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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to think of the second order effects of solar and battery storage if it becomes cheap enough to run your entire house without the grid. Wouldn't it make sense to design houses with DC power from the ground up? Why go through the inefficient inverter if you are generating DC from a solar panel and using DC power internally in all of your appliances?

Assuming $3-5 per watt fully installed and a 6 kWh solar panel array. Plus and additional $10k worth of batteries, you should be able to run most houses 24/7/365 off solar power. So a $40k investment should be around what you need to generate all the power for your home for ~25 years. (Assuming you average 30 kWh used per day) This is pretty close to being a no brainer for certain areas of the country with high electricity prices. (California, Hawaii)

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Many areas it is illegal to not be connected to the grid in the city (it certainly is in my home city in Canada). I bet a lot of stuff would go DC in this case (i.e. lighting) I suspect appliances would stay AC because they would put a huge premium on dc appliances just because they can.

> Many areas it is illegal to not be connected to the grid

It’s mind-boggling that this happened as it only seems to serve the private power companies while simultaneously restricting entire populations from some of the biggest benefits of current and future sustainable energy sources.

It's not really surprising when you look at the history. In my area the distribution at the city level was put in by the public utility owned by the city, so of course they are going to mandate that the business the city is taking huge debt out in to gamble on electrification will be propped up with a requirement to be grid connected to get any permit. This doesn't make it right, but I get why they did this and why it continues.

I suspect probably just a way to stop landlords from renting out units without electricity

One opposing force to this eventuality is the huge and still-growing RV/camper/boat industry, which has begun shipping some really good, house-sized DC electric appliances lately. It seems like these worlds might one day converge.

In some places it's also illegal to have that many LI batteries in your house (looking at you, SF).

I don’t understand the draw of your house being “off the grid”. It’s a house. Do you want to be off the water, sewer, gas, garbage, postal, newspaper, legal, and firefighting grids too, or just specifically the electrical grid? And your neighbors too or just you?

Saving money. If it is cheaper to generate your own power, a lot of people are going to do it. Practically speaking, you would probably still need (and pay for) a connection to the grid but just not need to use it. This isn't a reject society and live alone in the woods kind of appeal. You are going to be spending money on power for the foreseeable future, why not minimize that expense if you can?

Also in developing countries where there isn't a reliable power grid, would you just skip that step entirely? I know some places in Nepal where they have daily rolling blackouts and it is extremely annoying.

I wouldn’t want to power home out of ordinary lithium - e-scooter explosions are already disastrous. There’s LiFePO4 but it’s more expensive.

Another effect is replacing gas/oil heating with electric (heat pump). Fewer risks, less maintenance, less pollution.

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