I disagree, but in not in your situation so I can be wrong.
Unless you are producing way, way more electricity than you can use I think net metering is a great arrangement for the customer. (Not so much for the utility company)
The electricity is usually bought by the utility company at a much lower cost than what the customer is paying. Because the generation cost is only a percentage of the cost, there is taxes, maintenance of the grid ...
For example in France we pay 0.1952€/kWh, but the utility is buying the solar electricity produced by household at 0.04€/kWh.
Meanwhile with net metering your electricity is virtually bought at the same price as what you are buying your electricity for.
I've looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 vehiclra using it per day. Let's be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
How much of the "outside" can a kid access today without taking the risk of being it by a car ? As soon as he crosses the door of the house he risks his life.
I don't understand how we accepted that as normal.
Now compare that with a carless world, kids could go everywhere.
Abduction or aggression are still a risk but almost insignificant compared to the risk of being hit by a car, yet this is the one we are talking about.
In my village there is a donation place drop stuff they don't need anymore and take what they need. Half of our kid clothing, it's great ! A lot of my kids clothing come from there, and go back there once they outgrew it.
I did not know that the US didn't have an official ID card.
This is from Wikipedia:
All legislative attempts to create a national identity card have failed due to tenacious opposition from liberal and conservative politicians alike, who regard the national identity card as the mark of a totalitarian society.[1]
Solar is not great for heating in winter because solar produces very little energy in winter (which is literally the reason why winter is cold in the first place: less solar radiation).
So even if you have solar, unless your installation is massively oversized you generally don't have spare every in winter for heating.
Small consumer wind turbines make sense only in limited cases, and I say that as someone who had been building some. Because places with a strong constant wind are limited and generally this is not when houses are built.
I think tailscale would fit your use case perfectly.
You can install tailscale on your computer and your NAS. This way, there is a tunnel between your computer and your NAS. In practice you will have a separate IP address for your NAS that you can use from your computer.
It also means that you will have secure access to your NAS from wherever in the world as long as you have internet access.
Then, Mullvad and tailscale are integrated together. It means that from tailscale you get the Mullvad add-on that allows you to use Mullvad as exit-point. Meaning that all your traffic that is not in your tailscale network will go through Mullvad (so in your case everything except your NAS)
It's been two years that I am using that and it's working great for me.
I disagree, but in not in your situation so I can be wrong.
Unless you are producing way, way more electricity than you can use I think net metering is a great arrangement for the customer. (Not so much for the utility company)
The electricity is usually bought by the utility company at a much lower cost than what the customer is paying. Because the generation cost is only a percentage of the cost, there is taxes, maintenance of the grid ...
For example in France we pay 0.1952€/kWh, but the utility is buying the solar electricity produced by household at 0.04€/kWh.
Meanwhile with net metering your electricity is virtually bought at the same price as what you are buying your electricity for.