We really need to stop looking at houses as investments and start looking at them as homes. A place to stay for a long while and raise a family in stable neighborhood.

But to answer the question of commenter, you’ve improved the value of the house. As long as the new purchasers of the house know how to maintain and care for their solar cells, they will benefit from the cheaper energy bills.

And if you are going solar or wind power, you should upgrade all your major appliances to Energy Star rated ones. That will help cut down your energy consumption overall. Less is more, as they say.

With a house so bedecked, you’ll appeal to the more “Green” home buyer.

1) We spend, spend, spend, spend……………and…
2) We demand it cheap, cheap, cheap…………as a result
3) We have a crumbling national infrastructure, failing schools, a disappearing manufacturing sector and a myriad of other self-inflicted problems.
4) In addition, we had an opportunity to avoid our current over-dependence on fossil fuels decades ago; unfortunately, during the 80’s, those in power put it this way “the American Lifestyle is NOT negotiable” (George Bush Sr. actually said this!). Thirty years later, indeed, our lifestyle is NOT only NOT negotiable, it isn’t efficient, it isn’t sustainable and it is going to become more difficult to live in the 21st Century. We’ve left ourselves fewer opportunities rather than more.
Had our leaders been more visionary, they would not have eliminated incentives for alternative energy and they would have had a long-term perspective rather than a buy today, pay tomorrow philosophy.

As I mentioned in my post about Thomas Friedman’s book “Hot, Flat and Crowded, he hits the nail right on the head with the statement: that in the 80’s Americans adopted the “dumb as I wanna be” philosophy…..the spending spree started and today, most Americans find themselves wondering where the “American Dream” really lies.

The answers lie in a commitment by Americans to demand public policy that encourages and subsidizes alternative energy; to shop locally; to quit believing that we can run an economy by flipping burgers, selling ring-tones, and “securitizing debt.” Friedman’s premise is that the green revolution can and will save us. It’s where innovation and productivity come together.