Earlier this week I posted about an idea I had which led to some research about living ‘off the grid’ via renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro.
My initial conclusions were that it was prohibitively expensive, and varied widely based on local natural resources, tax breaks, real estate costs, etc.
Well, after reading the chaper on ‘off the grid’ living in The Renewable Energy Handbook, my opinion hasnt changed.
In the book, there is only example of an ‘off the grid’ household which committed to maintaining a ‘common’ energy lifestyle. However, even these folks required the use of a diesel generator (ok its 30% BIOdiesel) – even after spending $31,000 on their system (!). There were some concessions on the home design as well which weren’t appealing to me – its basically a greenhouse built up against a berm.
The other examples were a summer cabin style home with minimal power usage and a family which was dealing with a very inconvenient-looking refrigerator and no dishwasher (you can pry my dishwasher away from my cold, dead hands!).
One of the major issues I keep bumping up against is power *storage*. The sun don’t shine at night, so you have to *store* the energy collected during the day – which means big, ugly, deep-cycle batteries.
Another thing that bugs me is that the author isn’t very objective about the installations – he is encouraging and optimistic. For example, he will show a picture of a solar array and caption it as producing X watts of power ‘when the sun shines’, while the quote from the owner clearly states that figure is only the best-case scenario under optimal seasonal weather conditions.
3 responses so far ↓
1 M Mather // Jun 19, 2008 at 9:54 am
Hi Chris! As the publisher of “The Renewable Energy Handbook” I’d like to thank you for using our book to research life-off-the-grid.
Living off-the-grid isn’t cheap, especially if you want to maintain your current and sometimes wasteful energy ways.
We live and work in our off-grid home. After adding a new 1 kw windgenerator to our system, a few new solar panels and rewiring the system to 24V last fall, we have seen a huge improvement in our electricity supply and have not had to run our back-up generator since December!
No, we don’t have a dishwasher but we do use two laptop computers, satellite internet, printers/scanners, a TV with satellite dish, stereos, electric fridge, clothes washer, toaster, kettle and even a small convection toaster oven. Our water is usually heated with propane but with our excess electricity we’ve been using an electric hot water heater to pre-heat our water and so the propane tank rarely turns on.
Many of the U.S. states provide generous rebate programs (here in Canada we can apply for a rebate of any provincial sales tax we pay on renewable energy equipment) but more important than the price are the environment benefits. Just think if more individual citizens took the lead and generated their electricity using renewable techniques!
2 Chris (Admin) // Jun 19, 2008 at 10:09 am
The ability to get a federal rebate on provincial sales tax is a great program.
I was thinking ‘why not just not charge sales tax’? But I guess that would not be a good incentive for provinces to encourage renewable energy business growth in their region.
I applaud your efforts and are amazed at your ability to stay off the generator since December – in Canada no less!
Thanks for footing the early-adopter bill to inspire the rest of us!
3 p moorey // Dec 27, 2009 at 6:22 am
Am trying to go off grid. Built a 1kw wind system, am pricing an inverter (before HST)
can,t find info on tax rebates. Get a runaround
Please email info
Tx
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