4 ms·

Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins

Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins collecting, broadband and a number of other things?

mgkimsal 12y ago
Not sure most of those need physical connections. We can drive our garbage to the dump and also compost. We could dig a well, and we have a septic tank. We could get satellite internet. Physical connections for electricity is about the only absolute, unless you go solar, but then there's not a good storage mechanism for cloudy days (from what I can tell).
ibz 12y ago
I get water from my well, have a septic tank in my backyard and use a 3G connection (there is no landline connection available where I chose to live). Getting off the electric grid would be nice, not to mention it would be cheaper too!
oloboWd 12y ago
Water and sewage -- Most people in rural america and even in semi-suburban america already use their own wells and septic systems for water and sewage. Likewise with trash, many people drop their trash off at the dump/recycling center themselves. Broadband, yep, no DIY solution there but various forms of wireless internet are available that make it quite feasible to have a completely unwired home if not disconnected.
- skrause 12y ago
  But still the question is, why would I want that? I'm all for distributed power generation, but it can still be optimized better when it's connected to a grid.
  - angrybits 12y ago
    It's an independence thing. If that isn't important to you, none of this is going to seem terribly useful.
  - Arcanum-XIII 12y ago
    And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern. Then there's the question of the power price. I don't think the battery will be cheap when revealed, but after a while, they will and help us with solar/wind created energy.
    - skrause 12y ago
      > And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the German power grid. As far as I can remember I only a single blackout of 30 minutes in the last 15 years (some time around 2008).
  - deelowe 12y ago
    Even with a grid connection, this would be useful as it would allow the power companies to generate more during off peak hours. A distributed power storage solution combined with a centralized power generation solution would be extremely efficient. It's like turning your home into a hybrid.
  - oloboWd 12y ago
    There are many possible reasons. You might enjoy the feeling of independence or self reliance that supplying your own power brings. You might be a weed grower and not want to be found out because of your energy bills. You may feel that it's more responsible to produce your own electricity and have a clear understanding of its environmental costs. Grid power may be unreliable in your area, or expensive. Maybe you think that power lines give you cancer. Maybe grid power is simply unavailable in your location.
    - skrause 12y ago
      All those are good reasons to also have your own power. You'll get your independence and might even save some money. But even then it's still good to be connected to the grid. It will serve as a backup line and if you produce more enery than you can consume, you might be able to sell something back to the grid.
johnward 12y ago
I don't have water or sewage at my house. I have a well and septic system. I also have a propane generator but it's only for power outages, that happen more frequently when you live in the country. I do have a private company collect my garbage. I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.
nhaehnle 12y ago
Those batteries can come in useful even when you're still connected to the grid. Right now, some locations have laws and/or regulation that force grid companies to buy solar-generated electricity from home owners at fixed rates. This makes a lot of sense right now as a measure to encourage the adoption of solar, as a way to get off fossil fuels. In the long term, it might become a less useful measure, and we might want to allow market mechanisms for time-of-day-based pricing. This is already happening on the big players' market, where you see drops of the spot price of electricity at noon on sunny days. Extending these market mechanisms to individual homes makes sense, as long as home owners are empowered by technology to make use of it. A large battery is an important piece of such empowering technology (combined with being able to set a smart policy for when to run off the battery, when to run off the grid, and when to feed back into the grid).
deelowe 12y ago
Well. Broadband is available wirelessly either via cell, wifi, or satellite, so there's not a requirement for a physical connection. Water and sewer have localized options with wells and septic, but they are also extremely inexpensive to build and maintain and have a relatively small environmental impact. Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment. Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced. Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.
- pjc50 12y ago
  significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself This is usually less than the efficiency drop involved in a round trip through a battery. It's not as big a factor as you think.
  - deelowe 12y ago
    I'm not just talking about electrical loses, though that is a factor. Having to build 2-3 times the capacity because power generation can't be distributed throughout the day is a huge inefficiency.
    - lsaferite 12y ago
      Even 'better' is that most of the on-demand generation is coal-fired plants.
    - mattlutze 12y ago
      Having to build 2-3 times the capacity because power generation can't be distributed throughout the day is a huge inefficiency. This seems to me the big benefit here -- enough penetration of home backup batteries means public power generation doesn't have to be built up to provide massive peak surges. Further, trickle charging the backup batteries during the evenings/nighttime and allowing them to meet some needs during the day also means a higher net usage of generated power, so perhaps levels of generation could go down altogether. There's also then the capitalistic angle -- if you want more peak power at your house, you can buy more batteries in lieu of (or in concert with) installing secondary power systems. But reducing gross energy production due to higher net utilization would be a really cool thing, so long as the total cost to the macro system (considering full life of the battery vs. load taken off power plants) is a net positive.
pjc50 12y ago
I note that people replying to this are saying that you can avoid those things (if you live sufficiently rurally, which is only true of a fraction of the population), but not really saying why you'd want to. Here in Scotland it's the other way round. Orkney is detached from the grid and trying to get itself connected, so it can better balance local renewable generation with the rest of the UK (and thence ultimately the European grid as a whole). Maybe they'll go to municipal batteries but the cost is still not attractive.
vetler 12y ago
I don't see the big benefit here being living off any grid. To me, the benefit could be to charge battery when electricity is cheap, and also - if the battery is portable - to easily get a power source places where there is none.
datashovel 12y ago
From the research I've done on solar power systems (for powering homes) the market does not have an obvious pre-packaged solution that is made for storage of excess capacity generated by your solar panels. One commonly suggested (and substantially cheaper) option is to just set things up so you don't have local battery storage and just redirect all excess power back to the utility company. The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for. But beyond that, as power requirements in appliances / computers / electronic gadgets continues to decrease, and efficiency and capacity of alternative energy solutions continues to increase, there will likely come a time (in the not-too-distant-future) when there will [at least in theory] no longer be a need for utility companies. In fact, from varied sources online I've gotten the impression that many countries (besides US) have substantially reduced power requirements per household where even today it's feasible (for those with sufficient roof space) to move all of their power usage off grid, and rely strictly on power generated by solar.
- tomp 12y ago
  > The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for. That's not a problem, that's how the markets work. When electricity is abundant (i.e. sun is shining, wind is blowing), it's cheap; when it's in demand (in the evening, after the sun and wind stop but people want to cook and watch TV), it's expensive. The problem with energy storage isn't just a home-problem, it's a network-wide issue. AFAIK, current batteries aren't really able to solve this issue, in the long-term (i.e. considering the lifetime and replacement of the battery).
- fche 12y ago
  "You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for." Not if your region was forced to subscribe to a feed-in-tarriff subsidy scheme for solar. Around here, there was a time when solar generated power earned 10x the value of the same amount of energy purchased from the grid. That multiplier has fallen thankfully, but is still greater than one.
Spooky23 12y ago
Think of it as a CDN for energy. The grid will become less reliable over time as utilization increases, and in many cases we have fundamental limitations that make broad-scale robustness difficult to implement. So fake it out. If I have a reliable local power source, I can easily take short outages without user impact.

mgkimsal 12y ago

Not sure most of those need physical connections. We can drive our garbage to the dump and also compost. We could dig a well, and we have a septic tank. We could get satellite internet. Physical connections for electricity is about the only absolute, unless you go solar, but then there's not a good storage mechanism for cloudy days (from what I can tell).

ibz 12y ago

I get water from my well, have a septic tank in my backyard and use a 3G connection (there is no landline connection available where I chose to live). Getting off the electric grid would be nice, not to mention it would be cheaper too!

oloboWd 12y ago

Water and sewage -- Most people in rural america and even in semi-suburban america already use their own wells and septic systems for water and sewage. Likewise with trash, many people drop their trash off at the dump/recycling center themselves. Broadband, yep, no DIY solution there but various forms of wireless internet are available that make it quite feasible to have a completely unwired home if not disconnected.

skrause 12y ago
But still the question is, why would I want that? I'm all for distributed power generation, but it can still be optimized better when it's connected to a grid.
- angrybits 12y ago
  It's an independence thing. If that isn't important to you, none of this is going to seem terribly useful.
- Arcanum-XIII 12y ago
  And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern. Then there's the question of the power price. I don't think the battery will be cheap when revealed, but after a while, they will and help us with solar/wind created energy.
  - skrause 12y ago
    > And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the German power grid. As far as I can remember I only a single blackout of 30 minutes in the last 15 years (some time around 2008).
- deelowe 12y ago
  Even with a grid connection, this would be useful as it would allow the power companies to generate more during off peak hours. A distributed power storage solution combined with a centralized power generation solution would be extremely efficient. It's like turning your home into a hybrid.
- oloboWd 12y ago
  There are many possible reasons. You might enjoy the feeling of independence or self reliance that supplying your own power brings. You might be a weed grower and not want to be found out because of your energy bills. You may feel that it's more responsible to produce your own electricity and have a clear understanding of its environmental costs. Grid power may be unreliable in your area, or expensive. Maybe you think that power lines give you cancer. Maybe grid power is simply unavailable in your location.
  - skrause 12y ago
    All those are good reasons to also have your own power. You'll get your independence and might even save some money. But even then it's still good to be connected to the grid. It will serve as a backup line and if you produce more enery than you can consume, you might be able to sell something back to the grid.

johnward 12y ago

I don't have water or sewage at my house. I have a well and septic system. I also have a propane generator but it's only for power outages, that happen more frequently when you live in the country. I do have a private company collect my garbage. I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.

nhaehnle 12y ago

Those batteries can come in useful even when you're still connected to the grid. Right now, some locations have laws and/or regulation that force grid companies to buy solar-generated electricity from home owners at fixed rates. This makes a lot of sense right now as a measure to encourage the adoption of solar, as a way to get off fossil fuels. In the long term, it might become a less useful measure, and we might want to allow market mechanisms for time-of-day-based pricing. This is already happening on the big players' market, where you see drops of the spot price of electricity at noon on sunny days. Extending these market mechanisms to individual homes makes sense, as long as home owners are empowered by technology to make use of it. A large battery is an important piece of such empowering technology (combined with being able to set a smart policy for when to run off the battery, when to run off the grid, and when to feed back into the grid).

deelowe 12y ago

Well. Broadband is available wirelessly either via cell, wifi, or satellite, so there's not a requirement for a physical connection. Water and sewer have localized options with wells and septic, but they are also extremely inexpensive to build and maintain and have a relatively small environmental impact. Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment. Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced. Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.

pjc50 12y ago
significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself This is usually less than the efficiency drop involved in a round trip through a battery. It's not as big a factor as you think.
- deelowe 12y ago
  I'm not just talking about electrical loses, though that is a factor. Having to build 2-3 times the capacity because power generation can't be distributed throughout the day is a huge inefficiency.
  - lsaferite 12y ago
    Even 'better' is that most of the on-demand generation is coal-fired plants.
  - mattlutze 12y ago
    Having to build 2-3 times the capacity because power generation can't be distributed throughout the day is a huge inefficiency. This seems to me the big benefit here -- enough penetration of home backup batteries means public power generation doesn't have to be built up to provide massive peak surges. Further, trickle charging the backup batteries during the evenings/nighttime and allowing them to meet some needs during the day also means a higher net usage of generated power, so perhaps levels of generation could go down altogether. There's also then the capitalistic angle -- if you want more peak power at your house, you can buy more batteries in lieu of (or in concert with) installing secondary power systems. But reducing gross energy production due to higher net utilization would be a really cool thing, so long as the total cost to the macro system (considering full life of the battery vs. load taken off power plants) is a net positive.

pjc50 12y ago

I note that people replying to this are saying that you can avoid those things (if you live sufficiently rurally, which is only true of a fraction of the population), but not really saying why you'd want to. Here in Scotland it's the other way round. Orkney is detached from the grid and trying to get itself connected, so it can better balance local renewable generation with the rest of the UK (and thence ultimately the European grid as a whole). Maybe they'll go to municipal batteries but the cost is still not attractive.

vetler 12y ago

I don't see the big benefit here being living off any grid. To me, the benefit could be to charge battery when electricity is cheap, and also - if the battery is portable - to easily get a power source places where there is none.

datashovel 12y ago

From the research I've done on solar power systems (for powering homes) the market does not have an obvious pre-packaged solution that is made for storage of excess capacity generated by your solar panels. One commonly suggested (and substantially cheaper) option is to just set things up so you don't have local battery storage and just redirect all excess power back to the utility company. The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for. But beyond that, as power requirements in appliances / computers / electronic gadgets continues to decrease, and efficiency and capacity of alternative energy solutions continues to increase, there will likely come a time (in the not-too-distant-future) when there will [at least in theory] no longer be a need for utility companies. In fact, from varied sources online I've gotten the impression that many countries (besides US) have substantially reduced power requirements per household where even today it's feasible (for those with sufficient roof space) to move all of their power usage off grid, and rely strictly on power generated by solar.

tomp 12y ago
> The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for. That's not a problem, that's how the markets work. When electricity is abundant (i.e. sun is shining, wind is blowing), it's cheap; when it's in demand (in the evening, after the sun and wind stop but people want to cook and watch TV), it's expensive. The problem with energy storage isn't just a home-problem, it's a network-wide issue. AFAIK, current batteries aren't really able to solve this issue, in the long-term (i.e. considering the lifetime and replacement of the battery).
fche 12y ago
"You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for." Not if your region was forced to subscribe to a feed-in-tarriff subsidy scheme for solar. Around here, there was a time when solar generated power earned 10x the value of the same amount of energy purchased from the grid. That multiplier has fallen thankfully, but is still greater than one.

Spooky23 12y ago

Think of it as a CDN for energy. The grid will become less reliable over time as utilization increases, and in many cases we have fundamental limitations that make broad-scale robustness difficult to implement. So fake it out. If I have a reliable local power source, I can easily take short outages without user impact.