Looking at Solar only as a source of energy is pretty short sighted.
Anyone for a wind turbine ??
It's a bit blowy in Melbourne today and has been cloudy/pissing down on and off. With a reasonable wind turbine, I could have been putting anywhere from .5-4kW/hr into the grid while my 1.5kW Solar array might have struggled to put in .2-.4kW.
And best of all... I can still be generating at night.
One day I hope to only have to pay the charge for supply infrastructure and effectively use the grid as a backup incase my renewable systems are offline for some reason.
I see this going the same way the water companies went... "Hey everyone.. get a water tank/grey water thingy etc and it will help save our water" Which was soon followed by massive hikes in pricing because the consumption of their product went down (less revenue) but their fixed costs remained the same.
With electricity I can see a similar thing happening as people consume less but their fixed costs stay or even rise due to things like carbon tax etc then their costs go up and their ability to pay you high feed in tarrifs further erodes their profitability.
A bit of a vicious circle I guess.
If you can become more (or even completely) self reliant for the basic utilities then questions of what fuel source is most economical to use for brewing becomes a question of.. do I have enough resources (besides water, grain, hops, yeast) to run my brewery ?
I'm no tree hugging, basket weaving, tie dye wearing greenie but I have water tanks and solar panels and grey water for the garden and someday will have a wind turbine just so I can have more money to buy important stuff..... like brewhouse bling
Duck