It also depends on how much habitat you wish to destroy. Those giant windmills destroy acres of habitat. It's always amusing and pathetic to me how the city folk all rally around the windmill cause, and yet, they insist on destroying my home in order to make energy cheaper for THEM! right now there is a huge battle between the King Ranch (along with local area ranches) and a private energy company who wants to build windmills through I highly sensitive bird migratory pathway. No one ever talks about the miles and miles of torn up ground that will be incurred because they have to bury thick cables to attach the windmills to the collectors. No one mentions the lost acreage of prime wildlife habitat to gravel roads necessary to access each and every windmill placed. No one ever mentions the ugly side of windmills, yet it's a really big deal for our rural communities who have to suffer the losses so the big cities can continue to live in opulence. Shame on them. Build the windmills on top of their ugly sky scrapers, they will use less plastic, steel, and rubber running the cables alone! And they won't destroy vital and rare habitat. AND, they won't risk the extinction of the vast number of endangered plants we have in this area only.

I think a lot of energy needs can be dispersed simply through good building design and proper siting, without additional cost.

Retrofiting existing structures to get the same effect may be a whole other story, however.

<i need to generate not only my household electricity, but also sustain a high watt sound system for weekly use... >

If you want to do this you need to generate quite a bit of power. Your best bet is a combination of both. Wind to keep the cost down and solar to generate when there is no wind. You have no choice but to also but in a large battary bank to stoe energy for when you need to run your sound system. It is going to be expensive there is really no way around that. You want to use lots of power you have to invest lots of money at the current stage of solar and wind power available to you.

rooftop solutions are a compromise, straight up...

without a specific unavoidable and well justified reason, it is only extra loads over design in wind, traffic, and thermal stresses.

in a desert application, the opportunity to remove heat from a water cooled collector may in fact be very appropriate in energy managment, altho only if design loads and the expected life of the structure are considered.

high watt sound> switching power supply amplifiers are extremely more efficient than the standard semiconductor configurations.

although they are more expensive, difficult to find, and complex to service if they fail...

hysteresis losses in the conversion from AC to DC before the audio power sections are reduced, and as much also in the improvement from 'pure' thermal pollution of the output section heat sinks found in standard (even professional pa driver) power amps.

the key word in specs is 'switching amplifier' and 'switching power supply'...it refers to the fact that in the power supply, higher peak voltages in the waveform are switched on only for the section of the wave requireing them..

the matter is usually that for any given speaker output current, the amplifier (power section heatsink) dissipates the power from the supply instead of the speaker which converts the current to work. in the case of a switching amplifer, that voltage is not maintained on the power supply until needed (at the wave peak), and so does not have to be pumped into the sink as heat in order to maintain fidelity of the gain and input signal.

they are complicated, expensive, and hard to find... but much more lightweight, and extremely more efficient.

in a hi-watt application from solar power... i cannot imagine any configuration where a switching supply would not be more responsible.

Oh, and this can get expensive, but you do have options for converting all of your appliances over to DC, high-efficiency, sustainable. I used to work for Gaiam when they were buying out our yoga company. It was actually a very cool place, morally speaking, to work.
www.gaiam.com/category/ec...en+living.do