Admittedly, these experiences are like one's first experiences with learning how to paint - finger painting and messy but with much larger existential consequences and no actual paint.
So it's more like "Baby's first handgun?" Let's hope we survive our first "test" here.
"But at a solar/green event I went to, I use so little electricity that only after mentioning that was it *maybe* worthwhile for me."
This is a very good point. Homes, individually, don't take too much power, so powering each one of them with it's own generator (solar or otherwise) is redundant and expensive. Maintenance, too, is a pain for the average home owner. So centralizing power generation is great, for the most part. At least until you start factoring in transmission loss. What ideally will happen, and this will take time thanks to the cooperation it requires, is that district power plants will spring up. That a commercial building can produce so much power that it can sell the rest to local houses. You're starting to see this happen, and in the future, hopefully it will happen more. There's other benefits to this approach as well. Say, for instance, you run a massive server farm. This farm produces a lot of heat, and if you can capture this heat, you could use it to power your building and perhaps other neighboring buildings as well. It's an idea that's catching on in Europe and a few places in the US. So maybe solar power on your home isn't going to become viable, but that doesn't mean solar won't be in your future.
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!