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Well, after another lovely power outage here in the Silver Spring area due to a big storm that blew in on Friday, July 23rd 2005. Suffice it to say that we were without power for about 24 hours (power was restored early Sunday morning). It's kind of annoying as this happens more frequently here than where we used to live in Austin, TX. Part of this is due to the fact that we are in the path of more hurricanes because we live in the mid-Atlantic region -- but part of it simply comes down to the fact that PEPCO -- the Potomac Electric Power Company -- has not done enough to maintain and protect their power infrastructure.
After Hurrican Isabelle back in September of 2003 I started looking at solar power and power generators for the house. This page is an attempt to provide a compendium of my findings. I hope others can use it to help themselves determine if they should install either of these solutions.
These are some general links to renewable energy information on the Net
National Renewable Energy LaboratoryThe site below has an interesting solar power calculator that focuses on the Kyocera product line but is useful anyway
Clean Power Research(note: you'll need to view this either with IE 6 or Netscape 4 or 7 with Macromedia Flash 5 at minimum)
Here are some links to some pages about solar power in Maryland:
Modular Solar Photovoltaic HomesThe following are links to natural gas backup generator systems
Briggs and Stratton home generator systems