DIY Alternative Energy

We're mercilessly bombarded by the continuous and arbitrary increases of our gas and electricity bills. We're riddled with toxins and scraping holes into our environmental equanimity to boot. All for what? To be slaves to foreign oil and electrical companies? While everybody seems to want to change this atrocious situation as made evident from the media coverage alternative energy has been receiving, our culture is still in a bit of an energetic pickle. Alternative energy is available but at the same time ridiculously expensive - often taking decades to pay itself off with commercially installed kits. While at the same time, the average Joe is just trying to make ends meet by obediently throwing his money at the gas and electric companies with a sigh and a shrug. So what are we citizens to do? Just sit back and take the beating like we have been doing for the past thirty-some odd years. If you contemplate this question for a moment you'll soon inevitably realize that that's hardly a possibility. The unemployment rate is at an alarming high and the economy is at an astounding low. In order to thrive during this struggling era, we must find alternative energy sources that fit the criteria of being practical, economical and environmental.
There are innumerable reasons for switching to an alternative power source. For one: it reduces environmental pollution. Practically everyone has seen Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth", so they now realize the depletion of our Earth's ozone layer that preserves life on our fragile planet. But the inconvenience of the matter doesn't stop there. The combination of the reduced plants and other oxygen producing vegetation coupled with the increase in environmental pollutants has seriously reduced the oxygen levels on our planet. As modern research has indicated, this is a factor implicated in serious mental and physical problems such as autism, ADD, ADHD, antisocial personality disorder and other highly detrimental conditions that is inflicting all levels of society. Additionally, the depletion of the atmosphere has allowed in an unprecedented level of UV rays producing further physiological stress often taking the form of steadily increasing skin cancer rates.
Now for the obvious: it's cheaper, and I'm fairly certain that the majority of people are intimately familiar with the inherent importance of an energy system that isn't dependent on international exports or greedy national corporations. The only problem is that it only seems to be cheaper in the LONG run...costing tens of thousands of dollars to set up and taking decades for it to pay itself off. What the people of this country truly need now more than ever is an easy-to-follow, understandable set of programs/systems that anybody can do themselves with the minimal amount of time and effort as possible. Above this post is a list of the best programs I have found in the field of DIY alternative energy that quite sufficiently fit this bill. You can either spend hours researching online and years of fruitless experimentation with the multitude of the other programs, diagrams, etc., out there (like I unfortunately did), or spend a couple of minutes looking into, or at least considering, this short list of champs that I have compiled so that you don't waste the same amount of time, effort or money that I did. That is an inconvenience that nobody can any longer afford.