This is a guest post by Nick Rosen, the author of Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America. Rosen is a documentary maker, journalist, and broadcaster who for the past two decades has been a Teaching Assistant at the Georgetown University Philosophy Department. Nick is an off-grid expert, editing the website www.off-grid.net, and since 1994 has been off the grid part-time.
Salem NH June 2010: Kay Phaneu, at home in her oxygen tent, dies when National Grid cuts off her power over a delinquent bill.
National Grid, a British owned Utility providing electricity to homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York and Nantucket, says it followed all the correct procedures. But industry lobbying helped set those procedures. I hope my book Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America helps open a debate about the American electricity industry, which has sales of $400 Billion per year.
Most of us rely on the electricity grid (along with water and gas) in every aspect of our lives. But if the grid did not exist, would there still be a need to invent it?
I spent last year researching a book about Americans who live off the grid, free of the intersecting pipes and cables that delineate modern life. As a group and as individuals, the “off-gridders” are among America’s most independent, secure, self-reliant…and comfortable. Nobody is likely to cut off their power.[SButtonZ button="digg"]
Going off-grid is the wave of the future, not a return to the Stone Age; a marriage of new technology and ancient wisdom. For a lifestyle on the fringe of society, some of its adherents are surprisingly conventional. I met captains of industry seeking privacy, survivalists anticipating the next great disaster, environmentalists pioneering a new way of life, foreclosed urbanites making a fresh start in the boondocks, retirees exchanging suburbia for simplicity, anarchists and various other kinds of “-ists” living out social experiments, and plenty of ordinary middle income families who have lost trust in the system and prefer to rely on their own resources. There are up to 1.75 million Americans already living off the grid, and they are show-casing a potential future for many millions more.
The power grid may seem almost a force of nature today, but its history spans just eighty years. Now the electricity industry is asking for trillions to build the so called Smart Grid, which would allow it to continue the way it always has — with vast inefficient power stations and wholesale leakage of electricity during the long journey to the end user.
As the book shows, the way our communities are arranged today owes much to the practices of the power companies through the 1930s and 1940s. Just as the rise of the automobile drove Exxon’s oil sales, companies like General Electric that made generating equipment, promoted “the electric home,” marketing a range of energy-guzzling devices. The utility companies had no incentive to promote energy efficiency –- quite the opposite.
The same is still true – the more power we consume, the more profits they make. That is one reason for a carbon tax – as long as it is a tax on inefficiency in production and distribution. Meanwhile, technology has moved on. An energy efficient home, or community, generating its own electricity, can survive on a fraction of the power of its conventional equivalent – perhaps as little as 10%.
But there are better reasons to live off the grid than raising a middle finger at the utilities, however satisfying that might be. Perhaps the most important is that living off the grid can be cheaper — not for a conventional home that is already connected to the grid, nor in an area with strict building codes and expensive land. But a new home built somewhere the grid does not reach, where land is cheap and sun is plentiful, can run as little as $100,000 for three bedrooms – solar panels and battery systems included.
Most who decide they want to move off the grid do not want to save money on their home in order to spend it on other things – rather they intend to radically reduce their consumption. The people I met see this as a path to freedom – freedom from debt, of course, and greedy bankers and lying politicians, but also freedom from fear of foreclosure, economic collapse, energy insecurity, and Kafka-esque government bureaucracy.
Which brings us back to the late Kay Phaneu. It seems that residents of New Hampshire, however sick they are, must renew their status with the utility companies every 60 days, or else they cannot benefit from a rule preventing people with medical conditions from having their power supply withdrawn.
That kind of cosy relationship between regulators and industry can lead ordinary citizens to despair, or encourage them to go off the grid. Naturally the off-grid lifestyle has its own obstacles, one of which is opposition from Federal, State and local authorities who see this return to nature as somehow unnatural. Off-gridders are rarely in a strong position to fight back. The off-grid.net Web site exists to connect them up and find strength through numbers.
Tags: ENERGY, the future
So if moving off the grid is only cheaper if you move “somewhere the grid does not reach, where land is cheap and sun is plentiful,” aren’t you simply trading your dependency on the utilities to a dependency on your car? Now, I get that by saving money on housing/power/water you could afford a car more easily. But unless you’re starting an entire off-grid community or can almost exclusively telework, you’re neither completely independent nor sustainable.
In other words, to answer the headline of this post: no, we probably wouldn’t invent the grid as it exists today. But we’d certainly standardize utility distribution to reap the benefits of scale, and something resembling the grid (though likely cleaner and more efficient) would emerge.
While it is a nice idea to be able to live off the grid, “where land is cheap and sun is plentiful”, I’m not convinced that the increased costs of things like transportation would offset the savings you might find in not having a utility bill. After all, living in my town I pay about $70 in electricity bills and my apartment complex probably covers less than $100 more in water and sewage bills, but by living close to town I save a vastly greater amount of money by not having to own a car. I imagine that’s a pretty common circumstance for city-dwellers, who have no choice but to live “on-grid”. People living in close proximity to other people allows transportation to be more efficient.
It’s possible to both live “on-grid”, be able to use a bicycle or public transportation, and live in an energy-efficient manner. This seems to me as though it would both have more of an impact and be more practically possible for the majority of people than running off to the hills and bucking the system entirely. I am all for the reduction of consumption in general, but let us be practical as well.
Nick: excellent post, thank you. I agree with the concept of being off the grid. I am completely with you about diffused energy and regenerative buildings that create more energy than they use. It’s the way we need to think.
I plan to get your book and I hope you also address the realities of urban and suburban living? Living on cheap, agricultural property, you increase the commute and the need for roads. You might be drilling for water right from the water table? Perhaps you are not addressing your total consumption, just power, is that right? That will be rather disappointing if you only address one thing and actually exacerbate others. In my mind, it all relates.
Cindy @urbanverse
How cliche: using scare tactics to show big bad industry (British no less!) and government conspiring to crush an infirm woman (would that be Lady Liberty?). And speaking of cliches, this story only perpetuates the myth of American Individualist, resolutely forging his way forward without government support of any kind. Please.
I am always being told that it is much better ecologically to live in a city ON the grid than live rural OFF the Grid.
Well it just isn’t true;. I am sure people who live in cities would like to believe it – and the eco-experts who peddle this line have a willing audience, but it is simply impossible to prove – as are all these abstruse calculations about carbon footprints.
The main thing which is left out of the calculation each time I see this idea put about is the vast embedded cost in energy and resources – exclude that from your argument and you can prove anything you want. And don’t forget the world’s largest cities are morphing into overcrowded ‘mega regions’ defined by poverty and pollution, a UN report warned on March 24th 2010.
Moreover – most urban households do have a car – so the argument that you don’t drive in the city doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
And there are plenty of people living off the grid in cities – or what I call “off-grid ready” by which I mean that you have all the non utility resources you need but have not chosen to cease the utlity connections if you are living in a city it is more appropriate to compare yourself with someone living of the grid in a city rather than off the grid in a rural area. By off-grid ready
As to the people who get upset when I mention Kay Phaneu, who died shortly after her electricity was cut off disabling her oxygen – it happens to be true – sorry if this inconveniences you. They did cut off her power. She was ill. She had a certificate but it had expired because the rule in New Hampshire is that you must renew every 60 days – which suits the utility companies, but is not much good if you are congenitally ill.
I have been told that the utilities lobbied to get the 60 day rule introduced but I have not been able to prove that — yet.
Of course it was a British Utility – like BP their safety record is not their strongest point.
Do you have a link to the 10% claim? So far the reductions that seem realistic are more modest. For example, Zurich and Geneva are planning to cut their energy consumption by a factor of 3 over the next forty years. The level of consumption they’re planning to go down to, 2 kW, is about one sixth the American average, not one tenth. And it is inherently urban; it’s based in part on those cities’ high transit use and low car ownership.
It is wrong to say “Most urban households have a car” without a qualifier. It’s unclear which geography “Most” means. Worldwide, most urban households are car-free. In the first world, they’re not – but in the largest, most transit-oriented cities, they are. The single lowest electricity consumption per unit of GDP in the world is in Hong Kong, where 80%+ of households are car-free.
Finally, “the world’s largest cities are morphing into overcrowded ‘mega regions’ defined by poverty and pollution” is again right or wrong depending on geography. In developed countries, and in well-run developing countries, it’s false. In poorly-run developing countries, it’s true, but as long as they have economic growth, you can expect the slums to improve, just as they did in what’s now the developed world. Mumbai’s not seeing anything that New York didn’t see in 1910.
P.S. The part about the company being British is, in fact, xenophobic. British companies tend to be angels compared to American companies, which have brought us private armies in Nigeria and mountaintop removal in Appalachia.
I think we need to change the brand from ‘going off the grid’ to ‘forming micro-states’. Just wait until these micro-states start fighting each other for scare supplies like water or scavenged materials or better yet for land (too bad you can’t steal it off the Indians anymore). I wonder if big bad mommy and daddy government will need to come in at that point.
I am disappointed Nick Rosen’s post was featured on Infrastructurist. His contribution is riddled with logical faults and empty emotional appeals.
Did he make his blog post via smoke signal? ESP?
Does he believe Kay Phaneu would have lived a better, longer life without the grid?
What does a grid-free society look like? How is it powered? What technology does it use? Is there capacity to develop such a society? How does a grid-free lifestyle impact quality of life? What kind of environmental impact does a grid-free lifestyle have? Is producing massive amounts of expensive small-scale photovoltaic panels possible or even environmentally desirable?
These are all questions that Nick Rosen does a poor job of addressing. I suggest Nick return to his ideals, pursue his dream of grid-free living and stay away from the internet.
Okay let rip this apart piece by piece:
“Salem NH June 2010: Kay Phaneu, at home in her oxygen tent, dies when National Grid cuts off her power over a delinquent bill.”
Yay! An anecdote! These completely represent the whole of the population which is dependent on the grid!
“National Grid, a British owned Utility providing electricity to homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York and Nantucket, says it followed all the correct procedures.”
*gasp* Its not like that company is managing the power to several million homes right? Clearly this proves that the the power companies are big and evil!
“I spent last year researching a book about Americans who live off the grid, free of the intersecting pipes and cables that delineate modern life. As a group and as individuals, the “off-gridders” are among America’s most independent, secure, self-reliant…and comfortable. Nobody is likely to cut off their power.”
I see absolutely no reason as to why living on the grid has made my life any less comfortable.Not to mention that they still have to rely on massive corporations for their food, water, consumer goods, methods of transport, and the way in which they generate their own electricity. Tacking a few damn solar panels on your roof does nothing but widen your ego.
” There are up to 1.75 million Americans already living off the grid, and they are show-casing a potential future for many millions more.”
I’d love for you to provide some evidence that this is both a true statistic, and that these people have a choice between the grid and generating power on their own.
“The power grid may seem almost a force of nature today, but its history spans just eighty years. Now the electricity industry is asking for trillions to build the so called Smart Grid, which would allow it to continue the way it always has — with vast inefficient power stations and wholesale leakage of electricity during the long journey to the end user.”
Unless you have several studies which support the idea that power stations are “inefficient “or perhaps some background in engineering than I would suggest not making such audacious claims.
” Meanwhile, technology has moved on. An energy efficient home, or community, generating its own electricity, can survive on a fraction of the power of its conventional equivalent – perhaps as little as 10%”
How have you arrived at this conclusion? Is this purely speculation?
“But there are better reasons to live off the grid than raising a middle finger at the utilities, however satisfying that might be. Perhaps the most important is that living off the grid can be cheaper — not for a conventional home that is already connected to the grid, nor in an area with strict building codes and expensive land. But a new home built somewhere the grid does not reach, where land is cheap and sun is plentiful, can run as little as $100,000 for three bedrooms – solar panels and battery systems included.
So a place were you’re completely dependent on your car and oil from unstable middle eastern countries?
And the dreadful commute between your job and your house were “land is cheap and the sun is plentiful”?
You’ll pay for it in the rest of your life through wars in foreign lands, time lost to the monotony of highway driving and xenophobia…a theme which seems to be presented many times in this piece.
“Most who decide they want to move off the grid do not want to save money on their home in order to spend it on other things – rather they intend to radically reduce their consumption. The people I met see this as a path to freedom – freedom from debt, of course, and greedy bankers and lying politicians, but also freedom from fear of foreclosure, economic collapse, energy insecurity, and Kafka-esque government bureaucracy.”
Unless you take out loans you can’t afford, “greedy bankers” aren’t going to do a damn thing. Moving even to an extremely rural setting will merely put you under the control of “lying politican”, and merely another local government bureaucracy. Its impossible to seal yourself off from economic collapse unless you’re never part of the economy, and so long as you consume energy, energy insecurity will always be a risk.
“Which brings us back to the late Kay Phaneu. It seems that residents of New Hampshire, however sick they are, must renew their status with the utility companies every 60 days, or else they cannot benefit from a rule preventing people with medical conditions from having their power supply withdrawn.”
This garbage doesn’t even deserve critique.
“That kind of cosy relationship between regulators and industry can lead ordinary citizens to despair, or encourage them to go off the grid. ”
Theres a cozy relationship between virtually every U.S. industry and their regulators. Has that stopped you from buying the consumer goods those industries produce?
“Naturally the off-grid lifestyle has its own obstacles, one of which is opposition from Federal, State and local authorities who see this return to nature as somehow unnatural”
Alas, the conclusion to a poorly built argument, written by an individual with no credibility in the subject field, complete with a smug final statement.
Nick, even if it’s true that most urban households have a car – I think this may be true in the US, and you do seem to be talking solely about the US even though you didn’t say so – the fact remains that most urban households don’t have to have a car. If your hypothetical people are making choices that allow them to be as efficient as possible, then people living in the city don’t own a car. Your dichotomy still ends up being a choice between living in a city, not owning a car, paying utility bills; or living in the country, paying quite a bit of money to own a car or two and drive everywhere you need to go, and not paying utility bills.
If we assume that living in the country, you’re able to generate all of the electricity you need, you still have very little ability to reduce the impact of your transportation needs or your dependence on fossil fuels. If we assume that living in the city you are able to reduce your energy use by using efficient appliances and the like and you’re able to reduce (via public transit) or eliminate (via bicycle) your energy use and environmental impact, it seems pretty clear to me that living in the city is more efficient.
Also as a sidenote, your comments about British companies having questionable safety records is disingenuous and, as one American to another, embarrassing. Please show some class.
There are quite a few people living out on the fringes of El Paso and throughout west Texas that are off the grid….mainly because there are no utilities out there.
The biggest problem with those areas is water…this is, after all, the desert. But some people have managed to live off of whatever they can trap from the rain. It sure would take a lot of work though. Even friends of mine that own ranchland with on-the-grid power still have an up hill battle to fight with water. A while back the well failed and we had to use a 1000 gallon tank pulled by a truck to water pecan trees and fill buckets for the livestock.
I’m interested in doing it myself. However I dislike living in the city and would much rather be out in the wide open ranch lands with a horse for transportation so I’m probably biased.
To those wondering about the 10% claim, have a look at the Passivhaus standard:
http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PHIUSHome.html
Based on a German standard developed in the late 80s, Passivhaus construction does lead to a 90% reduction in space-heating, and 60-70% overall less energy use. This is before the use of solar panels or other renewable energy technology. Add those, and you can usually obtain a net-zero-carbon building (or better).
Still, these are, for the most part, grid-tied homes and buildings (Passivhaus-standard office buildings have been built in Germany, Switzerland and Austria).
As for the rest of the article, it’s deeply flawed.
I don’t think anyone here, including myself, has mentioned another efficiency advantage of cities over the country: apartment heating. Detached houses require more energy to heat than apartments, because excess heat is lost to the sky instead of heating other apartments. Good energy-efficient designs, for example passive solar designs, can eliminate this advantage, but also eliminate the cost advantage of the country. You can build a detached house that doesn’t require heating, even in a region where average winter temperature is around the freezing point, but not for $100,000.
It would seem that, to some observers, at least, throughout this article inserting “the telephone and cable networks as they exist today” in place of “the grid” would be an apt, if not a fully intuitive, proposition. Do you see the parallel dynamics at play? I sure do. Although, I think the author could have shared more useful insights by taking his argument to matters relating to basic architectural factors. In fairness, he touches on some of those too. For example, I thought his take in the following passage was particularly inspired: “The power grid may seem almost a force of nature today, but its history spans just eighty years. Now the electricity industry is asking for trillions to build the so called Smart Grid, which would allow it to continue the way it always has — with vast inefficient power stations and wholesale leakage of electricity during the long journey to the end user.” True that. Some estimates I’ve read recently put the waste heat factor along high-voltage transmission lines at greater than two-thirds lost before reaching local distribution networks. Ditto for the generation plants. Thoughts?
frank @ fttx org
If there wasn’t a grid, we would invent it the moment we worked with it. I live in the Wind Energy area of the Netherlands and the farmers really can’t deal with all the energy they create. So it needs to go somewhere. Furthermore the greenhouses in the Netherlands generate almost a fifth of the electricity we use in the country. That is generate, not consume, through combined gas power generators.
“Where land is cheap and sun is plentiful” is usually referred to as “farmland” and it’s typically used to cultivate food. And if it’s not farmland, it’s a natural environment that doesn’t exist solely to be settled by those seeking the satisfaction of “raising a middle finger at the utilities.”
Yes, it is silly to declare the grid superfluous. Instead of these grandiose visions, it would be better to concentrate on some simple things that even weakly organized and financed enviros could accomplish:
1. There should be a ban on “special” tariffs that are effectively government sanctioned monopolistic pracitces on behalf of the incumbent utilities. For example: District heating and cooling systems offer huge benefits in thermal efficiency. A biomass or natural gas generator throws off exhaust heat used to cool or heat neighborhood buildings, with the generated electric being used to handle the local electric load. The industry can’t get off the ground. Why? After the District heating company prepares a highly expensive feasibility study and the potential customer shows it is serious about leaving the incumbent utility, the local utility commission is prevailed upon by the incumbent utility to offer a discount rate.
If the enviros could put a stop to that, which they could do if they put their minds to it, it would be helpful.
2. Alternative energy subsidies are often artificially structured to benefit large producers. Most of these tax credits are asinine and unnecessary subsidies, which will disappear just as the industry really could use governmental support, as in the 1980s. Yet, one of the few real competitive edges alternative energy has is its siting advantage; they are simply easier to place closer to the load. Yet alternative energy credits are structured to provide the credit to larger facilities, therefore working at cross-purposes to the intent of the subsidy.
Enviros could be more vigilant to make sure that those little things aren’t slipped into the subsidies.
The anecdote about a 60 day recertification process sounds right on. Public Utility Commissions are poorly monitored by the press. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of tariff terms, after a long, hard fought rate case, —well, the utilities are allowed to do what they want. In my jurisdiction, the phone company asked for and received a three month statute of limitations on billing errors. No one was looking, and so the proffered reason by the phone company, a “need to close the books” was enough.
I assume the main point of this article is that the electricity industry is asking for money to be more efficient. We pay them certain price for the electricity which covers all expenses for maintenance of the equipment and its innovation. They should try to be more economical with their business and not to ask for more money…
I doubt that we are generation that could be cut off the grid. We are not used to it…
Tesla and Edison are still fighting it out in the afterlife to this very day.
I think the premise has a lot of value. Without a doubt our grid has become one giant leaky pipe that does its job much more poorly than it should for one of the most advanced nations in the world. I think moving more people off grid is a good answer, but doing so by pulling the grid back rather than moving people farther away from cities.
As a note, cities are far and away more efficient for many of the reasons people have already noted. Another point not mentioned is that we the last thing that nature needs is more people taking up virgin land in the middle of no where and sullying an ecosystem any more than it has to be. We should be living closer together to gain the reflexive benefit of proximity–not spreading farther apart.
Density helps make the grid worthwhile (all aspects of it be it water, gas, sewer electric.) When people are living in that degree of density they should get the benefits of the grid. When it comes to per-mile-per-capita, we most likely spend the most on portions of the grid that serve the fewest amount of people in the least efficient way.
When people distance themselves, they should not only have to produce all of those services themselves, but do so in a sustainable way. This would make our grid more efficient, save us money on not extending it out to meet the needs of few, and encourage more dense development patterns.
[...] of our lives. But if the grid did not exist, would there still be a need to invent it?” In a recent article he claims that “Going off-grid is the wave of the future, not a return to the Stone [...]