When it comes to clean energy, a lot of people love to blindly say “solar power!” as if the government should just choose solar and then it’s all over and all of the energy problems are solved.
We have been told who the villains and heroes of grid power are, and I wish to clearly muddy the waters. Everything on the other end of the wire is nasty – including solar. Here is a brief rogues’ gallery:
nuclear: the waste, the dangers, the fuel for war stuff…we are very familiar with a lot of the downsides here. There have been dramatic improvements, and there is talk of the potential of further optimizations.1 But there are downsides that most people are not aware of (like the waste needs 10,000 years of professional babysitting). And as much as nuclear is a mess, until demand drops, power companies will use whatever is the cheapest in the short run.2 And there is some thought to public safety – so as much as nuclear seems to be “the worst,” it turns out that the death count with nuclear energy is officially less than 200 people, although there is information that suggests numbers approaching an all-time count of one million people. Coal, meanwhile, is casually racking up several million per year.3
coal: the worst of the lot in my opinion. Instead of trying to carefully store dangerous waste as with nuclear, coal plants just pump it up into the atmosphere! And even if you go to the most remote wilderness and catch a fish, it’s going to be loaded with toxic levels of mercury that came from coal plants.
hydro: the cement has a massive carbon footprint. Plus, each dam obliterates 95% or more of the river wildlife. There is now less than 5% of the salmon remaining than used to be in the rivers in the Pacific Northwest thanks to hydro power, and we artificially augment the salmon population – what about all the other species? And many dams are on the edge of ceasing to function due to silt building up behind them.
wind: it takes quite a bit of cement to anchor those giant towers. But, compared to the others, wind power is now virtually problem free – and still getting better. The biggest practical problem is pretty obvious: energy demand might be at odds with how much the wind blows – so wind power needs to be augmented by something that has more problems.
solar: the poster child we turn to for “better.” Unfortunately, toxic materials are involved in the manufacturing process and in the panels themselves. I hope that by standing up now and expressing “I am worried about the toxicity,” we might see optimizations on that front. Additionally, today’s panels have a lifespan of about 25 years. Hopefully that will improve as well. But solar still has the same problem as wind: energy demand might go unsatisfied, depending on how much the sun is shining…especially at night. So solar power also needs to be augmented by something else.
Now that we’ve given all the bigs a quick kick, let’s contemplate making our own electricity. Not so much because you are about to make this leap tomorrow, but for the sake of trying on some ideas. To see how this frame of mind looks on you. And to contemplate a richer life that happens to use less energy, from a different angle than we have talked about so far.
I think the best off-grid power source is micro hydro, which often has a negligible environmental footprint.4 Lots of power, day and night. No silt issues. No massive concrete footprint. Not a lot of parts – so not a lot of bound-up toxicity. It is far better than any other option – but it is often illegal and requires you to have a backyard stream…which most people don’t.
While wind is a great champion for on-grid power, it also requires a lot of dedicated people to maintain those moving parts. Smaller-scale systems need that same level of maintenance, and parts will wear out. And the smaller stuff doesn’t get high enough to harvest the best wind.5 Overall, small-scale wind has not been a popular solution. That said, I think there is a lot of room for optimization, so I am grateful to the folks who continue to invest in this space!
Before rolling out my favorite strategy for backyard solar, we first have to get past off-grid’s dirty little secret…
Nearly everybody that is off-grid uses propane – which always struck me as a bit odd. It’s not like you wander out in the woods to harvest the wild propane, bring it home, and stuff it into your water heater. Propane is part of “the grid.” So when people shop around for solar power systems, they see the price tags for a 5 kilowatt system and get sticker shock “WHAT! That’s WAY too expensive!” But it gets worse: that system doesn’t include heat, hot water, cooking, or a clothes dryer – all of those things will be run on propane. If we choose to skip propane then we are looking at a 20 kW system.
When you are looking at spending over $25,000 for a system that will barely meet your needs for the next ten years, you start to appreciate the low price of the grid and how luxuriant your life is with so much cheap electricity – as long as you don’t think about the environmental disaster on the other end of the wire. Therefore, this chapter is about approaching this issue from a different direction.
My friend, Helen Atthowe,6 spent a few years living in a cabin. At first, she was without power. After a few months, she got the very best solar system I had ever seen: two 135 watt panels, two batteries, and two inverters.7 Here are the most profound points to this system:
Because Helen found a comfortable path using much less energy, her system ended up far simpler and easier to work with. As an engineer, one of my favorite “design pearls” is: the fastest and most reliable components of any system are those that are not there.
Two inverters. One is 2000 watts and one is 400 watts (personally, I would prefer a 3000/200 combo). The larger inverter is turned on for 2 to 3 hours each week and the smaller inverter is turned on for 8 to 12 hours each week. All other energy use is with 12 volt DC power. Solar experts are quick to point out that the amount of power that an inverter uses is very small compared to the amount of power that can be used through it. But my experience is that if you leave the inverter on all the time without using power for anything else, you can end up (in the winter) with no power left for anything else. So use the inverter only when you need it.
Most people who go off-grid suffer without their clothes dryer,8 hair dryer, air conditioner,9 etc. Unless, of course, their off-grid situation has the 20,000 watts of solar panels. I would like to suggest that people first explore reducing their energy consumption by 90% while still on the grid, and then they are ready to explore going off-grid.
Rather than a gradual reduction of use, Helen made a leap to zero electrical use for a few months. And then she added in a beautiful, small solar system. This is not the path for everybody, but it is a lovely path to contemplate.
There are a lot of great things to say about moving to solar. And enthusiasm often masks certain downsides, like the toxic footprint. One way to reduce the toxicity by 90% is to reduce the panel count by 90%. And the first step is to contemplate a luxuriant strategy with less electricity.