The math of residential alternative energy.

[hunter]

I've been considering solar energy for at least forty years but I can never get the numbers to work for me. Part of it is my attitude of "always put off today what you might not have to do tomorrow."

One of my great grandfathers was a cattle rancher. He was also a lineman for the very, very rural telephone and electric system. His wife, my great grandma, didn't care for electricity. The only reason she accepted it was my great grandfather's radio habit. Tube type radios use a lot of electricity and she was always upset by how much her husband spent on batteries. She grudgingly accepted rural electrification.

The thing my grandfather was best known for was not his electrical work, but his fences. They were instantly recognizable throughout the territory because they were woven together from anything and everything he could salvage. He never bought new barbed wire or new fence posts and he'd add whimsical artistic embellishments to his fences and gates whenever the mood struck.

My great grandma raised her kids and lived a long time in a two room cabin with a wood stove in the kitchen, two forty watt light bulbs, a hand cranked party line telephone, and the damned radio. She had no running water and used an outhouse. If you wanted a warm bath you fired up the wood stove and filled the reservoir with a bucket. Then, when the water was warm, you hauled it to the bath.

She also used a chamber pot, which me and my siblings could never bring ourselves to do. It seemed better to venture out to the privy with a flashlight. When we were small our parents thought they should always accompany us lest we meet a hungry bear, wolf, or mountain lion. Or maybe worse, fall through the hole into the shit. Waking up your parents in the middle of the night to use an outdoor toilet makes everyone grumpy. Great grandma thought that was stupid. Why won't your kids use the chamber pot?

Anyways, my great grandma's electric bill was never more than the minimal service charge and this was in a harsh Rocky Mountain climate.

Fast forward to present day...

My wife and I live in a mild climate. Houses here are built without central air conditioning and many houses don't have central heating, just a gas heater on the wall. People who have no money don't heat or cool their houses. On most winter days that means house temps in the sixties, sometimes in the fifties. It's not a survival issue. A few days a year it's hot, but not humid-hot or uncomfortably hot overnight. Open the windows and sleep. The highest temp I've seen in our house is 87.

Here is where things get interesting whenever I do the "alternative energy" math for our house:

I'm a creature of the internet. I use electricity for that. My always-on dsl modem, wireless router, UPS, and telephones use a grand total of 16 watts. Older versions of my communication infrastructure topped out at 87 watts but this is something I've paid attention to. My old laptop, modified a bit with a solid state drive, uses 12 watts. All our lighting is compact fluorescent or LED. As compact fluorescent lights die I've been replacing them with LEDs. LED lighting fixtures and lamps are subsidized by our power company. Our hot water comes from a small Bosch Aquastar on-demand gas water heater. Guests and family can take showers for as long as the want. When no hot water is used, no gas is used. Clothes can be washed in cold water. Tap water comes out of the faucet around the mid-sixties.

So, okay, I've got thirty watts of solar panels I've never bothered to put on the roof. These panels are among the items in our camping-survival kit. I also keep a couple of deep-discharge batteries around; they are easy to come by in the Silicon Valley, barely used because "mission critical" users swap them out by the calendar not by the number of charge-discharge cycles the batteries have endured. I've got inverters and dc-dc converters.

The biggest single use of electricity in our house is the refrigerator. My wife and I have a disagreement here. I've lived years without a refrigerator, as a kid and young adult. No problem. You don't buy food that needs refrigeration and you feed leftovers to the dogs, pigs, chickens, worms, or compost heap. My wife thinks life without a refrigerator is too radical.

So why do I need solar panels on my roof? If some catastrophe knocks out the power grid, or maybe we are living in extreme frugal mode, our internet, phones, and lights still work, I wash clothes and dishes by hand, and I don't buy refrigerated or frozen food. It's not a survival issue.

Do I need solar panels permanently installed on my roof? Do I need to be fussing with batteries and synchronous inverters and solar hot water plumbing? No, I do not. If I bought those things it'd just be more new stuff. Just like my great grandfather and his fences I don't buy new stuff when I don't have to.

[wtmusic]

2. k/r

[PoliticAverse]

3. Good story. Btw when was the last time when your electric went out for a day or more,

and how did things go for you ?

[oldhippie]

4. That question was interesting and made me think a bit .....

I'm 65 yrs old and have lived all over the US and a half dozen countries. I've lived thru blizzards in upstate NY, hurricanes in the south, tornados in Texas and Illinois, typhoons in Asia, and earthquakes in California and Japan.

I have NEVER had my electric go out for a day or more. The longest I can ever remember was I think 22 or 23 hours right after the Loma Prieta quake in CA in '89 when I lived in Monterey County.

Where I live now in Texas we have some electric outages due to storms, tornados, and cars hitting power poles. I have several aquariums, including salt water reef aquariums that need near constant heat, light, filtration and water movement, or some sensitive (and expensive) corals and fish start to die in about 30 minutes. I have backup power for the aquariums 3 layers deep, with battery UPS and two backup generators. In the 15 years I have lived here, I have only had to fire up a generator once, and the power came back on in about an hour. The longest power outage I have recorded here was less than two hours.

So that was a long story just to say that electricity outages haven't been a problem in my life. I know it is different for many in the paths of big storms that took out the whole power systems for weeks. And even though I haven't needed any big power system, the Engineer/Survivalist/Eagle Scout/Tinkerer/Ham Radio Operator in me makes me want to have the solar power system, batteries, and two generators to keep me and my corals alive and (fairly) comfortable.

Now I have surely jinxed myself and my power will go out for a week.

[hunter]

5. We have smart meters now so the electricity shuts off if we don't pay the bill on time.

No human involvement at all, a computer switches it off. Before smart meters the electric company would have to send a human out. This usually gave a customer a few days grace to come up with the money.

Fortunately they can't safely turn off the gas by remote control so we can still cook and take hot showers even without electricity. Hang a lantern in the kitchen, no big deal. Life goes on and one begins to think it's sort of nice living with the darkness instead of fighting it.

Our family is trapped in a cycle of medical bills and kids' college bills. My wife and I work as contractors, not employees. The bills always come on time, but the pay comes whenever. Our credit rating was destroyed by very serious medical problems. Before those experiences I would have said we had good health insurance. Now I just want to nationalize the health insurance companies, implement a national single payer health plan, and throw some "health industry" executives in prison.

Thanks for asking.

I've been thinking lately how we, as a society, might encourage experimentation with lower energy lifestyles. One way might be to provide some very minimal amount of household electrical service for free, something like a hundred watts. With gas for cooking and some kind of district heating and cooling, I think many people would choose to live with that minimal use of electricity. Maybe it could become a new "normal" and we could shut down a few coal power plants. There would also be a few people who wanted to get their full 2.4 kilowatt-hours out of the connection who'd begin to experiment with storage systems. This might or might not be a bad thing if strict safety regulations were enforced (no open cell lead-acid batteries in the house, etc...)

How to power industry, electric cars, and all that other stuff is another question.

[wtmusic]

6. For about $5B/yr we could give every household in the U.S. 100W/day

and that's a great idea. You could create incentives, i.e. for every week you get by with 100W/day you get one extra day (2.4KWH) free.