34 ms·

Facing sky-high connection fees, rural Ontarians go off the grid

317 points by dgudkov 5y ago

throwawayboise 5y ago
How well do solar panels work "north of Toronto" in the wintertime? They get what, maybe 8 hours of daylight and at that the sun is at a prettly low angle.
deadalus 5y ago
>Hydro One, which distributes electricity for most rural customers in the province, eventually reduced the cost to $25,000. It was still too much, according to Timmermans. >Combined, the system( wind-and-solar array) produces eight kilowatt hours — more than enough to run his offices, radio studios, the central air conditioning and the servers that keep his internet customers connected year 'round, he says. >It cost him $23,000.
- mulmen 5y ago
  The next sentence: > "And then on top of that, to pay, you know, an electric bill, probably at around four to five hundred dollars a month for the rest of my life and only increasing. I thought, well, now's the time to go off-grid." So what’s the total cost of ownership for his system? Does it have $400.00/mo of upkeep?
  - marvin 5y ago
    The $23,000 probably have a capital cost of $30 per month or so, and if they're written off to nothing in 20 years (and the acquisition cost isn't lower by then, which it will), that's another $100 per month. So that leaves $270 per month for maintenance, emergency supply and other upkeep. Seems completely reasonable that the actual costs will be lower.
    - koheripbal 5y ago
      This is an apples to oranges comparison since there is no way he'd have anywhere near the same uptime as on-grid power.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        How did you come to that conclusion?
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Indeed, his uptime will be many orders of magnitude better than what the Ontario grid can provide. It's an apples to oranges comparison specifically because it is the lines (and not the generating capacity) that fails very, very regularly in rural Ontario.
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        My rural Ontario cousins would like to chat with you about grid up time in rural Ontario.
      - SamBam 5y ago
        The top comment on this post [1] says the exact opposite, that the reason they are off-grid is precisely for the reliability. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998847
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  And note that even with a connection fee of zero, his autonomous setup would start to pay for itself after four years, due to no longer having to pay power bill of $400-$500 a month. Thats assuming zero maintenance costs so not quite correct, but it can't be too far off. It really is a no-brainer.
- albatrosstrophy 5y ago
  Also he mentioned they have to run on propane in winter. I wonder how much would that cost.
  - voisin 5y ago
    Most people in Canada use natural gas (if the network exists near one’s home) or propane (if not) for heat in the winter. Electric is considered too expensive. I think things like electric heat pumps are more cost effective nowadays to something like -5C, but alas, much of Canada is far colder for many months.
    - xavieralexandre 5y ago
      Dig a few meters and your soil will be 13C, a great starting point for your heat pump.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    About the same as electric, but a bit more hassle if it can't be delivered by truck. The most economic option is an outdoor woodstove, about $10K to install a big one and after that you need to keep it fed, a heat pump is another viable alternative. Another option is fuel oil (essentially: diesel), in an oil burning furnace. The best way to cut your heating bill in Northern Canada is insulation, wooden houses are pretty good at this to begin with, you can get pretty close to neutrality by some solid engineering (South facing windows, take advantage of thermal mass), then you only need to add additional heat besides what you already generate when cooking on long stretches of overcast days, which don't happen all that often there.
  - bregma 5y ago
    Where I live (rural Ontario), propane costs somewhere around $2500/year for heat. Hydro costs about $4000. The sane people stick to wood, which if you cut and split it yourself will keep to under $1000. We have disconnected all the electric heaters in my house (except for the newly-installed radiant-heat floor in the bathroom, because it's a luxury I'm willing to splurge on) and only fire up the second woodstove for those weeks it drops below -20.
leoedin 5y ago
Unfortunately this article (like most news articles seem to) mixes up kW and kWh, so we don't actually know how big his off grid solar system is. I'm guessing 8 kW (or 8 kWh per hour, without capacity factor taken into account). It's a pretty compelling option - spend less than the connection fee to get free electricity. The biggest problem is that you have to size your system for cloudiest days in the dead of winter - which means massive batteries and lots of extra panels. It would be interesting to see a full cost breakdown for a realistic use case over 4 or 5 years, including the cost of maintenance. I imagine you could throw a $1000 generator into the mix to cover the really bad days, but then that's an added maintenance burden.
- giantg2 5y ago
  If you're able to run central air plus a bunch of other stuff at the same time, then I would think your assumption of 8kW is right. If capacity was only 8kWh, then they could only run all this stuff for maybe 1-2 hours a day. That seems like an absurd outcome, and unlikely.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    > If capacity was only 8kWh, then they could only run all this stuff for maybe 1-2 hours a day. I think the correct reading is they'd be able to run it for 1-2 hours, once. Presumably it's all powered off a bank of AA batteries. ;-)
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      He's using some pretty heavy duty prismatic Lithium Ion cells.
      - Filligree 5y ago
        Then presumably it's 8 kW. I wonder what the base rating of the solar panels is; it might be 60-70 kW. (If it's just the panels shown in the photo, then those are probably 8kW on a sunny day.)
stefan_ 5y ago
> Combined, the system produces eight kilowatt hours Can they start educating journalists about power and energy, in university or whatever internships they do? It is really not that difficult.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  If Engineers are teached humanities. Why not humanities are teached STEM... Like basics of math, physics, chemistry, engineering and son on... Would in general make our society better if everyone understood these things.
  - notafraudster 5y ago
    Humanities degrees almost always require both 1-2 mathematics courses and 1-2 science courses, and they're almost always fulfilled with complementary electives e.g. "rocks for jocks" type material, the same way engineers fulfill their complementary electives with blowoff courses that cater to their preferences.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    MIT had a course called Physics for Future Presidents. Which is basically a primer of the major topics in science.
  - ketzu 5y ago
    Aren't those basic high school topics?
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      They should be. Maybe just need to apply standards to high schools and not allow graduation without certain sufficient baseline... Which currently clearly is too low in many countries.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Last time I interviewed someone in the US, they actually did do that in the first terms in the IT Bachelor because apparently there is no common standard across US high schools. But given how many of the investors in the UK actually study humanities at Oxford I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish there. Unless you really believe that studying humanities somehow makes you a more moral human being that then doesn't go on to destroy the world, which clearly isn't the case. And for reference Boris Johnson studied classics at Oxford, fucked a dead pig as part of a fraternity initiation ceremony and is now doing his best to dismantle public healthcare in the UK. So I don't think the "make our society better" statement holds any value. EDIT: comment below is right, it was David Cameron, not Boris Johnson. And he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. So while the last paragraph is half correct and half mixed in with Boris Johnsons history, both of them have been working hard on selling off the NHS. Boris also hasn't started as many wars. So, I guess Boris is better on a relative scale?
jbarham 5y ago
Personally my main takeaway from the article is less that renewable energy sources are a good alternative to the grid but more that the monopoly Hydro One connection fees are outrageously high. $25 - $80k connection fees seem like extortion in rural Ontario where the average annual income is probably around $80k. I wonder if they'll do a follow-up article next year to report how the solar systems performed over the long Northern Ontario winter...
- giantg2 5y ago
  Connections costs for utilities can be high like that in the US too. Running electric, sewer, and water is easily over $25k in many locations.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    25k doesn't sound entirely unreasonable. If it includes running them to where services run and connecting them. Just for connecting it is high.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      It's not entirely clear to me in the article. Does the utility exist at the property already? My understanding this that if you're on a rural road and build a house past the last one built, the electric company will try to make your connection fee cover them extending the lines on their side to your property. Then you still have to cover the lines on your property.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a rural line and maintain it? Even at 80k, the govt is still losing money.
  - sbarre 5y ago
    That should be the cost of doing business when you're a government-sponsored monopoly that provides an essential service to your tax-paying citizens (not customers). It's literally what the government is for.
jacquesm 5y ago
I was one of those. The bigger - and hidden - advantage to me was that my homebrew power setup (16 solar panels + a 2 KW windmill with a backup generator, and 48 KWh of batteries) was much more reliable than what Ontario Hydro & Power sold. The fees are one thing, having your freezer contents spoiled a couple of times per year gets old really quickly, and in rural Ontario having a well stocked freezer is not optional. Especially in the winter the power would go out so frequently it was a serious limitation. Coming from NL, where powerfailures are so rare that they make the news when they happen this was one of those little things that I found it hard to adapt to. When the power in Canada fails you are in immediate trouble, your heater and sump pump no longer work, you risk all kinds of follow on damage. So reliable power wasn't a luxury and it was relatively easy to get that sorted out to a degree that cutting the cord was a logical next step (because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected). Apropos high fees: the power company wanted some exorbitant fee for disconnecting us (the opposite of a connection fee), I asked them quite friendly what would happen if I shorted out the wires, 15 minutes later a truck came and someone pulled the road side fuses for free ;)
- vinay427 5y ago
  > Coming from NL Given the Canadian context, do you mean the Netherlands or Newfoundland and Labrador?
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    In a latter comment he says he moved “back to Europe” and links to his site reveal a Dutch looking name. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28999144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28999144
  - nervousvarun 5y ago
    > When the power in Canada fails you... I think contextually the very next sentence gives you your answer here.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Netherlands.
brody_hamer 5y ago
Not mentioned in this article is that Hydro One also charges rural ontarians a “delivery fee”, which is about 2x the price of your usage. So you might pay 6 to 14 cents per kWh, but your bill will be 3 times that amount. The delivery fee is also completely opaque: there’s no explanation to determine how it’s calculated, other than a brief text saying “a portion of this fee is fixed, and a portion depends on your usage”. But I haven’t been able to derive those values. If the formula for this delivery fee is something like ‘$xx + $yy*kWh’; then it appears these x and y values are not static.
- xmaayy 5y ago
  It could be that it is the formula you state "$xx + $yy*kWh", but you're getting variable amounts of power from different generation stations throughout a month that then all have a different x and y value
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    That reminds me of money generating mechanic in Transport Tycoon Deluxe, where the further away goods production and consumption are, the higher is price for delivering. Even if there is a much closer source for the customer you just send the train from a factory on the other side of the map and charge for distance.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I talked to someone in the power company at some point and they said it is a function of how far away you are to the nearest generating point. That could be a tale though, but it made some sense.
  - xmaayy 5y ago
    Thats odd, because I'm facing the same 2-3x markup and I live about 2KM from an active hydro dam.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
For anyone doing this, please bear in mind that if you want to be able to just use anything electrical anytime, you'll need a very expensive setup. Most people off grid need to be keeping a constant eye on their battery levels of charge, and do things like only using the washing machine on sunny days. Certain appliances like tumble driers, electric showers, and fan heaters, you pretty much can't have.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  True, you can't waste your power. But it isn't all that expensive (the prices of solar have come down tremendously) and there are now good and relatively inexpensive solutions for storage. It's still more work than a grid hookup, but it is absolutely doable if you are willing to adjust your lifestyle just a bit. A woodstove with a heat exchanger and you'll have all the domestic hot water that you'll ever need. Fan heaters are ridiculously wasteful and shouldn't be used (in general: electric heat should not be used).
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  It's good to be aware of energy consumption. It requires planning and a concern for efficiency. These habits seem difficult to inject into popular thinking until there is economic pressure. Human populations have consumed entire forests to burn wood just to cook and to stay warm. Electricity is a superior solution, but the same primitive, wasteful habits remain. In other words, for all the people "on the grid", the challenge is to unlearn wasteful consumer habits and conditioning. Their homes are full of devices and AC adaptors that draw power when idle. The combustion engine itself is very poor in efficiency, but the high energy density of petrol masks the cost. People prefer not having to think about the energy cost and environmental cost. A challenge in the area of EV adoption, for example, is that people expect not to need to concern themselves with expenditure. Those who drive an EV need to be aware of the energy cost of driving (e.g. heating, cooling, tire inflation, load) and of the advantage of combining trips. Is it all "too hard"? Well, the period of "energy luxury" has brought us to an ecological crisis.
  - ativzzz 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
Are there 'mini-grids' that off-grid people can use to connect one another? By connecting everyone's houses together, even with relatively low capacity cable, everyone should get more reliability (an inverter or battery bank can fail and it doesn't matter), and more energy availability (if I use more energy than I generate one day, but someone else uses less, that's okay). I'm imagining it could be as simple as a few hundred meters of cable with regular 110v plugs on the end, and a box of electronics that can push power in either direction as needed for balancing.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  This is made explicitly illegal in many places. I've looked into this when I was still heavily in renewables and depending on where you are crossing your lot lines with power supplied to another lot that doesn't have a grid hook-up can be a problem. Of course, when the power goes out everybody does this anyway (from generator or off-grid installation to the neighbors freezer, for instance). But for a permanent hook-up I have not seen it.
bob1029 5y ago
I am working on a partial off-grid solution for my new home. I went through the TX winter storm and don't want to get caught with pants down again. My strategy is to have a sub panel installed which runs the most critical loads: Main Panel - 150A - 50A A/C - 50A Kitchen Range - 30A Dryer - 30A Oven - 100A Sub-panel bypass - 30A Inverter/Charger - 50A Generator backfeed (Interlock w/ 150A Main) Sub Panel - 100A - 30A 220V Inverter backfeed (Interlock w/ 100A Main) - 20A Furnace/Blower (this is the key bit for TX winter) - All lighting/bedroom/office/internet loads - Kitchen 120V outlets + fridge - Garage 120V (doors, etc) In normal operation, the Main Panel would be fed by the grid, with the Sub Panel fed by the inverter backfeed. The inverter will operate in bypass mode if grid power is available. Otherwise, batteries will be drawn from seamlessly. The sub-panel bypass (i.e. 100A sub panel main) would only be turned on if there was some issue with the inverter setup. This effectively puts this most important parts of my house on a ~double-conversion UPS setup. I am not that worried about losing HVAC compressor, range, or laundry capabilities during a grid outage. If it gets really desperate, I could still wheel in my 12kW generator and run a load of laundry while the inverter charges things up. The reason I want to run inverter full-time is because we get shitty brownouts almost every day. I am planning to use a 6kW inverter to run the sub panel. Still debating on the # of batteries to use, but I am going to start with enough to run 12 hours before I need generator. And yes, I looked at Tesla power wall. I am not made of money. I am going to have this whole house UPS deal done for <8000 USD. Finally, back-feeding panels is acceptable per code around my parts as long as you follow all the rules (e.g. actually install the interlocks). This is definitely a more grey area, but its also one of those things that is super easy to back-out if you are going to sell the house.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "And yes, I looked at Tesla power wall. I am not made of money." Well, if you were ma of of money, would you commit autocannibalism? Otherwise, the cost is quite reasonable
ThinkBeat 5y ago
You also must add in the cost of propane for heating the house during the winter for 3 - 5 months. (and a big tank) If I was off grid, in a rural area where the winters can get severe, I would want a big diesel generator as a backup. A lot of things can happen during a proper winter: roads close, heavy snow, supplies can get hard to get some short periods, you can get cold front that bring the temperature down below 20C. One of the things that sucks about diesel generators are the noise, and the pollution and the maintenance. You also have to run it for a while every now and again and make sure you test everything regularly. He could heat the house electrically with power off the generator and that would integrate nicely with solar and wind power. Oh you can get propane generators as well, I was not familiar with that. That would be more convenient since he already has a propane tank. Just build a bigger one.
jeffrallen 5y ago
Totally different context, but somewhat same story. The estimate for network hookup plus meter, panel, and car charger installation for me is CHF 6000. The difference in charging cost between public chargers and home charging is 20 cents a kWh. The payoff time for home charging would be a decade or more. Instead I'll continue using "expensive" public charging until I can afford to make an off grid car charger in my garage. Network connection costs are a necessary evil of legacy power networks. But paradoxically, they accelerate the financial un-viability of the legacy network, by making off grid way, way more financially viable.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
If you can't afford utility hookups for your new construction, don't live rural. Live in the city limits. That's why city limits exist. There are economic boundaries where a city can fend for its residents. This isn't about 5th generation people losing power, it is about people choosing to live rural and feeling entitled to costly infrastructure for free.
- drited 5y ago
  The article said that the power company quoted 80 grand despite the nearest pole being across the street, about 45 metres away. The guy wasn't feeling entitled to costly infrastructure for free. He seems to have correctly concluded that the price the local monopoly quoted was ridiculous.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    What should it cost?
    - drited 5y ago
      For comparison I recently had an installation done at a similar distance and the cost was less than $5k
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
While a bit interesting how he brings it all together for the setup, I could care less about these rural people who decide to live in Minden or whatever and complain about expenses. This is not Toronto news CBC. These people are reasonably well off and choosing to live outside of the city where more and more of the majority live and we've got bigger issues closer to home like affordability and infrastructure etc etc. Bah.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You do realize more and more people are finding it too difficult to live in big cities like Toronto and are forced into much smaller cities/towns/hamlets where these are issues. Paying $2,000 a month rent is difficult for the average person making minimum wage. The affordability paradox is forcing young people and young couples into rural off the grid properties because few will ever afford a home in Toronto. Part of the solution is to encourage more rural density. This is an issue that you should support.
  - ChrisArchitect 5y ago
    fairplay - the people in this article and the other one that inspired it (the other Minden guy or whatever) do not seem like young people struggling with the affordability of the city.
tomohawk 5y ago
I've had a grid tied solar system for 15+ years. With the enormous tax subsidies back then, it's broken even. There's about a 1.5% decrease per year in production. I'll have to replace the whole thing sometime in the next 5 years. This article paints a very rosy picture of what to expect. In a non-grid-tied system, you have to deal with batteries and a bunch of other issues. This is not cheap. And it is a recurring maintenance cost. Are you going to do that maintenance every few months yourself, or pay someone to do it?
mdavis6890 5y ago
What they don't tell us in the article is WHY it is $80k. Without knowing WHY, it's very hard to judge anything about it. Maybe it's price gouging. Maybe there are technical issues that make it very difficult. Maybe there are weird regulations that come into play. Maybe there are strange incentive structures. Maybe $80k is actually a loss. Who knows?

317 points by dgudkov 5y ago

How well do solar panels work "north of Toronto" in the wintertime? They get what, maybe 8 hours of daylight and at that the sun is at a prettly low angle.

deadalus 5y ago

>Hydro One, which distributes electricity for most rural customers in the province, eventually reduced the cost to $25,000. It was still too much, according to Timmermans. >Combined, the system( wind-and-solar array) produces eight kilowatt hours — more than enough to run his offices, radio studios, the central air conditioning and the servers that keep his internet customers connected year 'round, he says. >It cost him $23,000.

mulmen 5y ago
The next sentence: > "And then on top of that, to pay, you know, an electric bill, probably at around four to five hundred dollars a month for the rest of my life and only increasing. I thought, well, now's the time to go off-grid." So what’s the total cost of ownership for his system? Does it have $400.00/mo of upkeep?
- marvin 5y ago
  The $23,000 probably have a capital cost of $30 per month or so, and if they're written off to nothing in 20 years (and the acquisition cost isn't lower by then, which it will), that's another $100 per month. So that leaves $270 per month for maintenance, emergency supply and other upkeep. Seems completely reasonable that the actual costs will be lower.
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    This is an apples to oranges comparison since there is no way he'd have anywhere near the same uptime as on-grid power.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      How did you come to that conclusion?
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Indeed, his uptime will be many orders of magnitude better than what the Ontario grid can provide. It's an apples to oranges comparison specifically because it is the lines (and not the generating capacity) that fails very, very regularly in rural Ontario.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      My rural Ontario cousins would like to chat with you about grid up time in rural Ontario.
    - SamBam 5y ago
      The top comment on this post [1] says the exact opposite, that the reason they are off-grid is precisely for the reliability. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998847
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
And note that even with a connection fee of zero, his autonomous setup would start to pay for itself after four years, due to no longer having to pay power bill of $400-$500 a month. Thats assuming zero maintenance costs so not quite correct, but it can't be too far off. It really is a no-brainer.
albatrosstrophy 5y ago
Also he mentioned they have to run on propane in winter. I wonder how much would that cost.
- voisin 5y ago
  Most people in Canada use natural gas (if the network exists near one’s home) or propane (if not) for heat in the winter. Electric is considered too expensive. I think things like electric heat pumps are more cost effective nowadays to something like -5C, but alas, much of Canada is far colder for many months.
  - xavieralexandre 5y ago
    Dig a few meters and your soil will be 13C, a great starting point for your heat pump.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  About the same as electric, but a bit more hassle if it can't be delivered by truck. The most economic option is an outdoor woodstove, about $10K to install a big one and after that you need to keep it fed, a heat pump is another viable alternative. Another option is fuel oil (essentially: diesel), in an oil burning furnace. The best way to cut your heating bill in Northern Canada is insulation, wooden houses are pretty good at this to begin with, you can get pretty close to neutrality by some solid engineering (South facing windows, take advantage of thermal mass), then you only need to add additional heat besides what you already generate when cooking on long stretches of overcast days, which don't happen all that often there.
- bregma 5y ago
  Where I live (rural Ontario), propane costs somewhere around $2500/year for heat. Hydro costs about $4000. The sane people stick to wood, which if you cut and split it yourself will keep to under $1000. We have disconnected all the electric heaters in my house (except for the newly-installed radiant-heat floor in the bathroom, because it's a luxury I'm willing to splurge on) and only fire up the second woodstove for those weeks it drops below -20.

leoedin 5y ago

Unfortunately this article (like most news articles seem to) mixes up kW and kWh, so we don't actually know how big his off grid solar system is. I'm guessing 8 kW (or 8 kWh per hour, without capacity factor taken into account). It's a pretty compelling option - spend less than the connection fee to get free electricity. The biggest problem is that you have to size your system for cloudiest days in the dead of winter - which means massive batteries and lots of extra panels. It would be interesting to see a full cost breakdown for a realistic use case over 4 or 5 years, including the cost of maintenance. I imagine you could throw a $1000 generator into the mix to cover the really bad days, but then that's an added maintenance burden.

giantg2 5y ago
If you're able to run central air plus a bunch of other stuff at the same time, then I would think your assumption of 8kW is right. If capacity was only 8kWh, then they could only run all this stuff for maybe 1-2 hours a day. That seems like an absurd outcome, and unlikely.
- Filligree 5y ago
  > If capacity was only 8kWh, then they could only run all this stuff for maybe 1-2 hours a day. I think the correct reading is they'd be able to run it for 1-2 hours, once. Presumably it's all powered off a bank of AA batteries. ;-)
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    He's using some pretty heavy duty prismatic Lithium Ion cells.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      Then presumably it's 8 kW. I wonder what the base rating of the solar panels is; it might be 60-70 kW. (If it's just the panels shown in the photo, then those are probably 8kW on a sunny day.)

stefan_ 5y ago

> Combined, the system produces eight kilowatt hours Can they start educating journalists about power and energy, in university or whatever internships they do? It is really not that difficult.

Ekaros 5y ago
If Engineers are teached humanities. Why not humanities are teached STEM... Like basics of math, physics, chemistry, engineering and son on... Would in general make our society better if everyone understood these things.
- notafraudster 5y ago
  Humanities degrees almost always require both 1-2 mathematics courses and 1-2 science courses, and they're almost always fulfilled with complementary electives e.g. "rocks for jocks" type material, the same way engineers fulfill their complementary electives with blowoff courses that cater to their preferences.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  MIT had a course called Physics for Future Presidents. Which is basically a primer of the major topics in science.
- ketzu 5y ago
  Aren't those basic high school topics?
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    They should be. Maybe just need to apply standards to high schools and not allow graduation without certain sufficient baseline... Which currently clearly is too low in many countries.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Last time I interviewed someone in the US, they actually did do that in the first terms in the IT Bachelor because apparently there is no common standard across US high schools. But given how many of the investors in the UK actually study humanities at Oxford I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish there. Unless you really believe that studying humanities somehow makes you a more moral human being that then doesn't go on to destroy the world, which clearly isn't the case. And for reference Boris Johnson studied classics at Oxford, fucked a dead pig as part of a fraternity initiation ceremony and is now doing his best to dismantle public healthcare in the UK. So I don't think the "make our society better" statement holds any value. EDIT: comment below is right, it was David Cameron, not Boris Johnson. And he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. So while the last paragraph is half correct and half mixed in with Boris Johnsons history, both of them have been working hard on selling off the NHS. Boris also hasn't started as many wars. So, I guess Boris is better on a relative scale?

jbarham 5y ago

Personally my main takeaway from the article is less that renewable energy sources are a good alternative to the grid but more that the monopoly Hydro One connection fees are outrageously high. $25 - $80k connection fees seem like extortion in rural Ontario where the average annual income is probably around $80k. I wonder if they'll do a follow-up article next year to report how the solar systems performed over the long Northern Ontario winter...

giantg2 5y ago
Connections costs for utilities can be high like that in the US too. Running electric, sewer, and water is easily over $25k in many locations.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  25k doesn't sound entirely unreasonable. If it includes running them to where services run and connecting them. Just for connecting it is high.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    It's not entirely clear to me in the article. Does the utility exist at the property already? My understanding this that if you're on a rural road and build a house past the last one built, the electric company will try to make your connection fee cover them extending the lines on their side to your property. Then you still have to cover the lines on your property.
koheripbal 5y ago
Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a rural line and maintain it? Even at 80k, the govt is still losing money.
- sbarre 5y ago
  That should be the cost of doing business when you're a government-sponsored monopoly that provides an essential service to your tax-paying citizens (not customers). It's literally what the government is for.

jacquesm 5y ago

I was one of those. The bigger - and hidden - advantage to me was that my homebrew power setup (16 solar panels + a 2 KW windmill with a backup generator, and 48 KWh of batteries) was much more reliable than what Ontario Hydro & Power sold. The fees are one thing, having your freezer contents spoiled a couple of times per year gets old really quickly, and in rural Ontario having a well stocked freezer is not optional. Especially in the winter the power would go out so frequently it was a serious limitation. Coming from NL, where powerfailures are so rare that they make the news when they happen this was one of those little things that I found it hard to adapt to. When the power in Canada fails you are in immediate trouble, your heater and sump pump no longer work, you risk all kinds of follow on damage. So reliable power wasn't a luxury and it was relatively easy to get that sorted out to a degree that cutting the cord was a logical next step (because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected). Apropos high fees: the power company wanted some exorbitant fee for disconnecting us (the opposite of a connection fee), I asked them quite friendly what would happen if I shorted out the wires, 15 minutes later a truck came and someone pulled the road side fuses for free ;)

vinay427 5y ago
> Coming from NL Given the Canadian context, do you mean the Netherlands or Newfoundland and Labrador?
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  In a latter comment he says he moved “back to Europe” and links to his site reveal a Dutch looking name. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28999144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28999144
- nervousvarun 5y ago
  > When the power in Canada fails you... I think contextually the very next sentence gives you your answer here.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Netherlands.

brody_hamer 5y ago

Not mentioned in this article is that Hydro One also charges rural ontarians a “delivery fee”, which is about 2x the price of your usage. So you might pay 6 to 14 cents per kWh, but your bill will be 3 times that amount. The delivery fee is also completely opaque: there’s no explanation to determine how it’s calculated, other than a brief text saying “a portion of this fee is fixed, and a portion depends on your usage”. But I haven’t been able to derive those values. If the formula for this delivery fee is something like ‘$xx + $yy*kWh’; then it appears these x and y values are not static.

xmaayy 5y ago
It could be that it is the formula you state "$xx + $yy*kWh", but you're getting variable amounts of power from different generation stations throughout a month that then all have a different x and y value
- lostmsu 5y ago
  That reminds me of money generating mechanic in Transport Tycoon Deluxe, where the further away goods production and consumption are, the higher is price for delivering. Even if there is a much closer source for the customer you just send the train from a factory on the other side of the map and charge for distance.
jacquesm 5y ago
I talked to someone in the power company at some point and they said it is a function of how far away you are to the nearest generating point. That could be a tale though, but it made some sense.
- xmaayy 5y ago
  Thats odd, because I'm facing the same 2-3x markup and I live about 2KM from an active hydro dam.
  - jacquesm 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

For anyone doing this, please bear in mind that if you want to be able to just use anything electrical anytime, you'll need a very expensive setup. Most people off grid need to be keeping a constant eye on their battery levels of charge, and do things like only using the washing machine on sunny days. Certain appliances like tumble driers, electric showers, and fan heaters, you pretty much can't have.

jacquesm 5y ago
True, you can't waste your power. But it isn't all that expensive (the prices of solar have come down tremendously) and there are now good and relatively inexpensive solutions for storage. It's still more work than a grid hookup, but it is absolutely doable if you are willing to adjust your lifestyle just a bit. A woodstove with a heat exchanger and you'll have all the domestic hot water that you'll ever need. Fan heaters are ridiculously wasteful and shouldn't be used (in general: electric heat should not be used).
heresie-dabord 5y ago
It's good to be aware of energy consumption. It requires planning and a concern for efficiency. These habits seem difficult to inject into popular thinking until there is economic pressure. Human populations have consumed entire forests to burn wood just to cook and to stay warm. Electricity is a superior solution, but the same primitive, wasteful habits remain. In other words, for all the people "on the grid", the challenge is to unlearn wasteful consumer habits and conditioning. Their homes are full of devices and AC adaptors that draw power when idle. The combustion engine itself is very poor in efficiency, but the high energy density of petrol masks the cost. People prefer not having to think about the energy cost and environmental cost. A challenge in the area of EV adoption, for example, is that people expect not to need to concern themselves with expenditure. Those who drive an EV need to be aware of the energy cost of driving (e.g. heating, cooling, tire inflation, load) and of the advantage of combining trips. Is it all "too hard"? Well, the period of "energy luxury" has brought us to an ecological crisis.
- ativzzz 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

Are there 'mini-grids' that off-grid people can use to connect one another? By connecting everyone's houses together, even with relatively low capacity cable, everyone should get more reliability (an inverter or battery bank can fail and it doesn't matter), and more energy availability (if I use more energy than I generate one day, but someone else uses less, that's okay). I'm imagining it could be as simple as a few hundred meters of cable with regular 110v plugs on the end, and a box of electronics that can push power in either direction as needed for balancing.

jacquesm 5y ago
This is made explicitly illegal in many places. I've looked into this when I was still heavily in renewables and depending on where you are crossing your lot lines with power supplied to another lot that doesn't have a grid hook-up can be a problem. Of course, when the power goes out everybody does this anyway (from generator or off-grid installation to the neighbors freezer, for instance). But for a permanent hook-up I have not seen it.

bob1029 5y ago

I am working on a partial off-grid solution for my new home. I went through the TX winter storm and don't want to get caught with pants down again. My strategy is to have a sub panel installed which runs the most critical loads: Main Panel - 150A - 50A A/C - 50A Kitchen Range - 30A Dryer - 30A Oven - 100A Sub-panel bypass - 30A Inverter/Charger - 50A Generator backfeed (Interlock w/ 150A Main) Sub Panel - 100A - 30A 220V Inverter backfeed (Interlock w/ 100A Main) - 20A Furnace/Blower (this is the key bit for TX winter) - All lighting/bedroom/office/internet loads - Kitchen 120V outlets + fridge - Garage 120V (doors, etc) In normal operation, the Main Panel would be fed by the grid, with the Sub Panel fed by the inverter backfeed. The inverter will operate in bypass mode if grid power is available. Otherwise, batteries will be drawn from seamlessly. The sub-panel bypass (i.e. 100A sub panel main) would only be turned on if there was some issue with the inverter setup. This effectively puts this most important parts of my house on a ~double-conversion UPS setup. I am not that worried about losing HVAC compressor, range, or laundry capabilities during a grid outage. If it gets really desperate, I could still wheel in my 12kW generator and run a load of laundry while the inverter charges things up. The reason I want to run inverter full-time is because we get shitty brownouts almost every day. I am planning to use a 6kW inverter to run the sub panel. Still debating on the # of batteries to use, but I am going to start with enough to run 12 hours before I need generator. And yes, I looked at Tesla power wall. I am not made of money. I am going to have this whole house UPS deal done for <8000 USD. Finally, back-feeding panels is acceptable per code around my parts as long as you follow all the rules (e.g. actually install the interlocks). This is definitely a more grey area, but its also one of those things that is super easy to back-out if you are going to sell the house.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"And yes, I looked at Tesla power wall. I am not made of money." Well, if you were ma of of money, would you commit autocannibalism? Otherwise, the cost is quite reasonable

ThinkBeat 5y ago

You also must add in the cost of propane for heating the house during the winter for 3 - 5 months. (and a big tank) If I was off grid, in a rural area where the winters can get severe, I would want a big diesel generator as a backup. A lot of things can happen during a proper winter: roads close, heavy snow, supplies can get hard to get some short periods, you can get cold front that bring the temperature down below 20C. One of the things that sucks about diesel generators are the noise, and the pollution and the maintenance. You also have to run it for a while every now and again and make sure you test everything regularly. He could heat the house electrically with power off the generator and that would integrate nicely with solar and wind power. Oh you can get propane generators as well, I was not familiar with that. That would be more convenient since he already has a propane tank. Just build a bigger one.

jeffrallen 5y ago

Totally different context, but somewhat same story. The estimate for network hookup plus meter, panel, and car charger installation for me is CHF 6000. The difference in charging cost between public chargers and home charging is 20 cents a kWh. The payoff time for home charging would be a decade or more. Instead I'll continue using "expensive" public charging until I can afford to make an off grid car charger in my garage. Network connection costs are a necessary evil of legacy power networks. But paradoxically, they accelerate the financial un-viability of the legacy network, by making off grid way, way more financially viable.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

If you can't afford utility hookups for your new construction, don't live rural. Live in the city limits. That's why city limits exist. There are economic boundaries where a city can fend for its residents. This isn't about 5th generation people losing power, it is about people choosing to live rural and feeling entitled to costly infrastructure for free.

drited 5y ago
The article said that the power company quoted 80 grand despite the nearest pole being across the street, about 45 metres away. The guy wasn't feeling entitled to costly infrastructure for free. He seems to have correctly concluded that the price the local monopoly quoted was ridiculous.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  What should it cost?
  - drited 5y ago
    For comparison I recently had an installation done at a similar distance and the cost was less than $5k

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

While a bit interesting how he brings it all together for the setup, I could care less about these rural people who decide to live in Minden or whatever and complain about expenses. This is not Toronto news CBC. These people are reasonably well off and choosing to live outside of the city where more and more of the majority live and we've got bigger issues closer to home like affordability and infrastructure etc etc. Bah.

ipaddr 5y ago
You do realize more and more people are finding it too difficult to live in big cities like Toronto and are forced into much smaller cities/towns/hamlets where these are issues. Paying $2,000 a month rent is difficult for the average person making minimum wage. The affordability paradox is forcing young people and young couples into rural off the grid properties because few will ever afford a home in Toronto. Part of the solution is to encourage more rural density. This is an issue that you should support.
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  fairplay - the people in this article and the other one that inspired it (the other Minden guy or whatever) do not seem like young people struggling with the affordability of the city.

tomohawk 5y ago

I've had a grid tied solar system for 15+ years. With the enormous tax subsidies back then, it's broken even. There's about a 1.5% decrease per year in production. I'll have to replace the whole thing sometime in the next 5 years. This article paints a very rosy picture of what to expect. In a non-grid-tied system, you have to deal with batteries and a bunch of other issues. This is not cheap. And it is a recurring maintenance cost. Are you going to do that maintenance every few months yourself, or pay someone to do it?

mdavis6890 5y ago

What they don't tell us in the article is WHY it is $80k. Without knowing WHY, it's very hard to judge anything about it. Maybe it's price gouging. Maybe there are technical issues that make it very difficult. Maybe there are weird regulations that come into play. Maybe there are strange incentive structures. Maybe $80k is actually a loss. Who knows?