Is it plausible to live off the Utility Grid and maintain a home life with all that utilities offer?
I’ve heard of people building energy efficient homes that use their environment to trap warm or cool air to maintain a common temperature at home…
I’ve heard of self sufficiency, but is this kind of thing really worth it?
How important is the climate and area you choose. Or is the building material and design of a home the thing that would provide for living off the grid?
Yes.
People do this all the time. And then blog endlessly about it. Just do a Google on living off the grid.
Is it worth it? I guess it is to them. I have no idea how you would define it for you, so that’s an unanswerable question.
If you have unanswerable questions you should put them in another forum than GQ.
If you live far enough out in the boonies, it’s entirely possible that having your own generator is cheaper than having powerlines strung far enough to reach you.
Absolutely possible. However, the up-front investment is quite substantial. Probably 50-100% the cost of your house by the time you’re completely off the grid.
Sure. Subscribe to the Mother Earth News to get the personal stories. It depends on what you to accomplish as well. There are a lot of people in raw numbers across the U.S. in Canada that really do this voluntarily. Some just don’t like technology that depends on outside sources to live their lives while others don’t have a problem with electricity itself at all but want to provide their own. You can generate your own power through lots of different methods including windmills, solar panels, a small hydroelectric dam etc. It isn’t usually cost effective at least in the short-term but some people really want to provide electricity to a dwelling where the commercial electrical grid doesn’t reach.
Home Power is a magazine that has that as its sole focus.
And more reliable. If you’re the sole customer at the end of a very long power line and some drunk hits a pole and your power line goes down, the electric co. isn’t going to be in any real hurry to get you back online.
That’s one reason I love living a block off a major thoroughfare in a neighborhood with buried lines. If my power goes out, chances are hundreds of other households are out, too. Strength in numbers.
If you live within a traditional electric utility’s franchise it has to provide you with power and it can’t charge you for the construction of the power lines.
The cost would go into ‘rate base,’ upon which the company earns a regulated return on equity. In fact, most utility’s would be thrilled to have you force them to build more transmission, as expanidng rate base is the ‘primary objective.’ They will be able to recover on the asset, from every rate-payer, forever.
Now, if you are outside of the franchise (a franchise is simply an area in which a utility has been granted a monopoly - that’s the crux of the deal by the way - we give you monopoly rights and you have the duty to provide the servce to all comers, at a regulated rate of return) - then you have more issues. Traditionally, this was addressed therough the rural electification act and the creation of a bunch or electric coops, but there are still some gaps I would guess.
utilities are governed by each state. a utility can charge to to extend their lines depends on the regulations they are subjected to.
Fair enough, then I’ll only speak to the states where I know the regulations.
Apply my response to Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky.
If you can find an example of a state that allows a monopoly franchised utility to charge individual customers for contruction of transmission, I’d love to see it.
And for the record, utilties are also regulated by the FERC, the NERC, the DOE, and the NRC - all federal agencies.
A few years ago, many in the more rural parts of Hawaii lived off the grid. But the call of HDTV and of hold water and cold drinks have brought many of these back on line. Only the diehard bachelor, who spends his time drinking beer at his favorite watering hole and meals at the local kind diner and take swims in the ocean in lieu of baths remain off line. Yet unto to these diehards, the cell phone and the free porn beckons.
Some people go all the way to be self sufficient. It’s expensive, though.
You know what - I’m going to take back the part about states not allowing utilities to charge people to hook them up. The states all require that utilities serve anyone in their teritory, but they probably allow some costs to be passed on to hook them up - but when it comes to large bills, a utility really doesn’t have an incentive to pass the cost to the customer. It’s better to have it in rate base where you can earn 12% on the asset, every year, forever.
I have friends who live in one of those. The house itself wasn’t that expensive, but then they used a lot of recycled materials and volunteer labour. It does have the virtue of being very thermally efficient, which means that their heationg costs are very low.
What can be expsnsive is the solar/wind/micro-hydro electric system. Some people assume that they can just plug in a solar/wind/micro-hydro system in place of their utility feed and otherwise do nothing, for about the same cost. This results in up-front costs often greater than $50,000 for the system.
They quickly discover how much saving can be realized through greater efficiency, which means less cash outlay at the beginning.
Here’s an example. I was in the hardware store looking at LED lightbulbs. They were around $40 to give the same light output as an incandescent bulb that cost 50c.
Let’s say that was a 100-watt incandescent: it uses 100 watts of electricity. But the LED bulb uses 10 W, If you’re getting power from the grid at 20c/kWh, lighting the incandescent for an hoiur costs 2c, while lighting the LED for an hour costs 0.2c. Not a big difference in you’re in the city? Maybe. But consider…
A 150-W solar panel with a battery and associated equipment might cost $750. That panel will run just one of the 100-watt incandescent bulbs. But it will run 15 of 10-watt the LED bulbs, for 15 times the light.
Sure, you pay up front, but then the cost drops, and you’re bnot subjected to blackouts beyond your control. And in a situation where it might cost $50,000 to run a pole line to your rural property, and then you’d still have bills, generating your own looks a lot more attractive.
And don’t think utilities don’t go through the same calculations. It’s just as beneficial for them to encourage people to become more efficient. A thousand families each replacing 10 100-watt incandescents with $40 LED bulbs that use a tenth of the power will reduce their load from 1 megawatt to 100 kilowatts, at a cost of $400 per family. Reductions like these across a city or a province mean less outlay on new power plants.
It’s not the transmission lines, it’s the distribution lines–beyond the last substation.
I know someone who chose to go off the grid at least in part because of Y2K scares. It wasn’t so much that he believed Y2K would really wipe everything out, but it got him thinking about how much he depended on the outside world. In a major catastrophe, he decided the only thing he could rely on was what he owned.
That said, this person is not 100% off the grid. In part, that’s because he sometimes generates enough power to sell some of it back to the utilities and, in part, it’s because the rest of the world can become his backup just in case it turns out that he can’t even rely on what he owns.
It was expensive. He has a straw-bale house that cost a fair bit more to make than a normal home, but it will pay itself off eventually.
I looked into doing it and it looked to be about $50,000 without storage. I’m waiting for a home flywheel systen before I consider it
:dubious: Really? A home flywheel system? Or is that a whoosh? Seems to be way over the top for a storage system.
I don’t think that it is as hard as people make it sound. We own property where our neighbors are all off the grid. We have not moved/built there. Just have the land.
Real Goods Solar Source book is chock full of good info. You can get it at Amazon. Can’t find my copy at the moment. But if memory serves, I think they had set up for less than 10 grand.
A lot of folks, including me only have power and phone (the phone is questionable, and as soon as we have better cell cover, it’s a gonner). I heated with wood for years. I live in a passive solar house. I changed to propane only because I got lazy, putting in 6 cords of wood a year is a lot of work. Now we heat with a single propane stove. And -20f is not unusual. Heck, we still have snow in the yard.
I have a well and a septic system. That’s a real real common set up. So, the only thing to overcome is electricity. It’s a leap, sure. And some old habits have to change. If you can build from the ground up, I doubt that it would double the cost of the house.
I think it’s more accurate to say that you’re subject to blackouts like anyone else, but you don’t have to wait for the power company to fix them. You can get right out there and fix them yourself.
