Hard Lessons in Living Off the Grid
longreads.com
longreads.com
“That was all happening, not because of me,” he remembers thinking, “but despite me and my efforts.”
He wanted to be a pioneer, a leader of some sort. This was more important to him than "saving the planet." His goal of going off grid was to position himself as a hero, a frontrunner. Instead of being happy that the island is converting to solar at a pace that exceeds its stated goals, he just feels cheated of his goal of being a role model.
But, I like the ending:
Walking me out past the taro patch, back across the swinging bridge that spans the creek surrounding his property, Luke points out one last thing. “It’s funny,” he says, “it was only recently I learned that Thoreau had his mom bring him food out in the woods.”
He wanted to be a pioneer, a leader of some sort.
This was more important to him than "saving the
planet." His goal of going off grid was to position
himself as a hero, a frontrunner. Instead of being
happy that the island is converting to solar at a
pace that exceeds its stated goals, he just feels
cheated of his goal of being a role model.
The whole story thus boils down to a nice, illustrative all-other-things-equal experiment of how off-the-grid self sufficiency stacks up against a renewable energy power grid "done right". The latter winning by a large margin.
That being said, there are plenty of sunny places on Earth where the power grid is dysfunctional, or is hard to access. Those would be more obvious places for DIY solar panels.
To me, a lot of "off the grid" attempts look like elective attempts at re-solving issues dealt with by plain rural poverty out of necessity, often overspending on capital goods to do so (eg how much are storage batteries, shipped to Hawaii?). But even so, they are valuable as a different starting culture means different assumptions about what amenities are necessary, and different approaches to solving/suffering problems - eg the expectation that there will be dependable electricity for solid refrigeration, copious light at night, computers, and electronic entertainment - rather than simply shrugging off that the benefits aren't needed.
Like capitalism. So... yes.
"But they still have rainy weeks where they run out of power and have to run their gas-powered generator to keep the refrigerator from spoiling."
You don't need to run any other appliances all night when the sun isn't shining. Also, why would you even have a microwave, toaster, and ELECTRIC dryer? Those all use obscene amounts of power.
I live off-grid and we run laptops (using boost converters) and lights directly off 12v DC. A big part of making an off-grid system work is reducing your consumption drastically in ways that you can't even do if you're plugged into the grid.
For the former two, I think microwaves and toasters are efficient uses of energy. Heating/toasting the equivalent with propane or some other fuel isn't worth the trade-off of running the generator for a few extra minutes.
But I guess it depends on how big you size your inverter, and if you intend on having a 2ndary power source.
Of the three appliances above, only the dryer uses a large amount of ENERGY, and energy is what's important for sustainability calculations. I can run my RV's microwave just fine from a 2000-watt inverter and two deep-cycle batteries which are recharged from a 180-watt solar panel, as long as I don't run it very long and I use it during daytime. An electric dryer is a different story because it has to run a long time to be useful. But there's no reason a toaster and microwave can't be part of a modest PV system.
I read this as they completely got rid of their toaster and microwave. Otherwise I think it would read "giving up their toaster, microwave and laundry on cloudy days".
To me, only the electric dryer might be optional because the alternatives are even worse.
A microwave or toaster would be replaced by another appliance, which has its own problems. Toaster ovens would run longer than the microwave. You can have a propane baking oven or propane burners on a stove, but this isn't all that efficient either. Or you can make fire and cook there, just to warm up your leftovers from yesterday. A Microwave or toaster seems like a comparative smart choice.
The electric clothes dryer seems the wasteful bit, since you can just hang the clothes on a drying rack. I haven't personally used a clothes dryer in years. It is most definitely a luxury, even if one has children since folks can just buy a few more clothes to make up for drying time.
Heating with energy generated from solar is going to be 'costly' for some time. Amazed they run a tumble dryer - but guess it is very humid there?
Modern dryers are actually quite efficient. I live in an apartment without a balcony, and bought a new electric condenser dryer the other week. A standard cycle at half load (4.5kg / 9lb) uses 1.2 kWh. If you use it once every two or three days, over the course of a year it will use about the same amount of electricity as a fridge freezer.
But yes if I was living off grid, it would probably be the first thing to go...
We know from statistics and economics that the rest of the world will want the same standard of living as the west, and that they will reach there at somepoint. There for it's very important to deprioritize things that are inherently not green in our culture and make green living a status thing.
Transportation, food, clothing, communication and work are all things that has to be reconsidered to be green.
I noticed something one day. I had recently built a home gym and gave some friends a tour of it.
The next week I hear that they're now working out and going to their local gym.
That moment made me realize the positive effect our actions can have on others.
It'll be the same with living green. Just by doing it, you are convincing other people that it's possible and that they should give it a try.
My home is now 100% powered by solar (just got the Tesla batteries installed a few days ago). It cost less than a kitchen remodel, will be paid off in 10 years, is 100% off-grid 100% of the year, and we've sacrificed no amenities (still got the A/C going comfortably :) ).
I'm one small fish in the pond, but my house is now a blaring advertisement for a greener future.
And in general, the theory of "social proof" suggests people like to follow the crowd in lots of ways.
Would be expensive to run, sure, but very quickly cheaper to have it on standby than stay connected to the grid.
(And the grid is vital to a future of country-wide renewable power IMO, so I'm not personally eager to undermine it)
"We've started timing our showers." "We do Meat-Free Mondays. It's easy and cheaper." "I've got into xeriscaping recently."
There are a number of things that are generally cheaper, not much effort and probably interesting to undertake.
But this is not going to start with public schools, because that would mean convincing policymakers and we established that doesn't work well; so if its starts somewhere its going to be private schools; funded by people interested in making the world greener.
It's disturbing to me that anybody thinks fear mongering and brain washing is an acceptable solution if they think the end goal is a worthy cause.
Do a little bit of soul searching and research before you decide to attack the minds of an entire generation because you read an activist pamphlet that affected you.
About the brain washing thing; I also think such school should dedicate some hours to produce a more skeptic/rational society, skeptic of authority (religion/goverment et all) and of course skeptic of the schooling itself.
"attack the minds of an entire generation"... as oppose to what? The free minds that we have now that voted for Trump? The free minds that pledge loyalty to a flag every morning but none to humanity? A free mind is the one who understands its world better, even the "fearsome" parts.
By the way asking me to do "inner soul searching" is the lowest kind of ad hominem, because its not even a rational one (e.g you belong to X political party so your opinion doesn't count) but an emotional one (e.g your soul is rotten and therefore you have rotten opinions).
A strong sign that there exist too many people on earth. Better strongly decrease the birth rate.
The amount of scale involved simply boggles the imagination. Grid-scale battery banks, that's something you would think was perfected back in the fifties or so. But the best we could come up with was pumped storage, and that's simply not an option everywhere.
China can't have the same Industrial Revolution the West enjoyed. It has to figure out how to leapfrog past it simply because oil just isn't what it was in the 1900s. Africa is going to have to leapfrog past what China does.
We look at cars and computers and think that technology is always going to get more sophisticated, harder for the average joe to work on. But the pendulum is swinging in the other direction now. We are going to have to value things like repairability and durability, aspects that are meaningless inside tech bubbles, simply because when one of your 500lb batteries breaks, you can't exactly get another 500lb battery out there. You have to fix it. Swap it out for a spare, sure, but you need to be able to repair it to return it to the pool.
Individuals think on one scale, organizations think on another. Individuals can't plan for a lot of things, how many people do you know save up to get their tires replaced? I bet not many. But organizations can work that sort of thing into operational plans and pay people to keep up maintenance schedules.
But all of that breaks down when you're talking about long distances. The cost of shipping out a brand new tractor is going to so dwarf any kind of repair that even at the organizational level, the company that farmers pay to provide equipment is going to demand that tractors be serviceable.
Besides accessible space travel, one of the things I most regret not being immortal for is that I don't expect to live to see how/if any nation on the African continent pulls that off.
The future is not at all evenly distributed, and Africa still doesn't really have too many export industries that don't rely on resource extraction, but it's definitely happening at the moment. It's just really under-reported.
The main reason consumer stuff is not repaired, I've decided, is the scale is so small that the savings, too, are so small they vanish.
Until very recently (and maybe even now) the electric utilities spent less on R&D than the dog food industry [0]. Because they didn't need to. There was virtually no need for storage before PV became cheap and fossil fuel became expensive and the regulated monopolies had to start thinking about competition from renewables. Although most of them still haven't recognized this.
[0] https://thebreakthrough.org/archive/dog_food_beats_energy
For Energy related R&D See: GE, Siemens, BP, Shell, Exxonmobile, not the local gas station.
>> Grid-scale battery banks, that's something you would think was perfected back in the fifties or so.
When you can scale energy production on demand with knobs and levers, why?
Here and now: When do renewables create an excess of energy so great that the baseload power sources can't be scaled back to balance it and greater after that to warrant the infrastructure and efficiency penalty of batteries?
Robert Frost on Thoreau:
Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer
With an income in cash of, say, a thousand
(From, say, a publisher in New York City).
Lesson: sustenance farming sucks. Farming has big economies of scale and you get none of them.
What 90% of humanity did, for centuries. Classic peasant stuff, you know.
It's not fun. You depend on the food from your land to eat, so you can't afford to experiment with new methods of doing anything, or grow "cash crops" that you can't directly eat. If the rains fail, you starve. If there's a locust swarm, you starve. If your plow oxen dies, and you can't get another one, you starve.
An interesting insight further down: "It turns out that most remote islands are powered like ships are"
On the mainland, investment in that infrastructure has gone in a cycle, I think we're coming off a decade of very large investment after a decade of 5x less investment in that infrastructure.
What's going to replace the expansion of transmission and distribution will be storage. It's often cheaper to buy storage at today's (relatively high) prices than to continue to size the transmission infrastructure for peak demand, rather than something closer to average demand. It's that peak demand that is the most costly to serve, batteries help with this immensely. In NYC, Con ED is delaying $1.1B in substation upgrades through the use of storage:
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/coned-seeks-efficiency-distr...
And on the smaller scale, in Arizona, a community that's growing is getting batteries rather than upgrading the transmission lines:
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/aps-to-deploy-8-mwh-of-batte...
Electricity billing is fundamentally flawed: Industrial users will pay a demand charge according to their peak usage, when they should really pay their contribution toward the local/regional/national utility's peak usage.
Residential customers may pay a time-of-day generation rate, but still pay a flat per-kwh rate for transmission and distribution. All 3 should be time-of-day, at the minimum. Wires sag more when you use them during the hottest part of the day and when they're already running hot. Upgrades need to happen to handle peak usage, not off-peak usage.
In open energy markets like those in California and Texas there's things called "Locational Marginal Pricing" and "Congestion Revenue Rights" to deal with this.
It's so easy to read the story from the comfort of your chair and criticise, isn't it?
Yes, and often the validity of the criticism bears no relation at all to the comfort of the chair of the author. Weird, huh.
Living off the grid is very practical. There is land on the big island or in the desert where you can get really cheap. Imagine owning a house (quality depending on effort you put in) in a warm climate for 20K. It's actually possible.
I would probably go with "Saying hi to the owner of the local general store" as a minimal amount of human contact. But then, I'd rather talk to shopkeeps than baristas even on a social day.
He set a goal of being totally self-sustained, and achieved some amount of it, while eventually recognizing that the cost of such an experiment was higher than he had initially thought. The whole article ends with him coming to terms with the fact that society is necessary in so many ways, and that we can perhaps achieve sustainability easier as a collective, than as an individual.
The US has lots and lots of cheap land with utility hookups if you don't care about things like high paying jobs.
I'm not sure if any self-sustaing fan would want that.
This is a great summary of the problem with homesteaders and people who want to live off grid. Efficiencies of scale are very real.
I've personally been living off the electric grid for about 2.5 months in my bus with solar and batteries. I've only had to plug into shore power for a few hours once due to a few days of rain. I don't have enough power to run AC 24/7 though which isn't great in 100+ F TX weather.
Don't get me wrong, that Tesla battery plant and the amount of solar Kauai has installed is amazing. I just wasn't expecting the obvious product placement given the story title.
The article uses the correct spelling of Moloka'i, but incorrect spelling of Kauai and Hawaii, which should be Kaua'i and Hawai'i. The ' symbol is an actual letter in the Hawai'ian language. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina
The article mentions Luke growing taro [1] and their daughter mostly eating poi [2], but it doesn't explain that poi is the mashed taro root, usually fermented.
1. “The only real success I’ve had is taro,” Luke says. 2. ... Finley, subsists largely on homegrown poi.
“The United States Board on Geographic Names lists relevant place names both with and without the ʻokina and kahakō in the Geographic Names Information System. Colloquially and formally, the forms have long been used interchangeably.”
some (I can only think of Canada) even export it.
.. but generally the larger your grid the better.
This is either impractical, or a literal death ray.
But self-sufficiency is a capital-intensive effort, and most residents cannot afford the up-front capital, nor have access to the credit necessary. That's yet another reason scaling up is the way to go for self-sufficiency.
> ...sometimes you end up with more power than you can use in the moment.
This is simply solved by co-generation, but it isn't easy: capital and/or credit availability drives this solution path. Excess power on an island can always be put to use somewhere, but it requires intensive capital equipment investments. Make potable water. Desalinate water. Push potable water uphill into a reservoir, then let it flow down through a hydroelectric generator at a minimum constant flow rate; constantly moving the water up and down hill keeps mosquitoes from settling in it. Many islands are in tropical zones, and there are always chilling needs: chill sea water in ocean-side reservoirs to drive central chillers. Even with efficient reuse and recycling, there will still be unreusable, unrecyclable trash: pull the surplus energy to drive a plasma arc-based garbage gasification plant (which generates more energy). Still more energy to use? Drive automated excavation machines with it, building out more reservoir capacity.
> Other than the fruit trees dotting the property...little else has taken root.
Permaculture techniques might assist here.
> ...the utility is offsetting some panel owners’ bills for their (less efficient) solar power...
This will take time (decades) before building construction habits change to regularly accommodate panels. Anywhere there is more climactic heat than desired for comfort levels, panels can be blocking the solar irradiation, but we don't have commonly-accepted construction idioms for moving panels to where they are needed around a building, and everyone ad hocs their own. I'd prefer to see people continue to use panels for the secondary and tertiary benefits, despite the reduced efficiency compared to utility-scale installations, for as long as real estate asset valuation remains high.
Just get everyone involved & roll that solar out. Not a biggie. The savings will be immediate over burning diesel to generate electricity.
All your ideas were spot on & good for using excess energy.
Heck they can even mine some bitcoin if they have extra energy.
If this is kept in mind, it means it would be possible to build resort-style communities in fantastic/beautiful locations that are fully self-sustainable (for energy, not necessarily food, entertainment, water, etc.).
I could easily see these types of communities being co-op or "hacker communities" run by small private (think YC) companies, that allow for digital nomadic living around the world.
Is it self-sustainable if food/entertainment isn't included? I say yes, because as humans we enjoy a diverse range of food than our own ecosystem anyways. So I don't think importing food is a bad thing. Could you survive off-grid if you stacked up on a bunch of beans in a basement? Yeah, but we want quality of life.
Finally, what if you don't want to be in a community? What if you do want to be alone? Well, that is still possible, it just means that "off-grid" (as the article states) means sometimes running a generator. Not as efficient, but at least it gets you what you want.
This is not sustainable. Setting up an island that constantly has to have food and people shipped in and people and trash shipped out is going to be a loss sustainability-wise compared to just living mainland and using renewables there.
(Edit: Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated with a permaculture farm can supply food and energy in a reasonable footprint. Cf. "Alcohol can be a Gas" http://permaculture.com/ )
Both the panels and the turbines have a lifespan of 20-25 years. Turbines also have a range of nasty mechanical failure modes.
Batteries are still not feasible for mass grid deployment or as a replacement for backup gas.
This is a completely subjective and vague statement.
However if we start to quantify it with economics costs, it turns out to be wrong. The lifetime cost of solar is very cheap. And the lifetime of turbines is not a huge amount longer than PV panels.
(FWIW, "we" is also a misnomer. PSE gets the majority of its power from coal and natural gas[3], while Seattle City Light is overwhelmingly hydro[4], as is Snohomish PUD[5].)
0 - http://www.seattle.gov/light/solarenergy/
1 - http://www.pugetsoundsolar.com/solar-in-seattle.html
2 - http://www.seattlepi.com/realestate/article/Solar-power-a-ha... (Pointing out that the relative low cost of power means the payback for solar is longer, not that it is less efficient)
3 - https://www.pse.com/aboutpse/EnergySupply/Pages/Electric-Sup...
Of course solar panels pretty much need to be completely replaced while wind turbines and coal plants can be refurbished, but isn't that mainly because solar panels require next to no permanent structures? Refurbishing wind turbines is a thing because support infrastructure and the towers are already standing. Refurbishing coal plants is a thing because they are very complex and buildings are expensive. Solar power consists of next to nothing except the panels, the batteries and a few cables.
You forgot the inverter, the supports, and optionally the solar tracker. Also, batteries are optional; many installations, including in the megawatt range, don't have them. In fact, it's better to treat battery storage as something completely separate from solar power, since it can also be used with wind, or even with other sources like thermal.
That's why I said "next to nothing", not "nothing".
You're right that in a grid-connected setup you won't have batteries in the setup. Ideally, you don't want batteries anywhere in the grid and instead do pumped hydroelectric storage, but that's not possible everywhere.
Without drastically reducing animal agriculture, all other efforts at global sustainability seem almost pointless (and rather expensive, both in terms of capital and time).
Should also note: both films are very persuasive - plan to spend a few weeks now fact checking before I dive in to a vegan existence.
Which is not to say don't do any of this, rather I wish to warn you about the difference between sprints and marathons. Be prepared for the latter, unless you are just following a fad.
6 panels!??? holy moly, I live on 2 poly 250w and 2 mono 100w panels + 400ah of battery and a 1k inverter...
this is just reads like a moaning pansy whiner paeon to bloat and consumer stupidity.
if you go off-grid, that's pretty easy. if you think to produce all your own food, that's going to take some time- permaculture is a lifetime pursuit.
sheesh look at these photos, that's a gazebo built from a kit or hired labor or what?
hello!? roundwood timberframe, onsite stones, baled grasses, mud render, etc
it's like the citiest slickers ever decided to try to become instant permaculture heroes and were disappointed...
It looks so, he probably never saw a farm, since he didn't think that poultry and vegetable garden should be separated by a... poultry netting (hence the name)