We lose a big percentage of our power just moving it around. Smart local grids are the future.

I saw someone during Irma had rigged their Chevy Volt as an emergency generator. It worked great!

Grid or no grid, why can't a state operate a non-profit utility that provides and distributes gas and electric? Rather than pay executive perks or shareholder dividends maybe the money goes towards BETTER TREE TRIMMING PROGRAMS THAT REDUCE THE CHANCE OF HUGE WILDFIRES, for example.

Large energy generation facilities are just terrorist targets. We should start to require that any building constructed should have enough solar/wind power on site to provide 25% of it's power needs, at least. Then start working it up as technology improves.

Privatizing power utilities is bullshit. Should not happen. Frankly, we should probably socialize the whole network, and make solar/wind upgrade subsidies commonplace. In the modern world, electrical power is a necessity, not a luxury. Leave it up to the libertarians and we'll all be suffering our own private Puerto Ricos across the country.

Residential is the "low hanging fruit" of power consumption. But you are forgetting large scale commercial/industrial processes (that are energy hogs) and also dense residential (I.E. high rise apartment buildings) where solar is not feasible for the power needed for the whole building.

What you are proposing would play nicely with large single family suburban areas surrounded by a few strip malls and is not without merit on those grounds for the significant load they would take off the grid. The large power plants will still NEED to exist but won't pollute as much which is a plus.

But even if we do something like install a hydro plant for a few thousand suburban homes.... who maintains it? Who does repairs when there is damage to the power grid between the homes and the station? Who pays for it in the first place? Are people going to tolerate these hydroplants in their line of view (think about cell phone towers)?

Lots of logistics but ultimately it comes down to what everything comes down to: $

How much for a bank of solar panels and some sort of heating system sufficient to disconnect myself from the grid?

How much, in the aggregate, for the millions upon millions of other homes in the US to do the same?


Hell, I don't know. Maybe I can set myself up for life for $1000, in which case I ask you to point me toward a vendor.

The "ownership" came with buying our house and signing up for power. Pretty common and positioned to continue forward -- to some degree -- as described. The transfer of power from areas of excess to areas of need all day long is critical to always having power available everywhere, though, and it's hard to imagine that would change. But we could develop greater independence and potentially the ability to unhook in emergencies when technically necessary.

This is the south, so there are no close plans at our coop to start subsidizing a transfer to solar. Unlike a number of other red states, though, Georgia's government has not quietly seized property-owners' right to generate solar power and given it to the power companies.

So in future (if the Repubs don't sneak in a change in the law), we would be able to convert to a power-sharing agreement where customers own the power they develop, the coop owns or merely subsidizes our purchase of the solar installations on our properties and manages the power--for a price and use of the excess power.

Not mentioned is the enormous threat to our nation that terrorist attacks could take out any sizable section of our grid. (A report to Congress several years ago estimated that 90% of all Americans would be dead by the end of a year if the entire national grid was taken down. NK knows this perfectly well, also that far smaller attacks would still devastate our entire nation.)

Also we should consider the threat, which not long ago I would mostly have considered merely theoretical, that the ability to turn off whole regions of power could be used to quell large-scale rebellion against the activities of any of our governments.

My grandparents all lived without electricity at times. Their Wild West grandparents had no electricity.

Grid free, and small community grids, do have problems. Batteries suck. Small fuel power plants suck.

Fuel power plants can be near carbon neutral if they run on agricultural and forestry wastes, but these bio-fuel plants have a very poor track record when it comes to air pollution. It's too easy to run them Volkswagen style, clamping down on emissions only when someone is measuring them, skimping on chemical additives and consumables required to keep the plant running cleanly, and using inappropriate fuels the plants were not designed for. Bio-fuel plants in Maine designed to burn forestry wastes have been caught burning construction waste. Similar plants in California have been caught cutting back at night on chemical additives required to control emissions, when nobody can see the smoke.

It's a lot easier to regulate pollution from a handful of very large very efficient fuel power plants than it is to regulate thousands of smaller less efficient plants.

Anyone can disconnect from the grid. It's as easy as finding your main power breaker and switching it off. Or, the more common way, not paying your electric bill. The new smart meters are fantastic. If you don't pay your bill, the power company's computer will shut you off automatically, no human intervention required. It used to be if you were having trouble paying your bill you'd get a few days grace because the power company had to send a human out to shut off your power manually. No more. (Don't ask me how I know.)

Almost every off-the-grid person I've met runs a dirty little fossil fueled generator whenever days go buy without sunshine or wind. The basic problems remain the same at every scale, from single household to huge multi-state electric grids. Wind and solar plants are backed up by nimble gas power plants. (Large hydro has been used in similar ways, but this causes very unnatural and potentially hazardous river flows.)

It's easy to disconnect from the nuclear-gas-coal-monster-hydro electric grid, the question is are you willing to accept the lifestyle changes required to do it?

For example, I know how to live without a refrigerator. I've lived without a refrigerator as a kid and as an adult. (It's especially easy when you've got dogs, chickens, and compost heaps handling the leftovers.) Most people today consider a house without a refrigerator incomplete.

The problem is that a "renewable" energy powered society looks nothing like the high energy industrial consumer society we now enjoy.