Gas prices are spiking again in the U.S. -- but given the pattern of up/down, up/down gas prices over the past four years in the U.S., apparent in this chart, a lot of people are probably banking on prices coming back down again. [Graph Credit: United States Energy Information Administration]

It’s a bit of a truism that every time gas prices rise in the U.S., electric car advocates shout: “See, we told you so!”

Heck, I confess to being part of the shout about gas prices crowd, and, yes, I’ll even cop to smirking a bit when gas prices go up. Any true EV advocate who claims he/she doesn’t smile, at least a little bit, when gas prices go up in the U.S. isn’t being truthful.

In fact, I’ve written more than my fair share of these types of the “sky is falling”, or, really, sky high gas prices are “skying”, as in skyrocketing, during the past 3 ½ years on SolarChargedDriving.Com. Check out a few of these entries, for example --> ‘Say goodbye to high gas prices forever’, ‘Say no to high gas prices: Fuel an EV with home solar’, ‘Why rising oil prices make me smile.’

As time has progressed, I’ve come to realize this approach may not be the most effective one, and may even be counter-productive.

How so?

There's not much more to add to this 'infographic' that came across my Facebook newsfeed recently: Germany, with a national feed-in tariff tilted toward individual solar installations, is leaps and bounds ahead of the U.S on solar.

And, as this infographic notes -- and, as I, myself, have noted in previous blog entries, there's plenty of irony in this fact.

After all, the U.S. likes to cast itself as the world leader in free-market-ism and the biggest champion of the small (business) guy. But when it comes to electricity production, we're all about helping the big guys and utility monopolies, or just the opposite of what's going on in "socialist" Germany.

Go figure...

Ho, ho, ho, ho! Our entire utility bill (gas + electric) for December 2012 was – drum roll, or, more appropriately put, a big Santa high five, please -- $36.99!

This in a household of four people and for a house that’s 2,100 square feet (if you include the furnished basement), and which is located in Aurora, Colo., not exactly a balmy climate at this time of year. In fact, according to our December 2012 Xcel Energy bill, the average monthly temperature was 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

As this monthly solar production vs. home electric use table produced by TED shows, November and December 2012 were off the charts for us in terms of our electric use. Of course, our natural gas use was also way down -- because we're primarily heating with electric, not gas.

We burned though 1,600 kWh of electricity and generated just 300 kWh of solar electricity in December. This represented the second straight month in which: a) we used more than 1,000 kWh of electricity; b) our electricity use far exceeded our solar-electricity generation.

Yes, all of this extra use is planned: Since we don’t have an EV yet, we’re trying to do as much of our winter heating as possible with six wall-mounted eheat.com electric heaters while using our central, natural gas burning, forced hot air furnace as little as possible.

We’re taking the extra electricity we’re burning out of a “bank” of more than 10,000 extra solar-generated kWh we’ve produced in 2 ½ years with our 5.59 kW solar system.