up to the electrical mains like everyone else in the city but also have small-scale forms of energy production. Then when they need energy they use what's available from their own sources, and if they need it, from the mains, and if they have extra energy at any given time that energy goes back into the mains. The goal being to produce, overall, the same amount of energy as is consumed. The Solar Decathlon generally seems to work under this model.

Unfortunately, the almost permanent availability of energy in this scenario is more conducive to excessive use of electricity than having to use only what you've just created, but I think that's acceptable to most people who want the house to be usable and livable.

Solar panels and powering

I was reading an email from Kenneth (an engineer at Queens) and the targeted advertisements from google came up with the following:

http://www.solarland.com/sd1/page1/home%20system.html
}This is a really wide selection of complete systems (panels, wiring, and lights) for various uses. everything from boats to homes.

http://www.ctsolar.com/
}These are more targeted towards laptops and wilderness excursions. The website seems kinda hacked together at the last minute, and so gives me the impression of sketchy... shrugs

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=55be9cbd0d&view=ap&t=r&rlk=Solar%20Panels%20Cost&rll=en
}and finally, the selection of links provided. They're all commercial of course, but some of them seem worth looking into.