In all honesty, and not wanting to spoil your euphoria, I have to point out a few things.
1) You are not a typical power consumer. You are designing a system and refurbishing a home that can be run on solar energy without hydrocarbon burning in everyday operation. This is both expensive and complicated, beyond the capabilities of most electrical consumers. The implementation of your system is largely a DIY matter, whereas most people would have to pay somebody to do these same things, and their costs would be much greater than yours.
2) You live in a relatively mild climate in a Southern US state. If I end up in a situation where I am building versus buying a home in Wisconsin, I will have a much harder design hurdle than yours, both because the solar flux is lesser, and because the HVAC energy needs are higher, especially in Winter. Most US consumers would fall between these two extremes, but not all. For example, residents of the Florida peninsula would have greater A/C energy requirements than you, and residents of Alaska would have greater heating requirements. These are the real extremes, and solar or solar plus wind would still need backup energy sources for most existing residences, not to mention new ones built to more stringent standards such as PassivHaus or LEED Platinum.
3) There are greater challenges than design in some situations. For example, the Mother-In-Law's house that the wife and I just inherited on Nantucket. That house is 20+ years old, built to an HVAC standard that is completely obsolete, with leaky windows and doors, and run by a combination of electricity and a single oil burner that supplies hot water baseboard heat and domestic hot water. You or I could easily solve these problems without the interference of the HDC (Historic District Commission) on that island. The HDC is fiercely protective of the look and feel of the 17th century structures that exist there, the external appearance of anything must get their approval before a building permit is issued. How many 17th Century period-correct solar arrays have you designed? The 17th century version of wind power looks like this:
....and turns dried corn kernels into corn meal. The cost of electricity on Nantucket has recently declined from more than $0.35 per kWh to about $0.147/kWh, not because of alternative energies, but because they replaced the island's diesel generators with an undersea power feed from Cape Cod, where the Koch Brothers sell hard coal to various power plants. I don't know of any remaining solar or wind contractors on Nantucket, which happens to be on the NASA list of the 10 best sites for wind power, but the island will probably will get bounced from the list next time because it would be hard to compete with cheap coal.
4) One of my own design goals in Wisconsin, assuming I am designing and building versus buying an existing structure, is to have a system that is operable via a non-technical person, either the wife or the new owner of my home. I will therefore endeavor to keep the local electrical inspectors happy by employing electrical contractors and architects familiar with alternative energy systems. I am anticipating that the cost per square foot will be relatively high, mainly because of the $100,000 per acre costs for beachfront property near Lake Michigan. Not to mention that the Nantucket home is on $1,000,000/acre real estate, in a pine forest 3/4 mile from the beach (beachfront costs $10,000,000/acre there). I mention this because many people have external design requirements such as keeping a spouse happy, or a very picky HDC, that you apparently do not. So let me simply ask: will your wife be able to operate and maintain your energy system after your death, or will the new owner of your property? Or will YOU, without access to Internet tech support?
Again, the last thing I want is to spoil your enthusiasm. But you are ignoring constraints that most people would have to face, and (concerns for TEOTWAWKI aside) will probably never produce electrical power competitive in cost to the $0.117/kWh that is the national average. Still, I love reading your messages, and encourage you to continue - and to get your wife's input regularly. Mine, for example, values a European vacation more than alternative energy systems.