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 ;)
Having dealt with Hydro One on permits and pole replacements from the telecom side of things, I can say that their methodology is not geared towards minimizing costs. They wanted me to pay $20,000 to replace 8 suspect / restricted insulators on one pole line, all of which were within 6 kilometers of each other. Done by a reasonable private contractor, all 8 insulators could have been done by a single crew in 1 day. Not Hydro One. Each one gets scheduled independently and assumes 2 hours of travel time to get to the job location (a not entirely unreasonable assumption for independent jobs, but ridiculous in the circumstances).
What's worse is when Hydro One's shortsightedness ends up costing them gobs of cash. I've seen brand new pole lines replaced within 2 years of being built because the ADET didn't leave any Spare Capacity on the poles. Add a communications strand and multiple poles need replacement. Since they had 6 phases of power on 60+ foot poles, Hydro One's replacement cost is north of $15k per pole. All because the lower class pole was maybe a few hundred dollars cheaper. #FAIL
I had a tangential WTF experience with Hydro One about a decade ago, but I’m not sure of this is typical for rural power operators.
I worked on an island on Lake of the Woods that was wired with power, phone and DSL. The next day, Hydro One was flying a branded helicopter up and down the chain of islands that were wired together to figure out where the lines were down.
The helicopter was absolutely bizarre to me and seemed like overkill, given that I only grew up in urban settings before. I though they might run a boat and walk the ROW. The helicopter seemed like an expensive toy they got to play with every so often.
I forgot to mention that Hydro Ottawa does the build for the future thing. Hydro Ottawa's design standards are to design for a minimum of 3 communications strands on all new poles. This results in significantly less make-ready on Hydro Ottawa poles. Hydro One in contrast has no such mandatory design standards, so whatever the ADET feels like on the day they're doing the design work is what gets installed.
> because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected
I've just had a tour of a hydrogen fuel cell setup we have here at our OB. I'm no electrician, but from what I could tell, it's plugged into the mains, currently drawing about 3KW, and hydrogen is producing another 12KW (we haven't got much demand for this event - the generator will produce 250kW if we want).
It comes in from the mains through an isolating transformer, into the generator and UPS, and then outgoing power to us goes through another isolating transformer (to stop mains hum that we saw last time, in both directions)
It seems it's perfectly fine to have this sort of setup connected to the grid in the UK. Obviously it's more expensive to do so than just wiring in your own diesel generator.
Yup. Fundamentally, the issue is whether there is any means by which locally-generated power can backfeed onto the mains. Typically cogeneration is handled by making the local generator have no ability to create the signal, it can only come from reading the line voltage. The mains voltage dies, there's no more signal to drive it and so even in case of failure it will shut down.
Any system which absolutely prevents backfeed is acceptable, your use of the mains charging the UPS and the UPS driving everything is an acceptable way to do it--even if your system goes nuts no circuit exists by which that power can backfeed. It's more typically done by a mechanical isolation switch, you can either be connected to the mains and rely upon the signal from the mains or you can run locally with no physical connection to the mains.
The reason for this is repairs. If a lineman opens a breaker the wires after that point must go dead no matter what--if your system backfeeds into the wire you could kill the guy working on the wires.
>because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected
On that note I believe there are electrical devices that automatically disconnect you from the grid. It allows you to use a battery / solar array to power the house, while not feeding back any power to the grid such that you don't harm anyone trying to fix the grid.
Now whether or not this is allowed is very much dependent on which country you live in.
This video is in the UK and demonstrate such a device:
This is called an 'automatic transfer switch', it basically islands your off-grid installation when the power isn't available. As you already mention whether or not it is allowed is dependent on where you live. As it was the electrical inspectors in Northern Ontario were very much in bed with the power companies and typically would find all kinds of reasons to persuade renewable energy builders to let it go and rely on grid power. Given the state of some of the homebrew systems I've seen they probably had a point.
Automatic transfer switches were technically allowed but at the time I didn't know of a single installation in Northern Ontario that got a stamp of approval and was allowed to be operated un-attended in grid connected mode.
There is some risk, but this is usually exaggerated, the theory goes that a lineman should be able to disconnect a segment and then it should be idle, requiring all renewable installations down-grid to disable themselves. As a rule this is fully automatic anyway because all of the grid connected inverters that I'm aware of stop working as soon as the grid fails because they use the grid to supply them with phase and frequency information required to function.
But that wasn't good enough, the installation needed to be physically disconnected from the grid, requiring a very large relay and somehow it then had to reconnect if the grid came back on for a specified minimum amount of time (I forgot the details). By the time I had worked all this out I figured since I'm going to be in island mode anyway most of the time I may as well take the shortcut, cut the grid entirely (saving a considerable amount of money in the progress) and invest the difference into a nice genset (which I did, a 5.8KW Kubota diesel).
> 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.
This sucks, but is it not cold enough to put freezer items outside?
Frozen food is supposed to stay below 0 F (-18 C) [1]. It will be cold outside, but it probably isn't going to stay below 0 F all day every day. For example, the average January high in Timmins, Ontario is +13 F.
I've been interested in how to do this -- in particular, how you tie in your solar inverter, windmill, and batteries together. Are you using AC to tie everything together, or are you able to use DC everywhere until you use it?
AC as much as you can. Wiring thickness quickly becomes a limiting factor so you site your inverters right next to your battery banks and you keep your solar voltage as high as your inverter allows you to (up to 400V these days).
Modern systems with multiple DC sources are usually all tied to a common DC bus (24-60V depending) that is parallel with the batteries. Devices called charge controllers take the unregulated DC from a DC source (PV, Wind, hydro...) and output a constant voltage which can be used to charge the batteries or be directly consumed by the inverters. The inverter takes care of tying the DC bus to the AC side of things including the grid and/or generator. Modern DC tied inverters perform multiple functions as they can be programmed to use AC or DC as the source, charge the batteries and even feed power back into the grid.
Tying together with DC usually works out cheaper, since MPPT tracking buck converters to charge the batteries are cheaper than having extra inverter capacity.
As a bonus, you can buy quite a lot of 12V DC equipment made for cars and caravans which tends to be a lot more energy efficient.
2 KW is a 5 meter diameter windmill, which is pretty large for a homebrew. 12-15 KW turbines are major feats of engineering, I would not trust myself to put together something that size, besides the gear required to put it up. A 2 KW machine has an alternator/blade combo that weighs close to 100 Kg, about the limit of what you can raise and lower with normal equipment. Keep in mind that it sits on top of a 10 to 20 meter high tower, which makes raising and lowering it a job all by itself.
Where I am in SF it seems to be the opposite. Until a few years ago the power would go out every time it rained heavily but at some point they fixed it and now we get electricity when it rains. (Major roads still become impassable when it rains because it happens infrequently enough they’re not built with a camber.)
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...
In Northern California, Sacramento & other counties subsidized utility hookups for wealthy residents (lots of local tech and flight from SanFran) who wanted to live further out in the rural El Dorado Hills area. This had long term consequences of the city always being in debt and having to sprawl to stay ahead.
I see this as catering to the rich, who could have afforded it, simply because they wanted to live in palatial McMansions in the countryside and felt entitled to be accommodated.
I don't think it should be the obligation of the county to provide utilities if people want to live outside city limits.
If you want to live rural, you need to come up with the cash to get your utilities, otherwise too bad, live in the city limits.
There are very good reasons why there is a thing called "city limits", this is one of them.
A brand new septic system (bed & tank) could run you up that high, too, these days. And a well is pricey as well.
Living rural is a constant money drain. Though in theory you are building systems that can sustain your independence later. In theory. In reality, rarely the case.
Living urban is also a money drain. To get a decent sized place, you need to pay HoA fees, high rents, security deposits often get stolen, not to mention pet fees, parking fees, expensive QoL, exposure to pollution and noise, lack of quiet and solitude. I'm semi-rural now and while we do have to pay for well upgrades and power backup systems, we get a huge beautiful quiet piece of land for our money.
My parents live 15 minutes out of town in North Western Ontario and they end up paying $1000-$2000/month in winter to Hydro One for heating, even though they have a well insulated house. You are pretty much screwed. They know people who got solar and the government promised them a certain rate, and then went back on their word and those people got boned as they could no longer afford their 40k installations over 25 years. I've never heard anything good about Hydro One.
Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
If the government is going to insist on making money, then it should operate nationalised utilities, which provide a baseline service and cost, and if private enterprise can compete with that by offering a better product and/or cheaper service, then all the more power to them.
Having a situation where a single commercial entity has a monopoly position seems to be the second-worst option, just above "no service at all".
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).
This is why governments have passed incentive acts to help. In the United States, that came from the Rural Electrification Act[0]. It was a recognition that rural areas are critical to our urban areas because they provide food and resources, in addition to an occasional oddball university location or something to stare at on a transcon flight.
Although the law is nearly 90 years old, it continues to be foundational for supporting rural communities. In 2014 it was updated to provide support for rural electric and telephone cooperatives to supply gigabit internet. And that’s why the north woods of Minnesota often has better internet than large swaths of Minneapolis and St Paul.
I'm all for cost recovery and fiscal restraint, and the exception I'd propose in this case is that rural residential electrification is the cost of government. If you want to expand your habitable footprint as a state, it means some reciprocity for the people living there. The govt needs rural people settling remote areas more than those people need govt.
Satellite internet changes a lot, as if you can do off grid renewable power with satellite internet, economic viability and mobility of populations changes radically. We've seen it post-covid with rural real estate prices matching those of cities as the result of remote work (I think).
Hydro was used as a giant opaque debt slush fund by previous governments, where they levered up debt secured against revenues and then blew it on favoured groups to secure re-election. "Infrastructure," surely, but now you have a debt retirement fee on every hydro bill that is essentially a tax.
Why would maintenance be covered in the connection fee? Not only is it backwards from the usual financial game of lowering up front costs by hiding them in recurring costs but there is no way to know up front if you'll need to maintain that line for 2 years or 200.
Governments provide services - in general - in no small part because services are almost all cost.
Do you want your citizens to have electricity, as is expected in a modern 21st century country - or would you rather folks go without because of cost? If yes, then getting electricity to houses should be a priority, even if they never profit.
It should also be very noted that electric companies tend to balance the rural costs out with charging urban customers a bit more to make up for the difference, much like healthcare (whether it be premiums or taxes)
Is it high compared meaning they are making a huge profit or that people can't afford it? If it really does that cost much then subsidies are possible.
However it seems some people live in rural areas to save money, you hear about that often here where people would post something like "I moved to the woods in North Dakota and only pay $500 a month" is it fair to then use tax money to help keep that price low?
> Last summer, Timmermans's two radio stations: Great Lakes Country 103.1 and Hits 100.7 went live from their new home — in Little Current, Ont., about 90 kilometres southwest of Sudbury — the first off-grid stations in Canada.
the guy was running two radio stations; i expect they quoted the price like it was a business/commercial line
The main takeaway should be that being that far north is not a show stopper for going off grid with mostly solar, a bit of wind, and batteries in a very harsh climate with limited sun hours in the winter. Anything further south is probably a lot more effective and cheaper to run. But the point of the article is that people are doing this and are saving money doing it. Of course, that is indeed enabled by a monopolist really encouraging this by discouraging new customers with unreasonable fees. But that's the other point, being at the mercy of companies like that is not great financially and there's a point where it becomes simply not worth the money in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better throw in a backup generator for the backup generator, as well. They're mechanical devices, and fail a lot.
Solar panels typically produce 10-15% of their normal power if it's cloudy. Adding a wind turbine or two can do a lot to make up for that, but then there's winter...
I'd very much like to see what their thoughts are in a year.
Adding a small wind turbine is usually not worth it. They need a lot of wind to produce any meaningful energy output while costing a few thousand $. So unless you go really big, you'd be better off adding more solar panels.
>> It's a pretty compelling option - spend less than the connection fee to get free electricity. The biggest problem is that you have to size your system for cloudiest days in the dead of winter - which means massive batteries and lots of extra panels.
Or alternatively have a manageable demand side so you can minimize your demand on bad weather days. Definitely 8KW system - everyone messes up kW and kWh.
If you're able to run central air plus a bunch of other stuff at the same time, then I would think your assumption of 8kW is right. If capacity was only 8kWh, then they could only run all this stuff for maybe 1-2 hours a day. That seems like an absurd outcome, and unlikely.
Why is that unlikely? You don't need all that much power if you're frugal and the first thing any person building a renewables installation is going to buy is a kill-a-watt, the next thing will be an energy efficient fridge. It's amazing how much you can shave off your electricity usage if you start monitoring where it goes.
Converting electricity to heat is a bit like turning the best steak into hamburger, wasteful and costly. Electric heat is pretty much limited to the United States, in most other countries power is way too expensive to be used for heating.
Not mentioned in this article is that Hydro One also charges rural ontarians a “delivery fee”, which is about 2x the price of your usage.
So you might pay 6 to 14 cents per kWh, but your bill will be 3 times that amount.
The delivery fee is also completely opaque: there’s no explanation to determine how it’s calculated, other than a brief text saying “a portion of this fee is fixed, and a portion depends on your usage”. But I haven’t been able to derive those values. If the formula for this delivery fee is something like ‘$xx + $yy*kWh’; then it appears these x and y values are not static.
So delivery is for wires, transmission, operations and safety (see wildfire maintenance as an example in CA). So whenever anyone new connects to the grid the cost will get defrayed through this mechanism. My theory is the more that people are becoming more effective at avoiding high generation fees the utilities will transfer the costs to the delivery fee increasing it over time to ensure they continue to get revenue.
Generation is for the portion generated - which will likely go up with the surge in commodity prices this year - except since you are paying retail rates it will take longer you aren't immediately exposed to whole electricity prices and the costs of electricity are also political issues in Ontario to a small degree.
Also in Ontario we sell power at a loss to Michigan (mainly because of overproduction of our Nuclear facilities). Its a real boondoggle.
I talked to someone in the power company at some point and they said it is a function of how far away you are to the nearest generating point. That could be a tale though, but it made some sense.
It could be that it is the formula you state "$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
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.
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.
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.
Telling people to reduce their quality of life in order to combat climate change is a fruitless endeavor. It will simply not happen unless a crisis forces us to.
I would consider anything short of new tech that allows us to continue increasing our quality of life while simultaneously improving ecological conditions a failure.
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).
This is where theoretically IoT and smart appliances can help.
Imagine if:
- You can put your clothes into a combined washer/dryer and it starts washing and drying when your PV panels generates a lot of power
- Your fridge thermostat adjust to lower temperature when there is power from the panels, and temporarily pause the compressor when a high load appliance is being used, such as microwave
Unfortunately in real life, smart appliance only have gimmicks and are very insecure
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?
Readit News
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 ;)
What's worse is when Hydro One's shortsightedness ends up costing them gobs of cash. I've seen brand new pole lines replaced within 2 years of being built because the ADET didn't leave any Spare Capacity on the poles. Add a communications strand and multiple poles need replacement. Since they had 6 phases of power on 60+ foot poles, Hydro One's replacement cost is north of $15k per pole. All because the lower class pole was maybe a few hundred dollars cheaper. #FAIL
I worked on an island on Lake of the Woods that was wired with power, phone and DSL. The next day, Hydro One was flying a branded helicopter up and down the chain of islands that were wired together to figure out where the lines were down.
The helicopter was absolutely bizarre to me and seemed like overkill, given that I only grew up in urban settings before. I though they might run a boat and walk the ROW. The helicopter seemed like an expensive toy they got to play with every so often.
Deleted Comment
I've just had a tour of a hydrogen fuel cell setup we have here at our OB. I'm no electrician, but from what I could tell, it's plugged into the mains, currently drawing about 3KW, and hydrogen is producing another 12KW (we haven't got much demand for this event - the generator will produce 250kW if we want).
It comes in from the mains through an isolating transformer, into the generator and UPS, and then outgoing power to us goes through another isolating transformer (to stop mains hum that we saw last time, in both directions)
It seems it's perfectly fine to have this sort of setup connected to the grid in the UK. Obviously it's more expensive to do so than just wiring in your own diesel generator.
Any system which absolutely prevents backfeed is acceptable, your use of the mains charging the UPS and the UPS driving everything is an acceptable way to do it--even if your system goes nuts no circuit exists by which that power can backfeed. It's more typically done by a mechanical isolation switch, you can either be connected to the mains and rely upon the signal from the mains or you can run locally with no physical connection to the mains.
The reason for this is repairs. If a lineman opens a breaker the wires after that point must go dead no matter what--if your system backfeeds into the wire you could kill the guy working on the wires.
On that note I believe there are electrical devices that automatically disconnect you from the grid. It allows you to use a battery / solar array to power the house, while not feeding back any power to the grid such that you don't harm anyone trying to fix the grid.
Now whether or not this is allowed is very much dependent on which country you live in.
This video is in the UK and demonstrate such a device:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP51JjnWvLo
Automatic transfer switches were technically allowed but at the time I didn't know of a single installation in Northern Ontario that got a stamp of approval and was allowed to be operated un-attended in grid connected mode.
There is some risk, but this is usually exaggerated, the theory goes that a lineman should be able to disconnect a segment and then it should be idle, requiring all renewable installations down-grid to disable themselves. As a rule this is fully automatic anyway because all of the grid connected inverters that I'm aware of stop working as soon as the grid fails because they use the grid to supply them with phase and frequency information required to function.
But that wasn't good enough, the installation needed to be physically disconnected from the grid, requiring a very large relay and somehow it then had to reconnect if the grid came back on for a specified minimum amount of time (I forgot the details). By the time I had worked all this out I figured since I'm going to be in island mode anyway most of the time I may as well take the shortcut, cut the grid entirely (saving a considerable amount of money in the progress) and invest the difference into a nice genset (which I did, a 5.8KW Kubota diesel).
So basically, to clarify, you're either 100% on the grid, or 100% off. There's no using both depending on conditions, is that it?
This sucks, but is it not cold enough to put freezer items outside?
1: https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/safe-food...
Given the Canadian context, do you mean the Netherlands or Newfoundland and Labrador?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28999144
I think contextually the very next sentence gives you your answer here.
Tying together with DC usually works out cheaper, since MPPT tracking buck converters to charge the batteries are cheaper than having extra inverter capacity.
As a bonus, you can buy quite a lot of 12V DC equipment made for cars and caravans which tends to be a lot more energy efficient.
This is now becoming a reality for more and more people in the Bay Area due to a combination of corruption and failing infrastructure.
NL in this context is Netherlands? Or another area of Canada?
https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill/
https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill-ii/
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...
I see this as catering to the rich, who could have afforded it, simply because they wanted to live in palatial McMansions in the countryside and felt entitled to be accommodated.
I don't think it should be the obligation of the county to provide utilities if people want to live outside city limits.
If you want to live rural, you need to come up with the cash to get your utilities, otherwise too bad, live in the city limits.
There are very good reasons why there is a thing called "city limits", this is one of them.
Deleted Comment
Living rural is a constant money drain. Though in theory you are building systems that can sustain your independence later. In theory. In reality, rarely the case.
Even at 80k, the govt is still losing money.
Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
If the government is going to insist on making money, then it should operate nationalised utilities, which provide a baseline service and cost, and if private enterprise can compete with that by offering a better product and/or cheaper service, then all the more power to them.
Having a situation where a single commercial entity has a monopoly position seems to be the second-worst option, just above "no service at all".
It's literally what the government is for.
Although the law is nearly 90 years old, it continues to be foundational for supporting rural communities. In 2014 it was updated to provide support for rural electric and telephone cooperatives to supply gigabit internet. And that’s why the north woods of Minnesota often has better internet than large swaths of Minneapolis and St Paul.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
Satellite internet changes a lot, as if you can do off grid renewable power with satellite internet, economic viability and mobility of populations changes radically. We've seen it post-covid with rural real estate prices matching those of cities as the result of remote work (I think).
Hydro was used as a giant opaque debt slush fund by previous governments, where they levered up debt secured against revenues and then blew it on favoured groups to secure re-election. "Infrastructure," surely, but now you have a debt retirement fee on every hydro bill that is essentially a tax.
Do you want your citizens to have electricity, as is expected in a modern 21st century country - or would you rather folks go without because of cost? If yes, then getting electricity to houses should be a priority, even if they never profit.
It should also be very noted that electric companies tend to balance the rural costs out with charging urban customers a bit more to make up for the difference, much like healthcare (whether it be premiums or taxes)
the guy was running two radio stations; i expect they quoted the price like it was a business/commercial line
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.
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.
My strategy is to have a sub panel installed which runs the most critical loads:
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.
Well, if you were ma of of money, would you commit autocannibalism? Otherwise, the cost is quite reasonable
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 $1000 generator into the mix to cover the really bad days, but then that's an added maintenance burden.
Solar panels typically produce 10-15% of their normal power if it's cloudy. Adding a wind turbine or two can do a lot to make up for that, but then there's winter...
I'd very much like to see what their thoughts are in a year.
Or alternatively have a manageable demand side so you can minimize your demand on bad weather days. Definitely 8KW system - everyone messes up kW and kWh.
Converting electricity to heat is a bit like turning the best steak into hamburger, wasteful and costly. Electric heat is pretty much limited to the United States, in most other countries power is way too expensive to be used for heating.
I think the correct reading is they'd be able to run it for 1-2 hours, once. Presumably it's all powered off a bank of AA batteries. ;-)
So you might pay 6 to 14 cents per kWh, but your bill will be 3 times that amount.
The delivery fee is also completely opaque: there’s no explanation to determine how it’s calculated, other than a brief text saying “a portion of this fee is fixed, and a portion depends on your usage”. But I haven’t been able to derive those values. If the formula for this delivery fee is something like ‘$xx + $yy*kWh’; then it appears these x and y values are not static.
Generation is for the portion generated - which will likely go up with the surge in commodity prices this year - except since you are paying retail rates it will take longer you aren't immediately exposed to whole electricity prices and the costs of electricity are also political issues in Ontario to a small degree.
Also in Ontario we sell power at a loss to Michigan (mainly because of overproduction of our Nuclear facilities). Its a real boondoggle.
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.
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.
I would consider anything short of new tech that allows us to continue increasing our quality of life while simultaneously improving ecological conditions a failure.
Imagine if: - You can put your clothes into a combined washer/dryer and it starts washing and drying when your PV panels generates a lot of power - Your fridge thermostat adjust to lower temperature when there is power from the panels, and temporarily pause the compressor when a high load appliance is being used, such as microwave
Unfortunately in real life, smart appliance only have gimmicks and are very insecure