Not Being Dependent Feels Great
I just sent this text to another friend who lives off grid:
“When we were designing and building our house, I can’t tell you how many people said, “Oh, you’re gonna wish you had connected to CMP.” Well, we got the last of our panels up on Dec 22 (one day after the shortest day of the year) and haven’t come even close to needing a generator or CMP since that day. Most days, we don’t know what to do with all the power we make. I’m actually thinking about getting an electric vehicle just because I can fuel it for free. I figure this is one less area in which we’re dependent on someone or something else. I like not feeling dependent!”
My friend and I were texting about being off grid because apparently we were two of the only people in several towns that had power, after some unknown event caused the grid power to go out overnight. No storms or anything, but something happened that caused an outage across multiple towns, and CMP (the local electric utility) kept pushing out the expected time for restoration. I was down in the village getting the mail and performing some volunteer duties when it started to come back around noon.
I suspect grid outages are going to be far more common in the future because the US electric grid isn’t sized to deliver all the power we are forecast to need as a nation, and the ability to build new power lines and centralized generating plants is met with significant public pushback at almost every turn. Everyone wants power, but no one seems to want a big transmission line or a power plant near their home. Heck, most people in our area are even opposed to big fields of solar panels, that just sit there and produce power cleanly (but they aren’t very pretty compared to fields and cows, I admit).
We’re actually designing and building our property so that every building has its own, self-contained PV system and batteries. Yes, that costs more, and yes, it’s probably not necessary. And yes, we’ve designed the main house (barnpartment) with multiple inverters and batteries so that if one (or even two) go down, we can still operate. But I like the feeling of having each building self-sufficient to the greatest degree reasonably possible. We’ll forget the added capital we spend a year or so after we’ve spent it, and will just forego a trip or other (probably unnecessary) purchase to pay for this added safety. But we’ll likely have that added safety for the rest of our lives, or close to it, at our current ages. And when the power goes out again, as we think will happen more and more often, we’ll just make another cup of coffee and offer up our shower and laundry to friends who need it. Then we’ll try to convince them to go off grid, as well.