And without adding on huge debt, to your already burdensome mortgage and credit card debt.

I sure like add on greenhouses for retrofit.

The best would be on the southside of an existing building.  But to adjust to buildings that have no solar exposure, a greenhouse can be built on, extending into a good sunny patch of the property.

A garage or shed can be added on the north side of the greenhouse.  A greenhouse supplies early garden plants and food most of the year in most places.

Solar collectors can then be hung inside the green house, in the form of horizontal louvre blinds that form solar concentrating troughs that can be adjusted to follow the sun.  Solar PV is mounted in strips onto a flat metal conduit with water circulating to the solar water heater.

The solar energy leaks through the blinds to power the plants in the greenhouse.  Additional louvre trough PV/heat collectors can be mounted on roofs (south facing) and covered with tough glazing.  Blinds are made with insulating material and close off at night.

This is a very cheap cogeneration design, easily installed by DIYers or local contractors.  Each louvre end would have a flexible plug and play fitting for water and electric power at the ends where the louvres mount on a pivot.

A control motor would pivot the louvres according to optimium sun angle.  The louvre collectors could be assembled one at a time and the parts all mass produced.

With a nice geo heat exchange system and building mass storage (and maybe heat stoage salt also, much more dense a storage media), heat/cold (depending on climate and season) would be stored when the sun was shining.  Enough heat/cold storage would keep the building and refrigerator/freezer at proper temperatures for days with no sun.

That's it bio-d.  Less than $100 a year for all utilities.  In fact this would produce extra solar electricity for the grid (depending on solar collector area). At the price payed here by a local utility (23 cents per kwh to solar panel owning customers) that might just pay your property taxes.  As well as providing all your own free kwhs and btus.

And lots of greenhouse space for your own veggies.  And lots of biomass for your very own backup generator running on biogas.  A 2hp generator, very tiny, running on biogas would make sure you have power and heat (with cogeneration) no matter what.

Imagine the future, ride on into it on your plugin bike and car.  Hehey.  But seriously, it does seem doable.

Subsidies per kwh to homeowners and low interest community loans would sure help.  The lowest income people are hit the hardest by soaring energy prices.

I think this sort of design (maybe tweaked back and forth) in the "architecture of mistakes" (earthship "Garbage Warrior") mode to find the best devices.  That's the beauty of the per kwh subsidy, the market, the real market of real consumers, make the product decisions.

People will want a proven product that delivers the GHG free kwhs that insures a reliable subsidy check to help pay for it.