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.
That raises another difference between Hydro One and Hydro Ottawa: Hydro Ottawa has sensors on primary all over the network (something like every 3-5 km). The sensors make it possible to locate faults within a fairly small part of the distribution network almost instantaneously.
In contrast Hydro One has very few sensors, maybe one every 15 to 20 km in parts of the network, and sometimes no sensors at all on rural lines that can require driving 50+ km of line to find the fault. We routinely have 4-6 hour power outages, and a good chunk of the repair time is spent finding the fault. Again, Hydro One could install more reclosers on rural lines to isolate faults, but that doesn't seem to be the design philosophy they follow.
It's not entirely Hydro One's fault. Building a sensor network in rural Canadian shield geography is challenging as getting radio signals through rocks, hills and trees can be almost impossible, but I still think they can do better.
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.
Actually, Hydro One doesn't use local contractors all that much as it's heavily unionized. Even in discussions about permitting, hands are often tied as it is almost impossible to assign work previously done by union employees to external contractors or even those of us submitting permits.
For the last few years Hydro One has been trying to reform its internal processes for permits, and the folks in charge of that get huge amounts of push back internally, making the pace of change abysmally slow even though everyone knows they have a problem.
There is also the perverse incentives of operating a regulated utility. As they are usually the monopoly LDC in a given area, the amount profits they are permitted to generate are limited relative to their costs (somewhere around 10-15% iirc). This creates a perverse incentive to inflate costs as they are then permitted to generate larger profits. If they reduced costs and profits grew too large, they would be forced to lower rates, which is clearly a bad thing in the view of Hydro One management.
> 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.
> It's more typically done by a mechanical isolation switch
Do you mean (automatic|manual) transfer switch? A transfer switch transfers the load to the generator and isolates the generator from the line side(utility side, or ‘mains’ for the two tiny islands that like silly words like ‘mains’)
A ‘mechanical isolation switch’ (safety switch, disconnect switch) is simply a disconnecting means.
The important part is the isolation. The fact that it also transfers to local power is important to the user, irrelevant to the power company. The power company only cares that there no failure mode that can cause local generation to feed back onto the line.
Whether it's a transfer switch, a local inverter that requires line power to operate or some other such system is irrelevant to them.
>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).
Just adding from an experience researching solar for a condo development - if you want the fire department to try to save your house, you need to be able to cut the panels off, grid connection or not.
Likewise, putting panels on both sides of the roof makes it difficult, if not impossible, to vent a fire through the roof. The figures are ever changing, but the additional weight of many panels can also be a consideration when fighting a fire.
Really urge anyone considering adding solar panels on their home to speak with their local fire/ems prior to installation/signing a contract to be sure you know their requirements (and in many places this is still evolving).
If you're building condos, you aren't in a rural area.
In my rural area, everyone ground mounts because space is cheap. I'm a volunteer firefighter and so far none of the trainings have mentioned solar (venting roofs yes). But then, we joke that we'll arrive just in time to put out your foundation.
Not in my experience. There was a fire in the third floor unit of a building I was living in (one floor up and one unit over). It was a three floor building, so that was a roof unit. The firefighters cut vent holes and were able to contain the damage to that unit.
Even if the building is lost, the firefighters still want to put it out to keep it from spreading.
A few weeks ago, the Mount Charleston Lodge in Las Vegas burned to the ground. Firefighters put most of their effort into saving the surrounding national forest.
In practice the lineman risk isn't as real as it seems at first. Odds are when the lineman shutdowns a segment, if your system tries to supply power there are enough other people on the segment that you will trip your local overload protection and isolate the grid.
I don't blame lineman for not wanting to trust that though. My understanding is their practice is to always short out the line when working on them as that is the only way to be 100% sure it isn't live. (note that linemen work on live lines all the time, but when they need a dead line they ensure it is dead)
Agreed. But given what I've seen in some off-grid installations I really don't blame them. And I have seen one installation that tried to supply all of Ontario when it didn't go off-line as it should have, that wasn't a really pretty sight. The inverter died quite spectacularly, judging by the scorch marks on the wall above it, all of the magic smoke had definitely gone out of that one.
Automatic Transfer switches are very common in Server Rooms and datacenters where there is a Generator in use. I'm not sure why they are not more common in Solar. I have a parent with a full house generator that also has a Automatic Transfer Switch, its essentially right above the breaker box. the breaker box either gets power from the generator, OR from the power company, never both. When power comes back on, the ATS senses it, and sends a signal to the generator after 30 seconds or so that it is switching over, and to shut down.
Grid tied home solar is usually about economics (and sometimes happy feelings), not reliability.
If you want automatic transfer, you need to add storage, and a more complex inverter that can operate in bridge tied and island mode, and that cuts into the economics. You might also need to get more panels to handle projected loads during projected outages, but most net metering tarrifs I've seen won't compensate you if you over generate.
This. Normal solar relies on the grid as it's "storage". The economics of solar become very different if you have to provide local storage.
This is also why there is an ongoing fight over net metering and in some places solar connections aren't even allowed. So long as solar is a small fraction of the total power it has basically zero effect on the grid. Now, however, there are a lot of solar setups. Look what happens to the grid:
The total delivered power drops, but the peak power (when the cloud passes in front of the sun and all those panels quit working) stays the same. They need to spend just as much on generators as before but they aren't selling as much power. Historically, the cost of being able to produce the power has simply been folded into the cost of the power but with the two going out of sync this model no longer applies. Solar gets a substantial hidden subsidy from this, without this subsidy solar is almost never economic.
Second, look at what happens when *lots* of homes go solar. Lets say the local substation is delivering 1000A of power to it's area. Lots of panels go up, the combined power is 1500A. Now the substation transformer is being asked to push 500A back up to the distribution wires--and it's probably not built to survive that. Either those substations must be upgraded or the power company simply prohibits the situation from arising the in the first place by not allowing too much solar on any given segment.
1) we here in Germany, for non-standard connections (including using the grid as backup for local generation), have split price between max-power-reached-in-any-15min-rolling-average, and per-kWh.
The former is low-medium single-digits per kW and year, depending on whether you hook up to the 6kV (to neutral; low-voltage would be 240V) medium voltage or they have to keep a 6kV->240V 3-phase transformer ready for you.
At 20-30ct/kWh, this sums up to (assuming low-voltage) 0.3% duty cycle getting you to spend as much on energy as you spend on power/capability.
As for the substation: it doesn't care beyond possibly having to switch some taps that are used to correct for load-current-dependant voltage drop in that 6kV network, but I doubt they get anywhere near their delivered voltage limits in normal operation, anyways.
That varies greatly. In my area, the grid is extremely reliable. I rarely see systems that are setup to handle outages as the cost isn't really worth it on its own.
People seem to think Natural Gas just magically makes its way down the lines. NG requires power as well. If power is out for any period of time you lose natural gas soon after due to compression stations going offline unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones who lives off a branch that is self-powered.
Oh, sorry, I didn't actually mean "natural gas that comes from a magic pipe" -- I meant propane that sits in a big tank in the backyard. I know intellectually that they're different gases, probably with different numbers of carbons in the molecule, but I have the bad habit of using them interchangeably....
In the "rural" areas I spend the most time in (cape cod, not exactly rural but also with sketchy utilities) people mostly have generators running off of big (well, probably medium sized) propane tanks that I imagine may also be used for cooking / heating as well.
I'm more curious about the stability of the fuel over the long term if it isn't cycled often, where I imagine propane / NG has an advantage, but I guess if you're using it as backup to solar and wind, there's an expectation that you'll go through a couple tanks a winter regardless so stability isn't as much of an issue.
Propane and methane are very different, and you should be careful about the differences if you use either. Propane is almost always sold as liquefied propane gas (LPG) at a relatively low pressure, whereas natural gas is almost always sold in its pressurized or compressed gaseous form. The most important difference is that if you have a natural gas leak, it will 'float' in the air, and dissipate; propane will (dangerously) 'sink', and pool around the source, and is liable to explode. Indoor propane installations should always have at least one propane detector.
That article is from 2015. The bulk of natural gas infrastructure is self powered these days because declines in gas prices since then have made that a comparatively better option in more places and the natural attrition and upgrade cycle of equipment.
It does make sense - just not by the metrics you're judging it. If what you care about is carbon emissions, electrical power is better. If what you care about is system reliability native fuel power is better.
A lot of times when people say 'Thing thing makes no sense' what they mean is 'This thing doesn't agree with my priorities'
> That meant that Oncor, which delivers power to the Permian Basin — the state’s most productive oil and natural gas basin — had unwittingly shut off some of the state’s power supply when it followed orders to begin the outages.
> When Texas deregulated its electricity market in the early 2000s, making supply and demand the primary forces for the price of power and increasing competition, wholesale power prices fell. That made it cheaper to electrify natural gas compressor stations and other equipment rather than the traditional method of using the natural gas produced in the field to run the compressor’s turbines or engines, energy experts said.
> Much the the state's natural gas production and processing were struggling during the storm even before they lost power because of the weather, causing problems at the wellhead and the plants. But the failures were exacerbated by widespread power outages in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale, creating gaps where the gas could not be delivered to the gas-fired power plants that desperately needed supplies to generate electricity.
> At the peak, more than half of the state's natural gas supplies were knocked offline by power losses, according to ERCOT, causing at least 20% of the total power outages during the week.
Natural gas was possible but would require more capital up front, a lot more space and a specially prepared site for the tank, annual safety inspections and a place for a 40' truck to deliver it and turn around again (and of course it still required the genset itself). Diesel was by far the easiest solution, especially because we used the generator infrequently and once the windmill was up not at all.
We used wood for heat and limited shelf life for diesel is not an issue at all (it is for ethanol based gasoline).
Reminds me of the days when you needed written permission from the telco in order to connect a fax machine or modem to the phone line. I remember standing in line at the local phone company office and explaining to a nice chain-smoking office lady (you could still smoke in windowless offices in those days) what a "modem" was and why I wanted to plug one into their sacred network.
Here in the US Midwest I recently observed some crews repairing a fault just upstream of me, and the last thing they did before reconnecting to upstream of that fault was disconnecting a set of yellow cables which were obviously grounding the downstream wires.
Layers of protection. Laws on what can backfeed into the grid, ground the wires, wear safety gear. No different than in computer science using both a firewall AND salting your password. The more layers, the less likely 1 mistake gets you.
Exactly. If you want to get fired in a hurry from any utility or large plant: override someone else's lock-out. If they don't beat you into a coma first.
I believe that inverters with integrated transfer switches are more common these days, due to the popularity of battery systems like Powerwall. I was reading the manual for one, and it had both a grid connection (to your main panel), and a "protected power" connection for a subpanel that will remain powered regardless of grid power.
They must still have some kind of internal transfer switch (as opposed to double conversion), but I would think as a single listed device with anti-islanding, they would be a lot easier sell to an inspector. Then again that AHJ sounds a bit dodgy ("specified minimum amount of time") so maybe they're still resisting.
It is quite reasonable--the idea is that your local system must not backfeed power even in case of failure. You don't rely on how it should operate, it must be *impossible* for a failure to backfeed.
Thus, physical switches. The power company doesn't care what throws the switch, just that it exist.
The problem here is that different power suppliers in different locations have different standards here. My 6.6kW array here in rural New Mexico is connected to the grid via an inverter that will, putatively, shutdown if the grid side drops.
How does the inverter make it impossible for a failure to happen? How different is this from an automatic transfer switch (which would not be allowed)?
What they usually do is design the inverter to only use line power as the reference to generate the output. No sine wave from the line, the circuit is completely unable to produce an output and thus shuts down even in case of failure.
That depends on your generation capacity and what the rules of your grid are.
If you're capable of producing enough power to run your home most of the time, then being grid connected and buying peak load from the grid itself rather than browning out your own devices might be a worth while tradeoff.
Most of us with grid tied solar installations (like me) transparently buy and sell electricity to and from the grid depending on day conditions. I buy from the grid overnight, and sell excess capacity during the day. Depending on how much electricity you use a battery system will smooth those out, but you need a lot of batteries to eliminate the need completely (OP mentioned 48KWh, which is about 3.5 Power Walls).
In my area the grid is really reliable and fees are low, so buying batteries is not economically viable. I'm currently paying $5.24 per month for a grid tie, which is below my threshold for caring.
It's also more viable to be grid tied if your winter needs are more than X times your summer needs. My 6.6kW array generates roughly 3x what we need during summer. But our home is heated in winter (at 6000' in New Mexico) using electrically powered air-source heat pumps (aka "minisplits") and that takes about 3x what we generate during the winter.
Adding either on-site storage capacity or sufficient additional panels to cover our winter needs really makes no sense. The storage capacity would have to be immense, because no matter how you slice it and dice it, we do not generate enough power to heat our home for several months (and that's with adobe and some passive design). The additional panels would take up a large amount of ground space, and result in us generating 9x our needs in summer.
I prefer to put my faith in the emergence of grid-scale storage solutions than try to solve this on a just-my-home level.
If the grid wasn’t reliable, a hypothetical I know, it would probably be cheaper to switch over to a ground source heat pump rather than increase your panels by 3x. That would lower your winter electricity demand, albeit at the cost of significant capital expenditure.
Yes, by far. It’s much easier to extract heat from ~55F ground water than from ~20F exterior air. Ditto for dumping excess heat into ~55F ground water than 90F exterior air. On average the water coming out of a geothermal loop will be more advantageous to work with than exterior air, which is why it’s a thing.
The vehicle I'm currently sat in at the moment has a 32A electrical cable running in the back, currently pulling 2881W into a magic box provided by victron inverter/charger, that is used to charge a battery (which is currently fully charged). That battery is currently being drained at a rate of 2881W to run the equipment (via the inverter back to 230V)
If I pull the 32A cable, everything carries on working (I believe it's a sub-20ms switchover). If the power goes for some other reason it carries on working. The truck can run on a 230V/13A source just as well (although when the aircon is on - not needed currently - we'll be pulling more than 13A so the battery will slowly drain). I can even plug into two different inputs.
Now this is a mobile vehicle, and I'm no electrician, but my understanding is this is perfectly fine -- the victron presumably switches from the grid if the input is lost and doesn't feed anything back into the grid.
Presumably the same setup could be used to power a home instead of several racks of equipment in the back of a truck.
I'm getting a manual transfer switch installed - I live in the city (although it's rural-ish where I live) but we get occasional power outages and it's often enough (and long enough) to be worth the annoyance of getting a generator and switch installed, but not enough for me to shell out big $$$ for a natural gas generator and automatic transfer switch to ensure 100% uptime for my house.
This works well as long as there is a reasonably high chance of someone being in the building when the power fails. For many rural setups (for instance: weekend cottages) that isn't the case so more and more inverters come with an automatic transfer switch built in or for a small surcharge as an option.
Or if you travel. If I ever get a generator installed (with automatic transfer switch), it would be primarily for the case of a power outage during the winter when I'm not around.
I'm not sure about Ontario, but in many places you can be grid tied which means that you use both. While it is possible to change depending on conditions, the equipment to do that isn't very common. Solar systems are just starting to come out with single outlets that can run while the sun shines without the grid, but that is rare, most assume 100% on grid, or 100% off grid.
In some areas, there is both, but it requires having a correctly installed automatic disconnect, that cuts you off from the grid if the grid loses power.
Many/Most home solar installations do not correctly install one, which can be dangerous to linemen.
> 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?
Also, are there not bears in rural Ontario? If there are bears (or other large predator animals) in the environment, putting food outside can be very dangerous.
Only black bears, even in summer they're dangerous to the food, but not really that dangerous to you (as long as you act reasonably). Racoons are more dangerous to food, too.
There are bear proof barrels, which are frequently used for camping (and I'm not sure if I'd bet on them against a bear, but they keep racoons out), or if you don't have them you can tie your food up a tree and that does a pretty good job too.
Cold storage like that is pretty common in the North (as are raccoon proof locks ;) ), and many people run outdoor woodstoves which require going outside to keep them running at least once every two days or so.
Snowstorms are rare enough, even in Northern Canada that you can usually wait it out. If it lasts for days then that's a different story, but I only recall one multi-day blizzard over the five years that I was there.
How often are people going in their freezer??? I barely use mine. You grab something, cook up a week's worth of food. If you run out during a snowstorm, you just cook pantry food.
I'm hardly the strongest guy in the world but that doesn't listen exactly seem like a very strenuous effort. Am I missing something? Hell I'd probably just keep everything Ina chest freezer in the garage or shed year round located on an external wall
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.)
280, the main motorway out of SF has standing water on it every time it rains heavily. Seems to be built with a different profile to motorways in UK which are cambered for the rain to run off. Guess it must just not be worth it given how rarely it rains heavily here.
They're a fraction of what they used to be, the panels that I bought back then you can now have for 20% of the price or so. Funny enough, installation costs have gone through the roof so effectively you still pay just the same for the total installation unless you do it yourself. You'd expect that increased competition would drive down installation costs but it didn't really work out that way. I'd stay away from movable panels, it was a lot of work to put it in and cost quite a bit, for that money you can now buy far more panels which more than offsets the ability to aim them better.
Installing a windmill is something that I would not advise for novel installations unless you have a lot of room around you and quite a bit of spare time. Windmills, compared to solar are finicky devices and require a lot of thinking to get them right, solar power is much simpler.
The 'DIY powerwall' scene has turned recycling Li-Ion batteries into an art form, not all of it is done safely but some of the results are quite impressive, battery power too is now a fraction of what it cost back then and the life-span has gone up considerably, with more and more interesting options right around the corner.
When moving to Canada I didn't know much about the country so I rented a car in Toronto and drove out West all the way to Vancouver and back stopping along the road every hour or so to see what it was like there. St. Josephs Island really stood out from that trip so that's where I ended up.
I got blackballed for life at Avis for that stunt, they had an 'unlimited mileage' two week offer for very little money, they gave me a brand new car, I averaged 1000 per day or so :)
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.
Thats why you go suburban. Low COL but high quality of services and infrastructure. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care about the solvency of your community :D
And I like that you understand that choice and cost. I don't like the concept that tax dollars should be used to pay for the extremely high cost of electricity and other utilities for a small number of people to keep rural living costs low.
Earlier this month the water line from my well pump to my pressure tank just... exploded. Water gushed all over my basement until I remembered where the off switch for the pump was. I'm lucky I was home, because it would have just kept running until it got to a place where it could drain out (i.e. upstairs) or the power shut off because everything shorted out.
It's real bliss out here in the country, let me tell you :-) My son was home and got to hear me swear with words and tones that he'd never encountered before.
Yeah it would need to sit between the pump and the pressure tank. My existing shutoff valve is -- like most -- after the pressure tank. What I really need is something to cut the AC power to the well the moment water starts to touch the floor under the tank.
HOA's are in theory a choice. In practice, in many regions anywhere built out in the last 30 years (more?) years is covered by them and there is no real choice. I absolutely loath them for this reason. There is no "choice" about them when it comes to newer housing.
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.
Oil tanks are dangerous and unpleasant things to store and maintain, and very dependent on road viability for the once or twice yearly top up. I've known plenty of people in the North East that used oil for heating and they all hated it, and I bet it's easier to get an oil truck to top up your tank in Massachusetts or Maine than it is in Ontario. Oh, and the oil tank is an explosion hazard if you need to do any work on it.
Wood heating is a lot of labor. It's sustainable if you have forest land, but still a ton of labor. Even pre-seasoned and delivered wood takes a lot of work. The general rule of thumb is that you need to envision literally filling your living space with wood in order to have enough to heat your home with wood burning stoves. Wood just doesn't put out the BTUs per pound that oil, coal, or other petroleum products do. Propane seems to be the go-to, but I know very little about storing and running your house off of it.
I think in the future the answer is going to be geothermal, or "ground source heat pumps". They work like reversible AC units that use ground temp water to extract heat from. They're more efficient than regular ACs, allowing you to heat your home with ~1/3 the electricity of regular resistance heating, but the installation costs in suburban areas are extreme due to the deep wells needed. If you live in rural areas though you can use shallower trenches to lay the tubing down below the frost line, making this a much more viable choice.
My parents installed Geothermal a few years ago, which was expensive, like 30k I think, and it's helped, but not a ton as the line is still going under a frozen river in the winter, so the prices I quoted above are after geothermal. I think I saw a comment thread a few months back about how a lot of people got taken by the promises of geothermal and how they don't really do much for people in cold areas. It's great in the summer mind you. My buddy who works for Hydro One said a lot of folks end up paying the same or more after the install of geothermal because of how cold it is, which is really unfortunate. I looked at a big, nicer house in Nova Scotia that had dual geothermal and I was just drooling until I got my hands on the heating bills and was so confused why it was still so expensive.
They don't have wood burning and they are too old to be able to handle it anyway, you'd die from all the wood you'd have to cut and move and deal with. They said oil wasn't viable, and I don't think their house is setup for it anyway. They are worried about snow removal where they live as it's just too much for them now and it's so easy to get stranded for days, even though the city does eventually plow that road.
Where they live it's regularly -30 to -40c in the winter. They were snowbirds until Covid hit.
Something does not compute. $1000 should be getting them ballpark 10'000 kWh of power. That is 14 kW of constant power use. Typical largest residential GSHP over here is 15-18 kW of heating at 4 kW compressor power. (usually COP in range 4-5 is specified at 0C input, 35C output) So unless the GSHP is woefully undersized, the house is terribly insulated and the resistive booster heater is running at full tilt, something is wrong with those numbers.
For saving money on heating the first step should be to waste less heat rather than making the wasted heat cheaper.
I’m not an expert, but it doesn’t sound like they installed the lines deep enough. I thought the point was that all groundwater is pretty warm compared to the air you’re trying to heat, at least if you go deep enough.
I think you're overstating the danger of oil tanks. You mention explosion risks, that's a very rare occurrence and could happen with gas or propane too. The real downsides of oil are the high prices and the carbon footprint.
Wood is at least much cheaper and has charming appeal, gas is cheaper too but not available in many districts. Propane is extremely cost ineffective for heating, it'd be much better to use any other type of heating if possible.
Sounds like they’re quite happy with the value provided by $1500-$2000/month from heating electrically.
Alas, if your home is well insulated, a newer wood stove should do the trick, but if moving it from a stack outside and cleaning ash is too much, I get it, stay electric.
Propane is delivered just like oil, but can be stored outside. Usually you get them refilled more often, so if road access is an issue, it’s not a great primary.
Propane freezes at 86 K; the lowest recorded temperature on Earth was 184 K.
There are a variety of things that can go wrong at low temperatures, like what happened with natural gas in Texas, but the propane itself isn't going to freeze.
As long as your tank is big enough, yes. The issue is propane is stored as a liquid, and when you draw it, it boils (and it must boil) but the evaporation makes the tank colder than ambient.
Boiling point of propane is -42C.
When it’s -30 and you’re drawing a lot of propane… yeah, your evaporation rate may suffer. Interestingly, a stiff wind is helpful here to warm the tank up to -30 (if it isn’t buried in wind-blocking and insulating snow…)
Propane tank heaters are a thing for this reason.
The issue in Texas was that you have regulators and pressure reducing valves, but going from high pressure to low pressure is cooling, leading to frozen valves/regulators because it wasn’t designed for liquid infiltration and the cold temps generated.
A wood catalytic converter stove will easily heat your main living areas and all you need is an area to store a few cords of wood, which does not need to be in your living area. It is more work to keep running but would save a ton of money as 1-2k of wood should get you all winter, not just a single month.
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".
The system should either break even (which it doesn't do), or cost money (which means taxpayers subsidise it), or make money (which means users subsidise other taxpayers)
The question is to what extent should grid connections to new rural homes be subsidised by taxpayers, which is of course a political decision - just like to what extent roads, military, healthcare, education, oil production, etc should be subsidised.
A better solution may be to allow the subsidiy money to be used to provide grants for off-grid. It may be better for the taxpyer to give someone $30k to sort their power out, than to spend $40k on an electric line to their house.
> The question is to what extent should grid connections to new rural homes be subsidised by taxpayers, which is of course a political decision
100% agree. Not only that, but rural development is inherently connected to these other subsidies. Rural populations tend to have worse education, worse health outcomes, and more expensive roads/mile/capita. Not to mention the negative political externalities rural populations produce (maybe a modern US-only phenomenon).
> the negative political externalities rural populations produce
I'd argue that the causality goes the other way - people move to rural areas to escape the demands of the high-interdependency core. And I'd say much of our political divide is from that highly connected core extending its influence into the previously left-alone areas, first through broadcast media consolidation and now through social media and its consolidation.
I agree that many people move away from cities to "escape", but it's important to recognize that for many decades now, rural residents have received significantly more benefits from the government than they pay in taxes, while urban dwellers pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Essentially, those who live in cities are living within their means and subsidizing those who live in rural areas.
From an economic perspective, rural areas are still highly connected and interdependent - think roads, infrastructure, food, water, electricity, internet, transport networks. Those who move from cities to rural areas to "escape the demands of the high-interdependency core" simply shift from majority "producing" to majority "receiving" benefits from our interdependent society.
I'm a huge fan of rural living, but it is expensive. We as a society have decided to subsidize it to various degrees. I'm OK with this, but also think cheap, individual solutions should be used when feasible. For example, sewer lines are very expensive in rural areas, so most houses maintain their own septic tank. Rural houses often use a Propane tank they refill rather than a gas line hookup. They often have their own well for water. Thus, the high grid-connection fees in the article make sense, as rural residents can just build their own off-grid electricity production.
I agree with most of your comment, but it's a bit too judgemental.
The main political wedge we're facing is the absolute destruction of the manufacturing-production economy (which requires open space and other distributed capital), in favor of the finance-metagame economy (which doesn't). In this wider context talking about subsidies is a bit disingenuous, because if we had a balanced economy then resources would be flowing to the rural areas from the urban areas as revenue of private companies. Instead, most of the resources for building out non-urban infrastructure are flowing abroad, while the little remaining bit trying to mitigate the hollowing out gets called a subsidy.
It's easy to get frustrated with the regressive hypocritical politics, especially with the last few years of objectively utter nonsense. But if that is ever going to get fixed it's going to require even more resources going to rural areas to alleviate the poverty driving the anger and spite. Ideally this would happen by fixing the market dynamics, but really it needs to happen any way possible.
I understand your point - farming, mining, and manufacturing are all essential economic activities that have largely shifted overseas post-WWII. This has hollowed the rural economy in US and other western nations while also making goods vastly cheaper and bringing billions out of poverty worldwide.
In my mind I am very willing to help and support many parts of a community and society. We need all sorts of work to build a society - finance, tech, manufacturing, non-remunerated work (raising children, etc).
I’m in favor of gov investment in infrastructure as I believe it helps all of us grow. Same with healthcare and education.
But it is _very_ important to make these benefits transparent and clear, otherwise we end up in the situation we now face, where the same voters that would be most helped by these investments argue against such programs and are strongly anti-government (see Trump, Brexit, Jan 6, etc).
Farming in the US did not shift overseas. American farming output in 2021 is higher than ever, approaching 3x WWII levels[1].
Farming in the US rather consolidated around massive economies of scale, where a few large industrial-scale players with large capital available can produce vast amounts of food at a very low unit cost.
This was partially the result of government subsidies and policy ("go big or get out" in the 70s) and partially the result of large technological advances yielding huge productivity gains. Far less labor is now required to produce a unit of food. Petroleum-based fertilizers developed in the 1940s improved crop yields in many cases by thousands of percent. At the same time, mass produced mechanized farm equipment (tractors, harvesters, etc.) became far cheaper and widely available.
The traditional family farms that dominated agriculture until the mid-20th century have become largely uncompetitive in the commodity market, leading to many social problems in rural areas and a widespread perception that American farming is no longer a thing. A few find a niche in organic farming or specialty crops. Many just sold their land to a large operation, lived off of the proceeds for a while, then became poor.
It's important to note too that this consolidation has had beneficial social effects: in inflation-adjusted terms, food is extremely cheap now as compared to any prior point in history. Put another way, the amount of minimum wage hours of labor required to procure 2,000 calories a day is lower than ever before in human history. _Obesity_ is now a significant health problem among lower income Americans, whereas historically starvation and malnutrition due to high food costs were the main food issues for the poor.
American farming is bigger than ever; it's just done on a vast industrial scale now.
Your assuming nutrient levels per unit weight have remained the same in the food from WW2 to present. There’s pretty convincing evidence that in face nutrients per unit weight have dropped dramatically. So there’s a qualitative difference in comparing food from different years.
Very good point about farming and productivity. I believe US manufacturing didn't decline in output either, just increased productivity and declined in workers. Although essentially all the growth in new manufacturing went overseas I believe.
> But it is _very_ important to make these benefits transparent and clear, otherwise we end up in the situation we now face
I strongly disagree on the causality here. The red state subsidies are a blue team talking point. To the extent the reality gets through to the red team, it's anticonvincing because the main thing they feel they're missing is self determination.
Telling them to be appreciative of federal welfare, and they can get even more of it (eg UBI), is the exact opposite of what they want. They want purpose, hence the attraction to regressive ideologies promising that there is purpose to their suffering. Purpose cannot be provided by overt direct subsidies - it can only come from the feeling of earning one's way, regardless of the truth of the matter (eg how the metagame industries suffice). By extension this means revitalization of rural economies, no matter how artificial. Then again after decades of ZIRP what does "artificial" even mean?
It sounds like you're suggesting the subsidies remain, but the red states get to pretend that it's not the anti-government individualism their personal ideologies demand?
If people want self-dependence and self-determination, they should strive for it - not play acting that they are independent. What they should not do is complain about the entire concept of government intervention ("socialism!") while benefitting from the exact same thing, paid for disproportionately by the groups they demonize.
I'm talking straight up pragmatic realpolitik. Fundamentalism is attractive to people in poverty, because it lends a purposeful narrative to their suffering. Fundamentalism then breeds more poverty. If we don't want that cycle to take down the country with ever more regressive fundamentalism, then we need to break it. If that involves pinching our nose and tiptoeing around the hypocrisy, then so be it.
From my libertarian perspective I'd rather not use a loaded term like "subsidy" due to the larger context where the government printed massive amounts of money over the past several decades, benefitting the centralizing/urban metagamers at the expense of the distributed/rural economy. Loaded terms make it too easy to condemn specific aspects while ignoring others that are quite similar.
Don't they often argue that government handouts are what prevent people from finding jobs, innovating, or moving to an area with jobs.
I don't think it's too hypocritical to accept government handouts because you need it while at the same time wishing you had a job so you didn't have to take handouts
However not everyone feels that way and they use a very broad stroke when it comes to Government assistance which was referred to by some as "socialism" and later "communism"
I grew up in a very rural, conservative small town and still talk to many people there.
They loved the $1500 checks in their accounts. They see rising cost of housing and several have suggested government subsidies for homes or a massive government program to build more houses.
I agree people want purpose, but I don't think rural conservatives are actually against government programs or subsidies, as long as it benefits them and is not presented from the perspective of modern culture war and media. They don't like "handouts" but they DO like roads, water, electricity, farm insurance, military bases, post offices, etc.
Your experience would seem to support the first part of my comment. What is making "benefits transparent and clear" if not presenting "from the perspective of modern culture war and media" ? Pointing out that their communities are net subsidized directly undermines the feeling of self sufficiency. FWIW based on my personal experience, I would say that people accepting the handouts justify it as at least getting something "back" for themselves, while others get so much more - it's not like the cognitive dissonance just goes away.
But sure one doesn't need to be so indirect as I went on to say in the second half of my comment. I feel like that's playing awfully close to the cognitive dissonance though, in that any given program can very easily end up on the talking point shitlist and become permanently unwelcome. Ideologically I'm a fan of decentralization so I'm inclined to focus on fixing the distributed economy, even though it requires a similar amount of forcing.
I think we agree on most practical aspects of this situation.
We both agree that this situation of expensive grid hookups in rural areas is simple economics. We both agree to make it affordable would require a subsidy. Rural residents seem to want this cheaper/subsidized, but several in the article are also happy to build their own infrastructure instead. I think that's great!
It seems where we may have disagreement is around wider political issues regarding perspectives on government, media, and culture. Specifically, I think we have slightly different perspectives and theories about the mindset and views of conservative rural residents.
That's totally fine! However, it feels a bit like we're both talking in circles without a clear topic / thesis or enough personal experience to provide strong insights.
I agree on all counts. I think "strong insights" are pretty common these days though, and if we hope to ever figure anything out, less-purposeful discussion such as this might be more productive. Cheers!
I agree that many people move away from cities to "escape", but it's important to recognize that for many decades now, rural residents have received significantly more benefits from the government than they pay in taxes, while urban dwellers pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Essentially, those who live in cities are living within their means and subsidizing those who live in rural areas.
This is a commonly repeated factoid, but it's not really true. Or at least, it's very misleading. Let me explain.
Rural populations tend to be older. That means more spent on Social Security, more spent on Medicare, and so on. This is by far the largest reason why people say that cities "subsidize" rural areas. But if those old people moved to cities, they would still be receiving Social Security and Medicaid. So it would be more accurate to say that young people subsidize old people.
Farm subsidies exist and probably should be reduced (or eliminated) but in the grand scheme of things, we're not talking about much money. It was about 22 billion in 2019, according to NPR [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...]. That's comparable to some of the increases in yearly budget that are being talked about for Amtrak, a program that mainly benefits cities.
So don't move to a rural area believing that the federal government will shower you with cash. In general, it won't, or at least not more than it does for city dwellers.
On the other hand, being old or poor may cause the Feds to shower you with cash, but not more than you would have gotten in a city (and many things will be more expensive in a rural area than a city).
I've seen other strong studies showing that government cost per-capita is _much_ high for suburban and rural areas. Intuitively this makes sense when considering infrastructure - more people use a road in a city than in a suburb, and vastly more than in a rural area. Yet those roads cost a similar amount to construct and maintain.
One of the best analyses I've seen is from Strong Towns - a blog devoted to building livable and financially solvent towns and cities. In their deep-dive analysis of Lafayette, LA, they find that the only part of the region generating enough revenue to sustain the maintenance costs was the dense old-town city center. [1] Most of the costs examined come from infrastructure (roads, power, gas, water), not social services.
I imagine the calculus is different when considering federal government expenditures (as you point out), as the majority of federal expenditures are towards social security, medicare, medicaid, and the military. However, there is significant federal subsidies to farmers as you point out, and huge sums of cash for highways, power, and other infrastructure.
From my experience taking Amtrak cross country a few times, the places benefiting the most are the rural areas that Amtrak runs through. A large contingent of people on the train were traveling to/from places that had train stations, and no airports. There were very few people doing city-city trips. That isn't taking into account the Northeast corridor though.
That's not what I'm getting at. When a sizeable portion of the rural population are subject to conspiracy theories and misinformation and worships an incompetent slob, these effects can undermine the power of the government.
This isn't mere "disagreement," unless the Overton window is that large now.
As another poster suggested, I could have the causality backwards. Either way, the rural population is where the problem lives.
"he system should either break even (which it doesn't do), or cost money (which means taxpayers subsidise it), or make money (which means users subsidise other taxpayers)"
That assumes a fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of stuff. Neither of which is the case in a country with its own floating exchange rate like Canada.
Government doesn't spend money, it spends people. What else were you proposing to do with the electrical engineer that is so much more important than maintaining electrical grid connections to citizens?
You can of course print money instead of raising taxes but the principle's the same.
Lets rephrase it then. How many hours of electrical engineer time should be spent hooking up a new home in rural Ontario? Why would an electrical engineer who lives in the Toronto suburbs want to do this? How much time and effort should a country devote to running and maintaining this connection? What does the engineer get in return?
Either he gets more in return (thus "makes money"), gets less in return (thus "requires subsidy") or it's even (thus "breaks even")
How much should the person who wants to live in rural ontario give for the engineer's time? It seems Canada decides they should give a little, but not the same amount of time the engineer gives (and instead the engineer should be compensated by time from the rest of the country)
As to what that electrical engineer could be doing that would be better? Well how about fixing the electrics in a childrens hospital? Or maybe they could spend the day working on their garden, or watching netflix.
"Well how about fixing the electrics in a childrens hospital?"
Do they not have their own engineers? In which case what are you doing about the shortage of engineers.
Again this is all fixed amount thinking. Are you sure you are supply limited in engineers? It's only then that you need to think about taxation. And then the taxation has to be targeted at those using engineers - to free them up for the public use.
Are you absolutely sure all engineers and equipment is engaged doing things that are required?
There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, and if there is any unemployment at all then there is capacity to expand.
"Or maybe they could spend the day working on their garden, or watching netflix."
Why should engineers work any less hours a week than anybody else? The person growing their food needs to work a full week, why not engineers?
Government deploys resources, not money. And whether those resources are used hooking up people to the grid, or fitting out another server room for Pornhub is a political choice, not a financial one.
Its not about being run for profit. Its why should anyone build a house in the middle of nowhere and expect the govt to spend whatever it takes to get connected.
> Its why should anyone build a house in the middle of nowhere and expect the govt to spend whatever it takes to get connected.
But the article says "he expected to pay a few thousand dollars, given that the nearest pole was across the street, about 45 metres away. He was shocked to find out it would cost $80,000".
So it's not the case of a house in the middle of nowhere...
Just playing devil's advocate here but maybe the whole line cost $400k and they could only charge the other 4 houses on the street $80k each. The fact that the line's already run doesn't mean it's already paid for.
Should we foot the bill for connecting every rural home because people wanted to move out of the city - increasing the urban sprawl? Maybe if there 5-10 people at a time in batches they could do it at cost. . but custom jobs for every individual homeowner, come on be realistic instead of entitled.
> if private enterprise can compete with that by offering a better product and/or cheaper service, then all the more power to them.
In this case, going off-grid is exactly that: private enterprise offering a more suitable alternative for this use case. In fact, it's the correct solution, because the public should not be required to subsidize the choice of an individual to live in an area not well served by power distribution infrastructure shared across many homes.
It's just like how the government won't pay for paving a long driveway (AKA road) that connects a rural house to the main highway.
Government should only get involved in subsidizing these things when the goal is to scale access to millions, i.e:
- High impact nascent and early stage technology (i.e. EVs, renewables)
- Generational scale investments in human capital and infrastructure that private industry is too risk averse to undertake.
Subsidizing rural home builders to the tune of 80K does nothing for anyone except that home builder. It would be undoubtedly nice for them, but that's not a justification for allowing it.
> Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
Look, there's 'shouldn't be run for profit' and then there's 'Simply infeasible to do some things regardless of profit motive simply due reality.'
Pull up a map of Ontario and pick some locations at random and then figure out the distance from those locations to the nearest town that likely has a utility tie in. Tell me the distance and what you think the cost per km would be in that kind of situation. Now tell me if the government should cover that kind of service for whoever wants it, whenever they want it, for free.
You vastly underestimate the size of a Canadian province like Ontario and the costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure in a place with that kind of climate.
>Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
Except when the service is being provided to people you don't like. (not sure if I should /s this since based on my observation this is what most people unironically want).
When the govt spends money on something, it is asking/telling people to spend their effort on that task/product, instead of something else that they would/could have been doing instead.
So if the govt spends $80k of people's effort on the rural line, what doesn't get done as a result?
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).
As an urban ratepayer in Ontario, I would very much not like my electrical fees to subsidize the recreationally remote, thanks. Rural/wilderness homes in Ontario already have heavily subsidized road infrastructure and get a larger cut of the carbon tax rebate per person. It's one thing to subsidize agricultural communities, but this is different. If you have some deep burning need to be a woodsman, more power to you, but that's your decision and your money.
And looking at the article, if off-grid is more economic for the resident for that kind of life, then it's also more economical for the government. Everybody wins. Subsidizing that would eliminate that win/win.
That said, as carbon pricing rises, the calculus on propane power may shift over time... which, I assume, will result in such residents loudly opposing carbon pricing.
Why do you expect the rural taxpayers to pay for urban/city only improvements like transit/subways or money to fight guns/gangs but balk at the thought of paying for electrical hookups in rural areas.
Pretty sure they don't pay anything since people living outside cities is net minus everywhere, maintaining all the infrastructure id expensive as fuck. I'm five with it but the reality is that they are being subsidised everywhere per capita. Economies of scale, capitalism 101.
Anecdotally, Philadelphia is the poorest county in our state, while Chester county is the richest. Seems like suburban areas bring in the most money and can afford excellent infrastructure, while infrastructure in the city is in constant disrepair.
"One could say the same if you choose to be a car-less urban dweller who relies on transit and high-density infrastructure.
You can stereotype and caricature people both ways, neither helps the discussion."
Car-less urban dweller pays ticket fees for transit, so the argument doesn't work.
They aren't car-less because they are saving money - if you give everyone who uses public transport a car, gridlock will get so bad there will be bodies in the street.
Sigh.. sure, you can find faults in anyone's examples if you're just interested in doing that instead of debating the broader point.
Neither side can be diluted down to an anecdote, but I guess here we are all trying to do it anyways.
My point was actually about the stereotyping and the painting of all rural dwellers as recreational, as if urban dwelling is the only valid choice and everyone else is intentionally choosing a lesser or more difficult lifestyle.
The _overall_ point here is that connecting to any public utilities should not be made prohibitively expensive just because you live in rural areas.
> The _overall_ point here is that connecting to any public utilities should not be made prohibitively expensive just because you live in rural areas.
In this case, the argument is not that it was "made" prohibitively expensive. It's that it is prohibitively expensive, and the debate is whether or not it should be made less expensive through subsidy by government actors.
This same debate will be occurring with providing other services to remote locations as carbon costs get incorporated into the prices of distribution of services. It's not going to get better.
Isn't that why the government has the power of taxation or the ability to levy fees? Not that I'm a fan of government reach, but if the single, monopoly, private corporation can't provide necessary services at a rate that their customers can afford, and there isn't any competition to "naturally" reduce rates, then this is a place where governments usually step in. They step in the form of subsidies and grants, the sources of income of which are usually taxation or fees levied to other constituents. And electricity, running water, and sewage are considered to be essential necessities, not luxuries. This is an area where monopolistic practices should have limits, even if such costs are "necessary". This is where governments have the positive ability to help.
My comment was based on the understanding was that the government was already involved with the company and proving subsidies already.
"Isn't that why the government has the power of taxation or the ability to levy fees?"
My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense. This would mean still charging the people connected. Otherwise, who would the government tax to subsidize these other citizens?
In this case, government grants to individual homeowners looking to connect to the public utility makes the most sense. It's also easy to quantify since you can see how many people are interested in connecting to the grid who aren't currently. Governments can find multiple ways to source funds for those grants. Homeowners would apply for those grants and get funds for the connection. If funds aren't provided directly they are often provided as credits against property tax. The gov pays the utility directly.
I've seen it done this way for many different projects.
"My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense"
Thats literally the opposite of how taxes work. What you are describing is called charging the customer.
Taxes are paid independant of usage, my taxes pay for schools wven if I dont have kids. Someone with 10 kids but less income pays less taxes for schools.
>And electricity, running water, and sewage are considered to be essential necessities, not luxuries.
In the US, the latter two are not broadly considered necessities in rural areas. The situation varies but wells, where possible, and septic systems are extremely common away from urban metros and towns of a certain size.
I have both a well and septic, so I totally get it. But if you are connected to public water or public sewer, which often a municipal monopoly for good reasons, and you have limited other choices, the local government places restrictions on the cost of getting hooked up to public water and sewer if there are no alternatives.
In any case, water and sewer are indeed considered necessities and you are unable to sell or convey a house in the state that I live without a functional water or sewage system, whether on public water/sewer or on well / septic. If you have a non-functioning well or non-functioning septic (outhouses are no longer allowed), then you can't sell your house, and also you are in risk of having your own house condemned. So these are indeed necessities.
They're not considered necessities in the sense that the government has to, in general, provide you with a hookup at a reasonable cost. But, as you say, running water and proper sewage may be a zoning requirement to build a house and live on a property just as a variety of other things may be requirements.
I think you can still call them neccessary, but they just aren't public utilities in rural areas. If you have a well, you still have running water. If you have a septic system, the sewage has somewhere to go.
Right. But the context was a comment to the effect of the government providing them at a reasonable price. Which, as you say, it commonly doesn't in many rural or semi-rural areas.
The government gets most of its money through taxes in Canada.
Then they plan and redistribute that money to the agencies, corporations and departments that provide essential services for the population, and it gets spent on offering and managing those services. (Yes this is a simplified explanation)
Not sure how it works where you live but I suspect it's probably similar.
My comment was based on the understanding was that the government was already involved with the company and proving subsidies already.
My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense. This would mean still charging the people connected. Otherwise, who would the government tax to subsidize these other citizens?
So if Elon Musk decides to carve out a 1,000 acre compound 50km from the closest power source the government, no tax payers, should pay for the hundreds of thousands to connect him to the grid?
Look there's _always_ an edge case that makes the generalized common good approach sound unreasonable.
But in the end, you make the best rules you can that help the majority of people, and you accept that they will not be 100% ideal. If some people end up unfairly benefiting from it, so be it.
It’s unreasonable even if not extreme. Some dude who wants to retire 50km into the bush because land is cheap shouldnt get a $100k subsidy by tax payers.
Giving a huge subsidy to someone in the top 1% when they buy a luxury electric car with monstrous torque is also suboptimal. https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives
Welcome to the world of government subsidies - I don't see how you can stop any of this cost-effectively, as money is fungible and stuff can be resold.
Sure. There aren’t enough crazy-rich people to be significant, just like at the other end there aren’t enough people having 12 kids to cause significant expense to government child benefits schemes.
> There aren’t enough crazy-rich people to be significant
In part because of these costs. If it were on the taxpayer to foot the hook-up bill, a home in the middle of the Grand Tetons would suddenly look much more attractive.
The Google maps pictures if they place certainly look pretty, but you need to be pretty rich just to be able to live so far from where most of the work is.
The land in a town or city is more expensive because of all the positive things such places bring outweighing all the negatives, even in the relatively cheap suburbs. Electricity (etc.) supply is part of that, sure, but far from the only thing.
Thousands, even hundreds of thousands, is essentially insignificant for the government of a nation of a third of a billion (as you said Musk, I’m thinking of the USA rather than Canada).
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.
It's interesting that 90 years ago, supplying your own electrical power was unthinkable. Also, there were communities that existed in advance of electrification, so there was at least some population density to justify wired power.
For people moving into a relatively unpopulated area, in a different country, it might make more sense today, to let people bring in their own power generation, maybe subsidize it a bit if needed.
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.
Economic growth in diversified regions. They are the roots for growth, where in cities, the marginal value they contribute is a fraction of what they can contribute outside of one. There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services, which values human life as managed livestock in service of an owner, and not as an engine of growth and development, but that is one I do not share.
> They are the roots for growth, where in cities, the marginal value they contribute is a fraction of what they can contribute outside of one.
It sounds like you are ascribing some special virtue to rural living that I just don't see. When I think about work that adds social value, very little of it requires rural living (farming, mostly) and most of it can be done anywhere (computer programming, skilled trades, manufacturing, etc.). Why is a person's contribution bigger if they are rural? What special value is there in doing these things in a place no one lives? Why do we need to increase growth in some arbitrary rural location.
> There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services
And ironically, you are arguing that we should be providing these people a public service, presumably because they are dependent on it. I fail to see where the cut off should be.
Their marginal contribution is greater because they literally bring human civilization from where it is, to where it is not yet, and where there is more opportunity for growth by virtue of nobody else being there, and return what they produce there back to the urban economies.
A marginal chicken in a mass feeding factory is less valuable than a marginal chicken in a backyard. It's a question of numbers and impact. The life of a marginal person in a city is not as valuable or meaningful to their neighbours as a marginal person in the country, as there are more strong ties in rural areas, and more weak ones in urban ones. In this sense of marginal numbers, cities cheapen lives.
Maybe that's the point, where humans should switch our r/K selection strategy from high investment in K-selected lives to low investment r-selected lives, and try to exist and spread more like bugs than mammals, but that's not something I'd advocate.
If you want the necessary growth and evolution of a civilization for long term survival, you need to diversify it over geography.
The cut off for public services is the persons relationship to them. When you pull hydro lines into rural areas, you facilitate growth from each marginal person out there. When you supply power to a new suburb, you are facilitating marginal growth there at a lower rate. The public service dependency occurs when growth is a zero-sum competition for the attention of a provider (see Ivan Illich's radical monopoly and related ideas), instead of exogenously sourced growth in a rural setting, merely facilitated by public services.
The crux of the policy disagreement is in different axioms about the value of individual life (v. collective "good"), which I don't think we reconcile here, but we can see how our assessments of a policy are certainly artifacts of them.
The government of Canada paid/pays people to live in remote northern regions. Use it or lose it. It allows Canada to claim regions that could be up for dispute in the future. Canada and Greenland engage in events that visit remote places and leave symbols like flags to show usage and provide a historical record for the world court if it came to it.
Some scattered towns aren't going to significantly impact claims by indigenous peoples, and anybody else claiming big chunks of the top half of Canada is going to get laughed out of the room.
Those towns are filled with indigenous people and Canada pays many to be part of a para military force in case of invasion or just to provide ground level information
. Hans island is in dispute between Greenland and Canada and both countries visit every year to plant a flag. Having a settlement if possible year round would make the claim stronger.
The northwest passage is seeing Russian / US subs crossing without permission. Having a population creates a stronger claim for situations like this.
> Those towns are filled with indigenous people and Canada pays many to be part of a para military force in case of invasion or just to provide ground level information .
Okay but that's not about claiming the territory.
> Hans island is in dispute between Greenland and Canada and both countries visit every year to plant a flag. Having a settlement if possible year round would make the claim stronger.
Okay, that's a tiny island. Far over 99% of the land is not in dispute, and doesn't need towns to stop it from being in dispute. And even there, they don't bother to have anyone live on it! I feel like this island supports the idea that these populations are disconnected from land claims.
Also wow it super does not matter who owns this island when the strait is already split right down the middle.
> The northwest passage is seeing Russian / US subs crossing without permission. Having a population creates a stronger claim for situations like this.
How so? I could see how an active port could physically get in the way of sneaking through, but I don't see at all how a town gives canada a better claim for keeping those subs away.
>If you want to expand your habitable footprint as a state
Why is this desirable? You basically just expand every single cost without much benefit and reducing the quality of facilities provided to everyone. The general trend of populations globally is centralization which provides massive benefits.
> The govt needs rural people settling remote areas more than those people need govt.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm curious to hear your logic. My understanding is that more urbanization is required for both environmental and infrastructural reasons.
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)
The option is never going to be power or no power. It's going to be paying the connection fee, setting up your own power, or living somewhere already connected.
Any proposal for governments to spend more on something should also come with a description of what they should spend less on to compensate for it.
Why should urban citizens subsidize a lifestyle choice for others? If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere you shouldn't expect everyone else to pay you for it.
Why should urban citizens subsidize a lifestyle choice for others?
Because people that live in cities need to eat.
Because we are a society.
Because not everyone that lives in the country (or a small enough town) chose to live here - people get born there and turn into adults there.
I shouldn't have to mention this, but farmers need infrastructure to keep making your food. Gas and groceries and utilities and grain silos and schools and doctors and a bunch more - oh, and people that operate all of this.
Those people that make all that stuff run need a lot of that stuff too.
This sounds like something the market can deal with. If it costs a lot for farmers to set up, they can charge more for products until they are profitable again.
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?
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.
> 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.
>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.
This is so wrong it is almost funny. Electricity is an incredibly efficient way to generate heat. A heat pump - to name just one device - can move much more heat energy than electrical energy put in. Even resistive heaters are more efficient than burning any fuel for heat.
Resistive heaters are only highly efficient if you draw the boundaries of your system very tightly. If you take into account the losses during generation, it's a terrible picture. It's far, far more efficient to burn the fuel directly to generate heat than it is to burn the fuel to generate electricity to generate heat. The grid is perhaps 40% efficient at converting fuel to electricity.
It's harder to be so absolute when talking about resistive heat and renewable energy, but it's almost certainly a very poor use of your electricity. You could either drive a heat pump (and get 4x the heat per dollar of renewable investment) or you could spend far less money to build a solar hot water system (or, if you have the renewable forestry, a wood burner). Resistive heat really only makes sense if you have excess renewable energy and literally nothing else you could use it for.
in the specific context of living off-grid, heat pumps make great sense because the amount of electrical energy put in is a fraction of the amount of heat energy moved. This is the crux of the cost argument - electricity is expensive whether from the grid or from your own sources. The original point was that electricity is wasteful for heating. It is not.
Your numbers for grid efficiency are also way off. Hydro and nuclear to name just two, are much more efficient than that and 40% efficiency numbers are in the realm of possibility where the grid is primarily coal-based. Which most of north america and europe are not.
Efficiency is hard to measure because there's such a mix of fuels. Hydro is very efficient, but also a very small part of the generation mix in most places. Nuclear is pretty hard to measure - the actual thermodynamic efficiency of extracting electricity from heat is around 33%, but obviously as that heat doesn't come from fossil fuels it's pretty hard to compare.
One way you can look at the grid as a whole is by comparing the average carbon intensity of a delivered kWh of energy with the carbon released by burning when generating the same amount of heat energy. There's a good map of different countries [1]
We can compare that with a hydrocarbon fuel like natural gas, which has a CO2 emission of 66.7 kgCO₂/GJ [2]. That's 66.7 gCO₂/MJ or 240 gCO₂/kWh
Interestingly, quite a few grids have an "efficiency" (including renewables) of greater than 100%. As an example, the UK national grid had a carbon intensity in 2020 of 181 gCO₂/kWh - meaning using a kWh of energy from the grid releases only 75% of the CO2 that getting that energy from burning gas would.
Others are less good - eg Queensland in Australia is at 703 gCO₂/kWh, giving an "efficiency" of 34%
This of course includes all the renewables which are pushing up the number. I'd expect it to also include the transmission losses. Interestingly for most countries it's higher than I would have guessed - obviously the ~20-30% renewables and nuclear is pulling up the efficiency.
So in summary - I was wrong. The grid is often (depending on your region) a better place to get energy from (in CO2 terms anyway), even if you're just burning it with resistive heat.
A heatpump does not convert electrical energy into heat. You are failing the first rule of HN which is to treat that which you've read with the principle of charity: to interpret it according to the most favorable interpretation rather than to jump on it with the worst possible interpretation. But since you've done this: heat pumps as you already mentioned move heat, they don't convert and I clearly wrote converting electricity to heat, not 'use energy to move heat'.
Resistive heaters are terrible compared to other sources of heat when you've done proper cost accounting, burning fuel for heat can work depending on where you are, an outdoor woodstove with a water based central heat system augmented with in ground loops and a heat pump can serve both to heat and to cool at will.
most resistive heaters will convert 100% of electrical energy into heat. No fuel can reach that number. How can you - in good faith - make the claim that electrical heating is wasteful or expensive, even accounting for edge cases?
If anything, it is the opposite when compared to burning any fuel for heating, particularly if you are living off-grid in a rural environment. If one considers the situation in the original link - exorbitant utility fees - it makes absolute economic sense to run heating and cooling off electricity, especially if you generate that electricity.
> make the claim that electrical heating is wasteful or expensive, even accounting for edge cases?
I suspect you two are talking past each other. In many/most parts of the world, the electricity you get at your house was generated by burning a fuel at a remote (to you) plant. In that case, you would have been far better off burning the same fuel at your house to generate the heat (assuming you can). Both the generation and transfer have significant losses.
It's also true that if you generate it from some other source the math changes.
If you generate it using solar or wind power locally the math indeed changes: those are very expensive KWhs so you tend to be far more careful with them. Running resistive heat off a local solar installation is madness, I have never seen this done in practice, except for cooking and even then it is an expensive affair. The first thing you learn when you go off-grid is that every little bit counts. Electric heat is right out.
Central AC is pretty much incompatible with having an off-grid system. But there are good alternatives such as heatpumps and running your central heat (water based) in reverse to cool.
Yes, that's why they have an oversized system, essentially they are putting in roughly twice the amount of power they need so that they can convert sunlight into electricity to power an AC that then moves about half of that in heat. It would be far more efficient to use a heatpump.
I'm not sure what you mean by using a heat pump for AC. AC is effectively a heat pump. Colloquially, we call HVAC systems that use a heat pump to heat the house as a "heat pump", while a heat pump used to cool the house (heat the outside) is called air conditioning. Many AC systems are also configured to heat the house (heat pump can work in either direction).
Why do you say it's an oversized system? It seems like it is sized appropriately give the stuff it is required to run.
Fair enough, every AC system is a heat pump. But most of them are quite inefficient and require a lot of power to operate, though the last decade or two there have been some major improvements on this front.
The kind of heatpump that I have in mind will heat and cool depending on the season and uses in-ground loops with a fluid running through them.
Ah, so a heat pump designed to use geothermal or marine heat transfer. Yeah, those are more efficient. It's too bad they aren't more common, probably due to price, experienced installers, and smaller market (certain install requirements make urban areas less of a candidate). I'd love to have one.
26 panels at 300 W / panel is indeed about 7.8KW with some leeway if it is cold they will do a bit better and when it's warm they'll do a bit worse. Rural Canada is quite far North, so your sunlight will not quite reach the 1KW/square meter that you can expect elsewhere due to the longer path the light needs to take through the atmosphere which causes some attenuation.
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.
And there are other alternatives in a resource crisis. Most notably, the fear with water is not that we will starve, but that one country will be forced to kill the users in another country over it.
So a crisis forcing reduced usage is after he have examined/tried killing the other humans using the resource.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
> "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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heat pumps don't work so well without some way to circulate the heat inside the house and are useless without electricity. I have a large acreage but the water table is under 250' of granite, and there are no ducts in my house. I would be very pleasantly surprised indeed if I could harness geothermal without electricity, extreme home renovations, and $100k in well-drilling costs.
They work just fine, you're just going to go a bit deeper then. I put a thermal sensor down an old well head in mid winter, it was -20 Celsius at the surface and a 'balmy' 12 degrees at 10 meters down. That gradient will allow you to do a lot of good stuff if you use a freeze proof working fluid for your heatpump.
Wouldn’t you be able to have a heat floor heated by your wood? If wood is cheap where you live heating water with it is a nice upgrade from a basic wood stove.
Yes, it would be possible to use the heated cistern water from the wood cookstove but that would mean running insulated pipes through the house, using electric pumps to move the water, and additional maintenance of all that especially when it drops below freezing inside the house. Besides, the joy of the electric radiant heating in the bathroom is best experienced briefly first thing in the morning before going to rouse the fires. The older I get the more I'm willing to splurge on a few luxuries like that.
I’m currently renovating a house and we live with a single wood (pellet) stove for the whole building. Living in a 16C home is surprisingly fine but the worst part is indeed the cold bathroom in the morning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was reading a book about nutrition recently and the author was relating the remarkable health benefits of herbs, even dried ones. She went on to state that were you to eat an entire cup of dried basil - not that you would - you’d get 2,113 grams of calcium. Yes that’s right, 2 kg of minerals in a fluffy cup of dried basil flakes! A miracle of nutrition indeed.
The map you linked suggests that dots are standard in both China and India as well, which probably means that the majority of humans and economic energy use dots not commas.
I assume any translation service would account for this.
As far as I know, commas as the decimal separator aren't used anywhere in the English world. Although, perhaps the author was not a native speaker, but still personally writing in English and made the mistake.
Reminds me of a factoid that claimed spinach was 80% protein or some absurd number like that. Turned out that 80% of the calories you get from spinach come from protein, but of course 80% of a tiny number remains a tiny number.
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.
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?
What wars did David Cameron start? You sure you're not thinking of Tony Blair?
Incidentally, Cameron is far from the only UK politician to have studied PPE at Oxford. An alarmingly high number of our leaders are products of that one degree program at one university [0] - which suggests that this program deserves a lot more public scrutiny than it gets, given the shoddy results it seems to produce!
Based on personal experience, I don't think it's a symmetric deficit. Just as an example: at lots (most?) colleges, you must take (or test out of) a foreign language to graduate, but it's fine to not take calculus.
And in any case, a journalist covering a technical subject should have a basic understanding of units. It's really elementary stuff.
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.
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.
Depends what you mean by "taught humanities" I guess.
For my engineering degree in the US, I certainly took non-engineering/science courses as part of a distribution requirement and took various other courses and did various other activities as well. Among other things, communications has been a key part of my career track.
Literally zero of my degree modules (BEng Software Engineering, Aberystwyth) were non-software engineering.
But the UK does all of education differently to the USA, or at least it did when I went thought it: mandatory up to the age of 16 where you got approximately a dozen GCSEs, then two years doing A-levels (3, 3.5, or 4), then you go up to university. The only mandatory requirement to do humanities was in the GCSEs.
MIT requires it of everyone, but Economics fulfills the requirement (and it’s a popular route, since you get a bit of basic algebra homework instead of paper writing).
Lack of understanding by journalists is pretty common across many topics. Many times they oversimplify, don't show the whole picture, and get things wrong. I see it quite often in a variety of stories.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Just because you teach it, doesn't mean people remember or understand it. I had Latin in highschool, but wouldn't be able to translate a single Latin sentence today...
Indeed, and even educated people might not grasp it. I'm a doctor in quantum physics and honestly I find electronics almost always impossible to understand.
Watts are joules per second. So power consumption would still be in Watts. A kWh, or in other words a 1000 Watts for an hour, is 1000 * 60 * 60 = 3600000 joules. So in practice people would use Mj (Megajoules) and save a syllable.
Besides, considering the food industry in most countries will not even get rid of kcal where there exist zero reason to use that unit, I don't think so.
kWH is a more consumer-friendly unit since it's easier to calculate that a 100 Watt light bulb run for 10 hours consumes 1 kWH and you would just multiply by the cents-per-kilowatt-hour billing rate to find out how much it costs. If you were billed by the joule you'd need to divide by 3.6 times the rate. Or is it multiply by 3.6 divided by the rate? Do you subtract the 32 before or after?
Any consumer that knows that "k" means 1000 is going to know how to figure out how many seconds there are in an hour/day/year. There is endless confusion caused by the double use of time in kWh that this article is an example of. There is little doubt that using the base unit would be better.
They have to take the same elementary physics class we all took in high school. It's just too "hard" to actually care. They remember work and energy are things, but it's just not worth caring about to them.
.png){kind=link}
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 ;)