No one knows that better than Andy Keith, Senior Environmental Scientist with Hawaiian Electric Company. Keith has rigged his home with enough photovoltaic panels to produce all the power he needs.

Keith owns a home in Kahaluu. In many ways, he is just like the rest of us. He flicks on the lights when he gets home. He heats food in the microwave. And he makes frequent trips to the fridge.

"For the most part my house is a pretty conventional house. I do have air conditioning. I don't use it all that often. I don't need it that much on the Windward side, but my house is essentially identical to the average house," Keith told KGMB9.

The difference is on Keith's roof which is covered by solar panels.

"In full sun at high noon, which we are pretty close to today, all these racks combined put out just about five thousand watts," Keith said standing next to one of the PV panels on his roof.

Keith has so many solar panels he feeds juice to Hawaiian Electric during the day when the sun is out. Then at night, when the sun is down, he gets power back from HECO.

It is an arrangement called net energy metering. Keith actually produces more electricity than he uses and therefore pays the lowest fee HECO charges for being connected to the grid.

"My bill is under $20 a month. Of course, I spent a lot of money to put a lot of equipment in the house to make that possible," Keith said.

A set up like Keith's can cost between $30,000 and $40,000 thousand dollars. It will eventually pay for itself, but Keith did not install it to save money.

"As a matter of fact, if you are doing it for investment reasons, that's not a very good reason to do it. You are doing PV because you've already done the energy saving things like changing your lights to compact fluorescent lamps. You've already installed solar hot water. If you've done those two things and still want to do more to be proactive to help the environment, that's when you should do PV," Keith said.

No green house gas emissions. No dependence on foreign oil. And an electric bill under $20 a month.

Andy Keith practices what he preaches as an environmental scientist.

KGMB9.com Extra: Going Solar

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