Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I’m very familiar with this because I do it, too.
Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all up and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.
We do buy carefully, and all the engineering is done by me. We have employees on the farm so much of the labor of installing underground cable etc was “free” (lol).
Still, we are miles ahead of our costs if we were hooked up to the grid (which also would have cost us an additional $20k just for poles to get close, and we still would have had to bury the cables on campus along with the water and data, if we didn’t want ugly poles all over, so that part is a wash)
I spend about 4 hours a week on utilities based projects, mostly engineering monitoring and control systems so that I spend less time working on the utilities. (So, futzing around with electronics because I have an excuse to) it feels like meaningful work that I care about, so that’s nice.
For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines, hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me we have a path out of this mess.
Rant your stupid “drill baby drill” crap all you want magats, we are going to solar, wind, and fusion our way to a better world, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.
What I've done is tap into an existing fission reactor. It's some distance from my house, but there's a lot of excess energy there leaking out. I put up some collectors to capture it.
Was really quite cheap to do, and I don't have to pay anyone to actually run the reactor.
The best way forward has always been to explore all energy avenues, and that will include fossil fuels as well. At least you’ve included nuclear, but left out fission, strangely, which is the best hope of electric generation replacement we currently have.
I’m tired of this team blue for electric (except Tesla now, lol) and team red for oil. They are choices with trade offs, and are friends, not enemies.
I've looked at it from a bunch of different angles and keep coming to the conclusion that for rural and suburban areas with the space for panels, off-grid solar is the future.
I don't know if you were being ironic or not but... that's an absolute truth. Our free time doesn't have a fixed rate. It doesn't have a rate at all. What you do during free time can be basically seen as either:
* a chore you don't like to do
* something you like to do.
Any task can swing between those states depending on your mood. If installing your own solar plant or self-host your server rack (as OP is doing) is something you enjoy doing, then yes, it costs exactly $0 in labor.
Also to be clear - good on you for building out rural off grid electrical. Its a fun project and satisfying no doubt (outaide of costa)
I’ve spoken to people from Rural Georgia (which is about an hour from Atlanta depending on the direction you’re driving) in Microcenter that are usually there to wire up their farm or factory with sufficient network capacity to keep production rolling. They have mentioned that they have had to do their own trenching for last mile for various services. Sometimes that means they literally drive down to Herc rentals, pick up a trenching machine, and do it themselves since the wait for someone else to do it is months away and that’s a long time if your business needs internet, water, power, etc.