...but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I made that joke at the tail end of Rapid Fire yesterday (Jon Fortt: "I'm not a lawyer, but..." Me: "But you did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night!"). And afterwards, Robert Frank and Kate Rogers said to me: what was with the hotel reference? They had never heard that line from the famous Holiday Inn commercials. I am still dumbfounded by this and need you all to tell me whether I ought to be or not.
Anyhow, there was a fascinating story on my local NBC news* this morning. I can't find a link online yet, so hopefully I can convey the gist of it: Con Ed, the local utility, is showing off a $20,000 geothermal system (after rebates) that both heats and cools your house. No furnace, no A/C system, and you won't even need a humidifier, apparently, which is hugely appealing to me right now.
Here's my point: could this be a real rival to solar power in the future? That cost is already attractive given that the solar systems we looked at cost at least that much, and you couldn't even store the energy to use in case of an outage without buying at least two Tesla Powerwalls that could run $20,000 themselves and make me worry about the massive energy being stored in our house that could, I don't know, explode?
Geothermal energy means sticking pipes about 500 feet down into the earth instead. Like I said, I'm no expert in this stuff, but a lot of you are, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of geothermal versus solar. If it's true that there's a better, simpler way to heat and cool your home in an energy-efficient way, that's a huge problem for solar, I would think. Those stocks have jumped sharply to start the year; the solar ETF, TAN (ha ha), has spiked to $41 lately after lingering in the low $20s since roughly 2016.
Now, solar gets "affordable" through complex financing schemes that make them pretty affordable on a monthly basis. The utility companies would need to offer something similar for geothermal systems to be similarly within reach for most people. But it's better than being put out of business, right?
Final note: we started looking into solar systems after a power outage and a headache-inducing experiment with a portable generator that needed a lot of maintenance. Solar just didn't make enough sense for us, so we went with the "whole-house" generator from Generac instead, which is pretty costly. Generac has been a stalwart stock performer and has more than doubled in just the past year. But if I were the company or its investors, I'd better be thinking about how to stay competitive with these alternative home energy systems going forward.
Have a great weekend, but first, see you at 1 p.m!
Kelly
*Among other incredible stories today such as the "coronavirus-themed party" at an upstate college, a 13-year-old seriously hurt by an innocent-sounding TikTok challenge, and the death of researcher Larry Tesler who pioneered the use of cut/copy/paste without which I couldn't create this newsletter.