If you want to see what happens when otherwise "green" people are faced with actually having a wind farm in their back yard look at the "Cape Wind" project.
A significant number of the people who have been telling us how horrible fossil fuels are (John Kerry, Mitt Romney and the whole Kennedy clan) suddenly changed their tune when you could see it from their house.
From what I have seen of small wind installations is they seem to be using them for load leveling. If you watch a while you will see them feathering and reloading the turbines. I assume they can tune this faster than a coal plant or maybe just more efficiently.
I am being courted by a solar company here. They have shaved the proposal and shaded the rebates to get me down to a 10 year pay off assuming everything works as planned. I seriously thinking about it.
I still have some homework to do, like what brand of hardware am I getting and whether that is a good brand. I also want more of the technical info.
I am most interested in the solar pool pump, since it is the simplest (just a collector array and a DC motor) and least critical in operation.
