Firewood tops solar for heating in Arizona

[obey]

Gary Jordan has been selling firewood for three decades and his family has been heating with it for three generations. But a few years back he got curious and looked into solar energy.

"I would love to have solar panels there at my house," said Jordan, the owner of Paul Bunyan's Firewood in Tempe. "But that initial cost, you know, it's a shocker."

Jordan's decision to stick with firewood made his home one of the 48,836 in Arizona that use firewood for heating -- 30 times the number of Arizona homes that use solar energy to keep warm.

Only 1,620 Arizona homes rely on solar-energy installations to provide heating, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, ranking sun-soaked Arizona seventh in the nation for homes using solar for solar heating.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2012/03/30/20120330arizona-firewood-solar-power.html#ixzz1qrNrkTYS

[saras]

1. FIrewood pollutes - you can't use it here for that reason.

The only woodburners left are grandfathered in. But there's no doubt about solar being expensive upfront. If you're poor, forget it. It's out of the question, and would belong to the dwelling and not you anyways. Wood you can burn in a boxcar in a bucket if you have to.

[Confusious]

2. Probably depends on where you live in Arizona

I live in southern Arizona, and in 10 years of being here, I have yet to enter a house that has a fireplace.

I lived in Alaska for 20 years, and almost every house had a fireplace.

[kristopher]

3. I kind of doubt the statement in the headline of this article

If the title read "solar PV" it is probably accurate, but various forms of passive solar heating have been a mainstay of traditional southwestern architecture for centuries.

As far as new renewables go, it is expected that heating systems are going to be an important way to store energy generated in excess of demand from variable sources. Wind and solar thermal are both cheap enough right now to be competitive as far as the price of energy goes, but the demand for storage is still so low that it will probably be more than a decade before these types of 'stored heat' heating systems start appearing on consumer's lists of options.