"Its Time To Shut Up About Bob

[Effete Snob]

13. And it's another good example of an empty and meaningless slogan

You do not even own enough real estate to cover your own electrical needs with solar, and certainly nobody living in high-density housing does.

That means you are going to be buying electricity from someone, regardless of how it is generated.

Solar is "free" in the same sense that oil is "free" too. Petroleum is there, in the ground, for free. Just like sunshine falls to the ground for free.

But extracting and refining that petroleum costs money and so does converting that sunlight to electricity.

Utilities build solar and wind installations in order to harvest "free" sunshine and wind, and they are able to meter and sell the electricity just fine.

That is what frustrates me so much about empty sloganeering as a substitute for thought.

The oil industry started with surface deposits of "free" petroleum. You can still just scoop it up for free (as long as they don't catch you) at the La Brea Tar Pits right in downtown LA. Every natural resource - wind, petroleum, solar, etc. - starts out with something that is "free" for the taking.