For maybe a century of even more people throughout the world have had dreams about it. Probably since the days of Faraday and Edison and the harnessing of electricity. The dream was to generate electricity off-grid at home with solar panels and windmills. The dream is nearing reality.
Hopefully it won't take more ecological disasters like that on the Gulf of Mexico involving fossil fuels to get the big push into clean energy. With centralized generating through power stations. There is a limited amount that can be done to increase green energy. The only clean technology when it comes to centralized generation is Hydro. These stations are limited by the very small number of suitable locations.
All other centralized generations systems use currently "dirty" fossil fuels or potentially catastrophic nuclear power. Maybe there will be a discovery of some, as yet, unknown miracle fuel. Barring that, there are no alternative fuels for big power stations than those we are already only too familiar with.
Having a huge number of mini power plants is one very viable answer. One for each house or at least one for a small group of homes. Whether such units are linked into the grid is just a detail. But such technology is looking more and more viable by the month.
Windmill and solar technology is advance in leaps and bounds. There have been significant developments in both in just the past six months. And each generation is better than the previous by a big number.
Recent ecological disasters implicating fossil fuels are helping spur on the alternatives. They are prodding visionary scientists and business to put on their thinking caps. And extremely promising results are being reported with increased regularity in scientific journals. The prospect of being in a position to generate electricity off-grid at home with solar panels and windmills is fast approaching a house just like yours. I have personally managed to build my own home renewable energy system by following an online system which you can find out more about at my website link below.