Renewable Energy--worth it?

For one of my assignments in school I was browsing the internet and stumbled on renewable energy ideas and the like.

Essentially, it was gray water systems and solar power. I then quickly dug out the power and water bill over at my studio (it's not just my power and water, as it is on a farm) and I was actually pretty surprised: We're paying barely more than the base price for our water (which in this area is $7). The power bill is the expensive one, on average I think it was $50 or $60, which was anywhere from one month we used 200kwh to another month 1100kwh. --Think that's a lot?

I threw out the idea of a gray water system: not only would purchasing it be too expensive, but maintaining it would also be too much work and would be much more expensive than paying the $7-10/mo. we are now.

Here's the story of solar panels:
I found a simple site that offers the whole kit to setting up solar panels (all the bolts and wiring and converters are included). Then I looked into what the government was offering as incentives. Then I found a set-up that pumped out 680kwh, or in other words the medium bill out of the 7 or so months I looked up.

Ready for the price: $20,000. Plus you get 25% cost UT state tax deduction (which would have been $5,000) and a %30 federal tax deduction (which was $6,000).
And it would probably take 25 years to earn back the bill you would have paid to purchase them. Meanwhile, over those 25 years you could have invested your $20,000 in renewable energy corporate stocks and made much more money.

Moral of the story? Coal and Nuclear power is the way to go. Coal is cheap to mine and use apparently, and Nuclear power is the same way: Uranium is cheap to mine and mill.
Are there downsides to coal and uranium? Absolutely. Mountains are toppled, people get cancer, people complain about the pollution and radiation. But at the end of the day the Dollar speaks for itself: you can either get rich and pay a ton of money to make your own electricity, or you can be poor and pay someone else to make your electricity. (and water).

Not to mention that you wouldn't ever want to drink gray water--I suppose we can give it to our cows without a problem? But the truth of it is, as long as their is pollution int he skies, rainwater just isn't all that clean and it costs money to clean it.

I am persuaded to believe that renewable energy isn't quite worth it yet--wait until prices rise.