Unusual Property of the Week

Fully solar, no need to hook up to the grid! Although it ain’t cheap at nearly $1 million. If you want to get away from it all at this place, to afford it you probably had to be making money in the middle of it all for awhile.

A separate cabin, 137 acres, a barn, a shop a waterfall, it’s got some cool features, plus they’re throwing in all the equipment to make maple syrup! It’s on a gravel road somewhere a few miles out of Botkinburg. More photos here.

For those of you wanting to reduce your own dependence on the grid, perhaps due to your experience this past week and continuing for what may be several more weeks, it appears the latest version of the federal stimulus bill will be giving you some relief from the cost of doing so:

“The bill would also remove dollar caps on a variety of residential renewable energy investment tax credits, allowing homeowners to claim a 30% credit on small wind energy investments and residential solar and geothermal equipment. It would include incentives for homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their existing homes, extend a tax credit for efficiency upgrades through 2010 and increase it from 10% of the cost to 30% for 2009 and 2010.”

Maybe one of these days Arkansas will even require its utilities to buy back excess capacity from its customers who have renewable energy sources, but I doubt we’ll be leading the way on that sort of thing anytime soon.