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Comment by antonkochubey | Hacker News Reader

Other than southern Spain, France, Italy and Greece, you're not going to run off-grid anywhere in Europe. Too little sun in the winter for heating needs. Unless you're considering small-scale wind power installations, but I cannot imagine what costs those could incur in installation alone.

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Up in Orkney on vacation, the pretty constant wind all year (according to relatives) with a little solar, battery storage and heat pumps, I reckon off-grid might be possible. Add in starlink for internet and I might just stay here.

Not sure of the cost (need to do the research) but all of the above are getting cheaper. A small wind turbine can’t be that costly, surely.

Wind turbines in my research are pretty terrible unless run at scale (massive). YMMV but when I last looked into it, small turbines tended to be 1) noise polluters, 2) not very large power generators and 3) poor build quality.

The dilemma with wind turbines is that the small ones tend to be inefficient (and still much more expensive than solar), and large ones require huge up-front investments.

I'd love to be proven wrong about this though, if anybody has links to affordable wind turbines / generators, I'd be interested.

small wind turbines have a terrible reliability and maintenance track record. They are not worth the investment.

When I’ve looked into this before for a client in Scotland, it seems the smallest size that made sense in terms of the factors other commenters have mentioned was about £50,000 to install. Also it requires planning permission which is much harder to get for a wind turbine than for solar PV which you can often install without getting explicit permission under ‘permitted development’ rules.

Off-grid does not mean renewable-only.

You can run a generator to charge batteries or provide additional capacity when needed.

It would be ideal to have full coverage with "renewables" (isn't oil and gas a renewable just on a longer timeline?) but don't let perfect be the enemy of good if you want to move off-grid.

I do lack familiarity with the European environment, but between geothermal, wind, hydro and natural gas backup, is it really feasible as it is in places where solar gives 0.01 USD kWh prices?

Is geothermal an option?

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