If you contemplate the benefits of using renewable energy for your home, are you thinking about yourself, or of the spaceship you live on, called Earth? There are gains to be made on both levels.

From an intimate perspective, there's an immediate financial advantage. You can stay connected to the grid for when you need it, but other times have more energy than you require, and sell it to the local utility, greatly reducing your bill.

Pondering on a planetary scale, it's impossible not to consider the wars, related to oil, despite what politicians may tell us. The insanity of the mightiest countries in the world, risking their stability to quench their obsessive thirst for the thick black liquid, boggles the mind. If renewable energy could meet our home energy requirements, wars could end, or just not start. That must be the biggest impetus to getting serious about solar power.

We could make the air we breath a lot cleaner and safer, not only for us, but for our families to be, for generations to come. People would be healthier and cancer and illness would be drastically reduced.

Nuclear energy poses immense danger, both in terms of accidents as well as storage of the radioactive waste, lasting many thousands of years. It's a ridiculous way to generate electricity, not entirely unlike shooting a missile to kill a fly. It's that inappropriate. If we were able to power our homes with green energy, there would be no excuses anyone could make to build more nuclear power plants, ever.

Try to remember your physics class. Do you recall the 1st law of thermodynamics? It said the amount of energy is a constant. Then the second law, the entropy law said energy changes forms by how we use it, and the natural tendency is to wind down and be less able to be used. Well, when you look at how humans have decided to use our energy, it seems like we went out of the way to make the worse possible use of entropy; or that we even tried to speed it up.

Renewable energy, on the other hand, seems almost like a reprieve from entropy, an escape from the law, almost. It allows us to tap into the energy flow and make use of it, without running out of usable energy. Whether we power our houses, directly from the sun, the flow and movement of water, wind, or geothermal forces, the benefits of using renewable energy for your home are local and global, immediate and future, health and wealth, simple and profound.