Facing sky-high connection fees, rural Ontarians go off the grid
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
The fees are one thing, having your freezer contents spoiled a couple of times per year gets old really quickly, and in rural Ontario having a well stocked freezer is not optional. Especially in the winter the power would go out so frequently it was a serious limitation. Coming from NL, where powerfailures are so rare that they make the news when they happen this was one of those little things that I found it hard to adapt to. When the power in Canada fails you are in immediate trouble, your heater and sump pump no longer work, you risk all kinds of follow on damage.
So reliable power wasn't a luxury and it was relatively easy to get that sorted out to a degree that cutting the cord was a logical next step (because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected).
Apropos high fees: the power company wanted some exorbitant fee for disconnecting us (the opposite of a connection fee), I asked them quite friendly what would happen if I shorted out the wires, 15 minutes later a truck came and someone pulled the road side fuses for free ;)
What's worse is when Hydro One's shortsightedness ends up costing them gobs of cash. I've seen brand new pole lines replaced within 2 years of being built because the ADET didn't leave any Spare Capacity on the poles. Add a communications strand and multiple poles need replacement. Since they had 6 phases of power on 60+ foot poles, Hydro One's replacement cost is north of $15k per pole. All because the lower class pole was maybe a few hundred dollars cheaper. #FAIL
I worked on an island on Lake of the Woods that was wired with power, phone and DSL. The next day, Hydro One was flying a branded helicopter up and down the chain of islands that were wired together to figure out where the lines were down.
The helicopter was absolutely bizarre to me and seemed like overkill, given that I only grew up in urban settings before. I though they might run a boat and walk the ROW. The helicopter seemed like an expensive toy they got to play with every so often.
In contrast Hydro One has very few sensors, maybe one every 15 to 20 km in parts of the network, and sometimes no sensors at all on rural lines that can require driving 50+ km of line to find the fault. We routinely have 4-6 hour power outages, and a good chunk of the repair time is spent finding the fault. Again, Hydro One could install more reclosers on rural lines to isolate faults, but that doesn't seem to be the design philosophy they follow.
It's not entirely Hydro One's fault. Building a sensor network in rural Canadian shield geography is challenging as getting radio signals through rocks, hills and trees can be almost impossible, but I still think they can do better.
For the last few years Hydro One has been trying to reform its internal processes for permits, and the folks in charge of that get huge amounts of push back internally, making the pace of change abysmally slow even though everyone knows they have a problem.
There is also the perverse incentives of operating a regulated utility. As they are usually the monopoly LDC in a given area, the amount profits they are permitted to generate are limited relative to their costs (somewhere around 10-15% iirc). This creates a perverse incentive to inflate costs as they are then permitted to generate larger profits. If they reduced costs and profits grew too large, they would be forced to lower rates, which is clearly a bad thing in the view of Hydro One management.
I've just had a tour of a hydrogen fuel cell setup we have here at our OB. I'm no electrician, but from what I could tell, it's plugged into the mains, currently drawing about 3KW, and hydrogen is producing another 12KW (we haven't got much demand for this event - the generator will produce 250kW if we want).
It comes in from the mains through an isolating transformer, into the generator and UPS, and then outgoing power to us goes through another isolating transformer (to stop mains hum that we saw last time, in both directions)
It seems it's perfectly fine to have this sort of setup connected to the grid in the UK. Obviously it's more expensive to do so than just wiring in your own diesel generator.
Any system which absolutely prevents backfeed is acceptable, your use of the mains charging the UPS and the UPS driving everything is an acceptable way to do it--even if your system goes nuts no circuit exists by which that power can backfeed. It's more typically done by a mechanical isolation switch, you can either be connected to the mains and rely upon the signal from the mains or you can run locally with no physical connection to the mains.
The reason for this is repairs. If a lineman opens a breaker the wires after that point must go dead no matter what--if your system backfeeds into the wire you could kill the guy working on the wires.
Do you mean (automatic|manual) transfer switch? A transfer switch transfers the load to the generator and isolates the generator from the line side(utility side, or ‘mains’ for the two tiny islands that like silly words like ‘mains’)
A ‘mechanical isolation switch’ (safety switch, disconnect switch) is simply a disconnecting means.
Whether it's a transfer switch, a local inverter that requires line power to operate or some other such system is irrelevant to them.
On that note I believe there are electrical devices that automatically disconnect you from the grid. It allows you to use a battery / solar array to power the house, while not feeding back any power to the grid such that you don't harm anyone trying to fix the grid.
Now whether or not this is allowed is very much dependent on which country you live in.
This video is in the UK and demonstrate such a device:
Automatic transfer switches were technically allowed but at the time I didn't know of a single installation in Northern Ontario that got a stamp of approval and was allowed to be operated un-attended in grid connected mode.
There is some risk, but this is usually exaggerated, the theory goes that a lineman should be able to disconnect a segment and then it should be idle, requiring all renewable installations down-grid to disable themselves. As a rule this is fully automatic anyway because all of the grid connected inverters that I'm aware of stop working as soon as the grid fails because they use the grid to supply them with phase and frequency information required to function.
But that wasn't good enough, the installation needed to be physically disconnected from the grid, requiring a very large relay and somehow it then had to reconnect if the grid came back on for a specified minimum amount of time (I forgot the details). By the time I had worked all this out I figured since I'm going to be in island mode anyway most of the time I may as well take the shortcut, cut the grid entirely (saving a considerable amount of money in the progress) and invest the difference into a nice genset (which I did, a 5.8KW Kubota diesel).
Likewise, putting panels on both sides of the roof makes it difficult, if not impossible, to vent a fire through the roof. The figures are ever changing, but the additional weight of many panels can also be a consideration when fighting a fire.
Really urge anyone considering adding solar panels on their home to speak with their local fire/ems prior to installation/signing a contract to be sure you know their requirements (and in many places this is still evolving).
In my rural area, everyone ground mounts because space is cheap. I'm a volunteer firefighter and so far none of the trainings have mentioned solar (venting roofs yes). But then, we joke that we'll arrive just in time to put out your foundation.
> putting panels on both sides of the roof makes it difficult, if not impossible, to vent a fire through the roof.
If a fire is bad enough to need to be vented from a hole in the roof, wouldn't the building likely be lost already?
A few weeks ago, the Mount Charleston Lodge in Las Vegas burned to the ground. Firefighters put most of their effort into saving the surrounding national forest.
I don't blame lineman for not wanting to trust that though. My understanding is their practice is to always short out the line when working on them as that is the only way to be 100% sure it isn't live. (note that linemen work on live lines all the time, but when they need a dead line they ensure it is dead)
If you want automatic transfer, you need to add storage, and a more complex inverter that can operate in bridge tied and island mode, and that cuts into the economics. You might also need to get more panels to handle projected loads during projected outages, but most net metering tarrifs I've seen won't compensate you if you over generate.
This is also why there is an ongoing fight over net metering and in some places solar connections aren't even allowed. So long as solar is a small fraction of the total power it has basically zero effect on the grid. Now, however, there are a lot of solar setups. Look what happens to the grid:
The total delivered power drops, but the peak power (when the cloud passes in front of the sun and all those panels quit working) stays the same. They need to spend just as much on generators as before but they aren't selling as much power. Historically, the cost of being able to produce the power has simply been folded into the cost of the power but with the two going out of sync this model no longer applies. Solar gets a substantial hidden subsidy from this, without this subsidy solar is almost never economic.
Second, look at what happens when *lots* of homes go solar. Lets say the local substation is delivering 1000A of power to it's area. Lots of panels go up, the combined power is 1500A. Now the substation transformer is being asked to push 500A back up to the distribution wires--and it's probably not built to survive that. Either those substations must be upgraded or the power company simply prohibits the situation from arising the in the first place by not allowing too much solar on any given segment.
At 20-30ct/kWh, this sums up to (assuming low-voltage) 0.3% duty cycle getting you to spend as much on energy as you spend on power/capability.
As for the substation: it doesn't care beyond possibly having to switch some taps that are used to correct for load-current-dependant voltage drop in that 6kV network, but I doubt they get anywhere near their delivered voltage limits in normal operation, anyways.
People in the Netherlands or the UK have reliable power anyway, but there are still some home solar installations.
Do you just use heating oil? How do you manage that it has a limited shelf life?
https://geekprepper.com/how-long-will-natural-gas-last-witho...
In the "rural" areas I spend the most time in (cape cod, not exactly rural but also with sketchy utilities) people mostly have generators running off of big (well, probably medium sized) propane tanks that I imagine may also be used for cooking / heating as well.
I'm more curious about the stability of the fuel over the long term if it isn't cycled often, where I imagine propane / NG has an advantage, but I guess if you're using it as backup to solar and wind, there's an expectation that you'll go through a couple tanks a winter regardless so stability isn't as much of an issue.
Also be careful to note that "natural gas" is mostly methane but with a significant mix of heavier hydrocarbons too.
Even replacing compressors that were self powered now need to be electric.
It doesn't make any sense, except that it's another regulatory expense resulting in both higher cost and less reliability.
A lot of times when people say 'Thing thing makes no sense' what they mean is 'This thing doesn't agree with my priorities'
Last year's deadly winter storm in Texas showed that a lot of natural gas infrastructure does indeed rely on electricity.
We used wood for heat and limited shelf life for diesel is not an issue at all (it is for ethanol based gasoline).
They must still have some kind of internal transfer switch (as opposed to double conversion), but I would think as a single listed device with anti-islanding, they would be a lot easier sell to an inspector. Then again that AHJ sounds a bit dodgy ("specified minimum amount of time") so maybe they're still resisting.
Thus, physical switches. The power company doesn't care what throws the switch, just that it exist.
How does the inverter make it impossible for a failure to happen? How different is this from an automatic transfer switch (which would not be allowed)?
So basically, to clarify, you're either 100% on the grid, or 100% off. There's no using both depending on conditions, is that it?
If you're capable of producing enough power to run your home most of the time, then being grid connected and buying peak load from the grid itself rather than browning out your own devices might be a worth while tradeoff.
Most of us with grid tied solar installations (like me) transparently buy and sell electricity to and from the grid depending on day conditions. I buy from the grid overnight, and sell excess capacity during the day. Depending on how much electricity you use a battery system will smooth those out, but you need a lot of batteries to eliminate the need completely (OP mentioned 48KWh, which is about 3.5 Power Walls).
In my area the grid is really reliable and fees are low, so buying batteries is not economically viable. I'm currently paying $5.24 per month for a grid tie, which is below my threshold for caring.
Adding either on-site storage capacity or sufficient additional panels to cover our winter needs really makes no sense. The storage capacity would have to be immense, because no matter how you slice it and dice it, we do not generate enough power to heat our home for several months (and that's with adobe and some passive design). The additional panels would take up a large amount of ground space, and result in us generating 9x our needs in summer.
I prefer to put my faith in the emergence of grid-scale storage solutions than try to solve this on a just-my-home level.
If I pull the 32A cable, everything carries on working (I believe it's a sub-20ms switchover). If the power goes for some other reason it carries on working. The truck can run on a 230V/13A source just as well (although when the aircon is on - not needed currently - we'll be pulling more than 13A so the battery will slowly drain). I can even plug into two different inputs.
Now this is a mobile vehicle, and I'm no electrician, but my understanding is this is perfectly fine -- the victron presumably switches from the grid if the input is lost and doesn't feed anything back into the grid.
Presumably the same setup could be used to power a home instead of several racks of equipment in the back of a truck.
Many/Most home solar installations do not correctly install one, which can be dangerous to linemen.
This sucks, but is it not cold enough to put freezer items outside?
There are bear proof barrels, which are frequently used for camping (and I'm not sure if I'd bet on them against a bear, but they keep racoons out), or if you don't have them you can tie your food up a tree and that does a pretty good job too.
1: https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/safe-food...
Given the Canadian context, do you mean the Netherlands or Newfoundland and Labrador?
I think contextually the very next sentence gives you your answer here.
Tying together with DC usually works out cheaper, since MPPT tracking buck converters to charge the batteries are cheaper than having extra inverter capacity.
As a bonus, you can buy quite a lot of 12V DC equipment made for cars and caravans which tends to be a lot more energy efficient.
Yes, you are correct: 12 kW are a big install:
https://en.wind-turbine-models.com/turbines/1579-windkraft-z...
https://en.wind-turbine-models.com/turbines/1664-psw-en-driv...
This is now becoming a reality for more and more people in the Bay Area due to a combination of corruption and failing infrastructure.
NL in this context is Netherlands? Or another area of Canada?
Installing a windmill is something that I would not advise for novel installations unless you have a lot of room around you and quite a bit of spare time. Windmills, compared to solar are finicky devices and require a lot of thinking to get them right, solar power is much simpler.
The 'DIY powerwall' scene has turned recycling Li-Ion batteries into an art form, not all of it is done safely but some of the results are quite impressive, battery power too is now a fraction of what it cost back then and the life-span has gone up considerably, with more and more interesting options right around the corner.
I got blackballed for life at Avis for that stunt, they had an 'unlimited mileage' two week offer for very little money, they gave me a brand new car, I averaged 1000 per day or so :)
I wonder if they'll do a follow-up article next year to report how the solar systems performed over the long Northern Ontario winter...
I see this as catering to the rich, who could have afforded it, simply because they wanted to live in palatial McMansions in the countryside and felt entitled to be accommodated.
I don't think it should be the obligation of the county to provide utilities if people want to live outside city limits.
If you want to live rural, you need to come up with the cash to get your utilities, otherwise too bad, live in the city limits.
There are very good reasons why there is a thing called "city limits", this is one of them.
Living rural is a constant money drain. Though in theory you are building systems that can sustain your independence later. In theory. In reality, rarely the case.
It's real bliss out here in the country, let me tell you :-) My son was home and got to hear me swear with words and tones that he'd never encountered before.
Wood heating is a lot of labor. It's sustainable if you have forest land, but still a ton of labor. Even pre-seasoned and delivered wood takes a lot of work. The general rule of thumb is that you need to envision literally filling your living space with wood in order to have enough to heat your home with wood burning stoves. Wood just doesn't put out the BTUs per pound that oil, coal, or other petroleum products do. Propane seems to be the go-to, but I know very little about storing and running your house off of it.
I think in the future the answer is going to be geothermal, or "ground source heat pumps". They work like reversible AC units that use ground temp water to extract heat from. They're more efficient than regular ACs, allowing you to heat your home with ~1/3 the electricity of regular resistance heating, but the installation costs in suburban areas are extreme due to the deep wells needed. If you live in rural areas though you can use shallower trenches to lay the tubing down below the frost line, making this a much more viable choice.
They don't have wood burning and they are too old to be able to handle it anyway, you'd die from all the wood you'd have to cut and move and deal with. They said oil wasn't viable, and I don't think their house is setup for it anyway. They are worried about snow removal where they live as it's just too much for them now and it's so easy to get stranded for days, even though the city does eventually plow that road.
Where they live it's regularly -30 to -40c in the winter. They were snowbirds until Covid hit.
Wood is at least much cheaper and has charming appeal, gas is cheaper too but not available in many districts. Propane is extremely cost ineffective for heating, it'd be much better to use any other type of heating if possible.
Alas, if your home is well insulated, a newer wood stove should do the trick, but if moving it from a stack outside and cleaning ash is too much, I get it, stay electric.
Propane is delivered just like oil, but can be stored outside. Usually you get them refilled more often, so if road access is an issue, it’s not a great primary.
Even at 80k, the govt is still losing money.
Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
If the government is going to insist on making money, then it should operate nationalised utilities, which provide a baseline service and cost, and if private enterprise can compete with that by offering a better product and/or cheaper service, then all the more power to them.
Having a situation where a single commercial entity has a monopoly position seems to be the second-worst option, just above "no service at all".
The question is to what extent should grid connections to new rural homes be subsidised by taxpayers, which is of course a political decision - just like to what extent roads, military, healthcare, education, oil production, etc should be subsidised.
A better solution may be to allow the subsidiy money to be used to provide grants for off-grid. It may be better for the taxpyer to give someone $30k to sort their power out, than to spend $40k on an electric line to their house.
100% agree. Not only that, but rural development is inherently connected to these other subsidies. Rural populations tend to have worse education, worse health outcomes, and more expensive roads/mile/capita. Not to mention the negative political externalities rural populations produce (maybe a modern US-only phenomenon).
I'd argue that the causality goes the other way - people move to rural areas to escape the demands of the high-interdependency core. And I'd say much of our political divide is from that highly connected core extending its influence into the previously left-alone areas, first through broadcast media consolidation and now through social media and its consolidation.
So you'd be happy with them if they agreed with you politically....
I do appreciate the honesty.
That assumes a fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of stuff. Neither of which is the case in a country with its own floating exchange rate like Canada.
Government doesn't spend money, it spends people. What else were you proposing to do with the electrical engineer that is so much more important than maintaining electrical grid connections to citizens?
Lets rephrase it then. How many hours of electrical engineer time should be spent hooking up a new home in rural Ontario? Why would an electrical engineer who lives in the Toronto suburbs want to do this? How much time and effort should a country devote to running and maintaining this connection? What does the engineer get in return?
Either he gets more in return (thus "makes money"), gets less in return (thus "requires subsidy") or it's even (thus "breaks even")
How much should the person who wants to live in rural ontario give for the engineer's time? It seems Canada decides they should give a little, but not the same amount of time the engineer gives (and instead the engineer should be compensated by time from the rest of the country)
As to what that electrical engineer could be doing that would be better? Well how about fixing the electrics in a childrens hospital? Or maybe they could spend the day working on their garden, or watching netflix.
Do they not have their own engineers? In which case what are you doing about the shortage of engineers.
Again this is all fixed amount thinking. Are you sure you are supply limited in engineers? It's only then that you need to think about taxation. And then the taxation has to be targeted at those using engineers - to free them up for the public use.
Are you absolutely sure all engineers and equipment is engaged doing things that are required?
There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, and if there is any unemployment at all then there is capacity to expand.
"Or maybe they could spend the day working on their garden, or watching netflix."
Why should engineers work any less hours a week than anybody else? The person growing their food needs to work a full week, why not engineers?
Government deploys resources, not money. And whether those resources are used hooking up people to the grid, or fitting out another server room for Pornhub is a political choice, not a financial one.
But the article says "he expected to pay a few thousand dollars, given that the nearest pole was across the street, about 45 metres away. He was shocked to find out it would cost $80,000".
So it's not the case of a house in the middle of nowhere...
Power and phone was run for free pretty much everywhere. Now they want 80K for a line and a pole.
This is the same story for internet access.
In this case, going off-grid is exactly that: private enterprise offering a more suitable alternative for this use case. In fact, it's the correct solution, because the public should not be required to subsidize the choice of an individual to live in an area not well served by power distribution infrastructure shared across many homes.
It's just like how the government won't pay for paving a long driveway (AKA road) that connects a rural house to the main highway.
Government should only get involved in subsidizing these things when the goal is to scale access to millions, i.e:
- High impact nascent and early stage technology (i.e. EVs, renewables)
- Generational scale investments in human capital and infrastructure that private industry is too risk averse to undertake.
Subsidizing rural home builders to the tune of 80K does nothing for anyone except that home builder. It would be undoubtedly nice for them, but that's not a justification for allowing it.
Look, there's 'shouldn't be run for profit' and then there's 'Simply infeasible to do some things regardless of profit motive simply due reality.'
Pull up a map of Ontario and pick some locations at random and then figure out the distance from those locations to the nearest town that likely has a utility tie in. Tell me the distance and what you think the cost per km would be in that kind of situation. Now tell me if the government should cover that kind of service for whoever wants it, whenever they want it, for free.
You vastly underestimate the size of a Canadian province like Ontario and the costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure in a place with that kind of climate.
Except when the service is being provided to people you don't like. (not sure if I should /s this since based on my observation this is what most people unironically want).
When the govt spends money on something, it is asking/telling people to spend their effort on that task/product, instead of something else that they would/could have been doing instead.
So if the govt spends $80k of people's effort on the rural line, what doesn't get done as a result?
People should likewise not be able to run up arbitrary high costs and expect the government (i.e., other people) to pay for it.
You cannot run anything, including governments, forever at a loss. People pay for things in every case.
It's literally what the government is for.
And looking at the article, if off-grid is more economic for the resident for that kind of life, then it's also more economical for the government. Everybody wins. Subsidizing that would eliminate that win/win.
That said, as carbon pricing rises, the calculus on propane power may shift over time... which, I assume, will result in such residents loudly opposing carbon pricing.
One could say the same if you choose to be a car-less urban dweller who relies on transit and high-density infrastructure.
You can stereotype and caricature people both ways, neither helps the discussion.
"Isn't that why the government has the power of taxation or the ability to levy fees?"
My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense. This would mean still charging the people connected. Otherwise, who would the government tax to subsidize these other citizens?
In the US, the latter two are not broadly considered necessities in rural areas. The situation varies but wells, where possible, and septic systems are extremely common away from urban metros and towns of a certain size.
Then they plan and redistribute that money to the agencies, corporations and departments that provide essential services for the population, and it gets spent on offering and managing those services. (Yes this is a simplified explanation)
Not sure how it works where you live but I suspect it's probably similar.
My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense. This would mean still charging the people connected. Otherwise, who would the government tax to subsidize these other citizens?
They don't use Loonies anywhere else.
As my Canadian aunt says: money is made round to go around.
The cost of hook up is the time of the people to do that job, which means they can't do anything else.
Is Canada that short of electrical engineers that it can't maintain its current grid and add new connections?
But in the end, you make the best rules you can that help the majority of people, and you accept that they will not be 100% ideal. If some people end up unfairly benefiting from it, so be it.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
In part because of these costs. If it were on the taxpayer to foot the hook-up bill, a home in the middle of the Grand Tetons would suddenly look much more attractive.
Although the law is nearly 90 years old, it continues to be foundational for supporting rural communities. In 2014 it was updated to provide support for rural electric and telephone cooperatives to supply gigabit internet. And that’s why the north woods of Minnesota often has better internet than large swaths of Minneapolis and St Paul.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
For people moving into a relatively unpopulated area, in a different country, it might make more sense today, to let people bring in their own power generation, maybe subsidize it a bit if needed.
Satellite internet changes a lot, as if you can do off grid renewable power with satellite internet, economic viability and mobility of populations changes radically. We've seen it post-covid with rural real estate prices matching those of cities as the result of remote work (I think).
Hydro was used as a giant opaque debt slush fund by previous governments, where they levered up debt secured against revenues and then blew it on favoured groups to secure re-election. "Infrastructure," surely, but now you have a debt retirement fee on every hydro bill that is essentially a tax.
Can you expand on this? Is there a general social benefit to people settling remote areas?
It sounds like you are ascribing some special virtue to rural living that I just don't see. When I think about work that adds social value, very little of it requires rural living (farming, mostly) and most of it can be done anywhere (computer programming, skilled trades, manufacturing, etc.). Why is a person's contribution bigger if they are rural? What special value is there in doing these things in a place no one lives? Why do we need to increase growth in some arbitrary rural location.
> There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services
And ironically, you are arguing that we should be providing these people a public service, presumably because they are dependent on it. I fail to see where the cut off should be.
Some scattered towns aren't going to significantly impact claims by indigenous peoples, and anybody else claiming big chunks of the top half of Canada is going to get laughed out of the room.
Why is this desirable? You basically just expand every single cost without much benefit and reducing the quality of facilities provided to everyone. The general trend of populations globally is centralization which provides massive benefits.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm curious to hear your logic. My understanding is that more urbanization is required for both environmental and infrastructural reasons.
Do you want your citizens to have electricity, as is expected in a modern 21st century country - or would you rather folks go without because of cost? If yes, then getting electricity to houses should be a priority, even if they never profit.
It should also be very noted that electric companies tend to balance the rural costs out with charging urban customers a bit more to make up for the difference, much like healthcare (whether it be premiums or taxes)
Any proposal for governments to spend more on something should also come with a description of what they should spend less on to compensate for it.
Why should urban citizens subsidize a lifestyle choice for others? If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere you shouldn't expect everyone else to pay you for it.
Because people that live in cities need to eat.
Because we are a society.
Because not everyone that lives in the country (or a small enough town) chose to live here - people get born there and turn into adults there.
I shouldn't have to mention this, but farmers need infrastructure to keep making your food. Gas and groceries and utilities and grain silos and schools and doctors and a bunch more - oh, and people that operate all of this.
Those people that make all that stuff run need a lot of that stuff too.
the guy was running two radio stations; i expect they quoted the price like it was a business/commercial line
This isn't about 5th generation people losing power, it is about people choosing to live rural and feeling entitled to costly infrastructure for free.
The guy wasn't feeling entitled to costly infrastructure for free. He seems to have correctly concluded that the price the local monopoly quoted was ridiculous.
My strategy is to have a sub panel installed which runs the most critical loads:
Main Panel
- 150A
- 50A A/C
- 50A Kitchen Range
- 30A Dryer
- 30A Oven
- 100A Sub-panel bypass
- 30A Inverter/Charger
- 50A Generator backfeed (Interlock w/ 150A Main)
Sub Panel
- 100A
- 30A 220V Inverter backfeed (Interlock w/ 100A Main)
- 20A Furnace/Blower (this is the key bit for TX winter)
- All lighting/bedroom/office/internet loads
- Kitchen 120V outlets + fridge
- Garage 120V (doors, etc)
This effectively puts this most important parts of my house on a ~double-conversion UPS setup. I am not that worried about losing HVAC compressor, range, or laundry capabilities during a grid outage. If it gets really desperate, I could still wheel in my 12kW generator and run a load of laundry while the inverter charges things up. The reason I want to run inverter full-time is because we get shitty brownouts almost every day.
I am planning to use a 6kW inverter to run the sub panel. Still debating on the # of batteries to use, but I am going to start with enough to run 12 hours before I need generator.
And yes, I looked at Tesla power wall. I am not made of money. I am going to have this whole house UPS deal done for <8000 USD.
Finally, back-feeding panels is acceptable per code around my parts as long as you follow all the rules (e.g. actually install the interlocks). This is definitely a more grey area, but its also one of those things that is super easy to back-out if you are going to sell the house.
Well, if you were ma of of money, would you commit autocannibalism? Otherwise, the cost is quite reasonable
It's a pretty compelling option - spend less than the connection fee to get free electricity. The biggest problem is that you have to size your system for cloudiest days in the dead of winter - which means massive batteries and lots of extra panels. It would be interesting to see a full cost breakdown for a realistic use case over 4 or 5 years, including the cost of maintenance.
I imagine you could throw a $1000 generator into the mix to cover the really bad days, but then that's an added maintenance burden.
Solar panels typically produce 10-15% of their normal power if it's cloudy. Adding a wind turbine or two can do a lot to make up for that, but then there's winter...
I'd very much like to see what their thoughts are in a year.
Or alternatively have a manageable demand side so you can minimize your demand on bad weather days. Definitely 8KW system - everyone messes up kW and kWh.
Converting electricity to heat is a bit like turning the best steak into hamburger, wasteful and costly. Electric heat is pretty much limited to the United States, in most other countries power is way too expensive to be used for heating.
This is so wrong it is almost funny. Electricity is an incredibly efficient way to generate heat. A heat pump - to name just one device - can move much more heat energy than electrical energy put in. Even resistive heaters are more efficient than burning any fuel for heat.
It's harder to be so absolute when talking about resistive heat and renewable energy, but it's almost certainly a very poor use of your electricity. You could either drive a heat pump (and get 4x the heat per dollar of renewable investment) or you could spend far less money to build a solar hot water system (or, if you have the renewable forestry, a wood burner). Resistive heat really only makes sense if you have excess renewable energy and literally nothing else you could use it for.
Resistive heaters are terrible compared to other sources of heat when you've done proper cost accounting, burning fuel for heat can work depending on where you are, an outdoor woodstove with a water based central heat system augmented with in ground loops and a heat pump can serve both to heat and to cool at will.
I think the correct reading is they'd be able to run it for 1-2 hours, once. Presumably it's all powered off a bank of AA batteries. ;-)
(If it's just the panels shown in the photo, then those are probably 8kW on a sunny day.)
So you might pay 6 to 14 cents per kWh, but your bill will be 3 times that amount.
The delivery fee is also completely opaque: there’s no explanation to determine how it’s calculated, other than a brief text saying “a portion of this fee is fixed, and a portion depends on your usage”. But I haven’t been able to derive those values. If the formula for this delivery fee is something like ‘$xx + $yy*kWh’; then it appears these x and y values are not static.
Generation is for the portion generated - which will likely go up with the surge in commodity prices this year - except since you are paying retail rates it will take longer you aren't immediately exposed to whole electricity prices and the costs of electricity are also political issues in Ontario to a small degree.
Also in Ontario we sell power at a loss to Michigan (mainly because of overproduction of our Nuclear facilities). Its a real boondoggle.
Most people off grid need to be keeping a constant eye on their battery levels of charge, and do things like only using the washing machine on sunny days.
Certain appliances like tumble driers, electric showers, and fan heaters, you pretty much can't have.
These habits seem difficult to inject into popular thinking until there is economic pressure. Human populations have consumed entire forests to burn wood just to cook and to stay warm. Electricity is a superior solution, but the same primitive, wasteful habits remain.
In other words, for all the people "on the grid", the challenge is to unlearn wasteful consumer habits and conditioning. Their homes are full of devices and AC adaptors that draw power when idle. The combustion engine itself is very poor in efficiency, but the high energy density of petrol masks the cost.
People prefer not having to think about the energy cost and environmental cost. A challenge in the area of EV adoption, for example, is that people expect not to need to concern themselves with expenditure. Those who drive an EV need to be aware of the energy cost of driving (e.g. heating, cooling, tire inflation, load) and of the advantage of combining trips.
Is it all "too hard"? Well, the period of "energy luxury" has brought us to an ecological crisis.
I would consider anything short of new tech that allows us to continue increasing our quality of life while simultaneously improving ecological conditions a failure.
So a crisis forcing reduced usage is after he have examined/tried killing the other humans using the resource.
Not a pleasant thought, but reality.
Imagine if: - You can put your clothes into a combined washer/dryer and it starts washing and drying when your PV panels generates a lot of power - Your fridge thermostat adjust to lower temperature when there is power from the panels, and temporarily pause the compressor when a high load appliance is being used, such as microwave
Unfortunately in real life, smart appliance only have gimmicks and are very insecure
Network connection costs are a necessary evil of legacy power networks. But paradoxically, they accelerate the financial un-viability of the legacy network, by making off grid way, way more financially viable.
By connecting everyone's houses together, even with relatively low capacity cable, everyone should get more reliability (an inverter or battery bank can fail and it doesn't matter), and more energy availability (if I use more energy than I generate one day, but someone else uses less, that's okay).
I'm imagining it could be as simple as a few hundred meters of cable with regular 110v plugs on the end, and a box of electronics that can push power in either direction as needed for balancing.
This article paints a very rosy picture of what to expect. In a non-grid-tied system, you have to deal with batteries and a bunch of other issues. This is not cheap. And it is a recurring maintenance cost. Are you going to do that maintenance every few months yourself, or pay someone to do it?
>Combined, the system( wind-and-solar array) produces eight kilowatt hours — more than enough to run his offices, radio studios, the central air conditioning and the servers that keep his internet customers connected year 'round, he says.
>It cost him $23,000.
> "And then on top of that, to pay, you know, an electric bill, probably at around four to five hundred dollars a month for the rest of my life and only increasing. I thought, well, now's the time to go off-grid."
So what’s the total cost of ownership for his system? Does it have $400.00/mo of upkeep?
So that leaves $270 per month for maintenance, emergency supply and other upkeep. Seems completely reasonable that the actual costs will be lower.
It's an apples to oranges comparison specifically because it is the lines (and not the generating capacity) that fails very, very regularly in rural Ontario.
The best way to cut your heating bill in Northern Canada is insulation, wooden houses are pretty good at this to begin with, you can get pretty close to neutrality by some solid engineering (South facing windows, take advantage of thermal mass), then you only need to add additional heat besides what you already generate when cooking on long stretches of overcast days, which don't happen all that often there.
If I was off grid, in a rural area where the winters can get severe, I would want a big diesel generator as a backup.
A lot of things can happen during a proper winter: roads close, heavy snow, supplies can get hard to get some short periods, you can get cold front that bring the temperature down below 20C.
One of the things that sucks about diesel generators are the noise, and the pollution and the maintenance. You also have to run it for a while every now and again and make sure you test everything regularly.
He could heat the house electrically with power off the generator and that would integrate nicely with solar and wind power.
Oh you can get propane generators as well, I was not familiar with that. That would be more convenient since he already has a propane tank. Just build a bigger one.
Can they start educating journalists about power and energy, in university or whatever internships they do? It is really not that difficult.
> you’d get 2,113 grams of calcium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...
As far as I know, commas as the decimal separator aren't used anywhere in the English world. Although, perhaps the author was not a native speaker, but still personally writing in English and made the mistake.
Mind, that's for fresh basil and you mentioned dried, I don't know how to convert those weights.
But given how many of the investors in the UK actually study humanities at Oxford I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish there. Unless you really believe that studying humanities somehow makes you a more moral human being that then doesn't go on to destroy the world, which clearly isn't the case.
And for reference Boris Johnson studied classics at Oxford, fucked a dead pig as part of a fraternity initiation ceremony and is now doing his best to dismantle public healthcare in the UK. So I don't think the "make our society better" statement holds any value.
EDIT: comment below is right, it was David Cameron, not Boris Johnson. And he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. So while the last paragraph is half correct and half mixed in with Boris Johnsons history, both of them have been working hard on selling off the NHS. Boris also hasn't started as many wars. So, I guess Boris is better on a relative scale?
And in theory the basics of those should be covered in high-school.
And in any case, a journalist covering a technical subject should have a basic understanding of units. It's really elementary stuff.
Before you down-vote: ask what their high school STEM grades are?
It just doesn't stick.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michae...
Besides, considering the food industry in most countries will not even get rid of kcal where there exist zero reason to use that unit, I don't think so.