Thursday, June 19, 2014

A Compelling Reason To Go Off-Grid

My big plan for when we moved to our rural home (where we now live) was to be off-grid immediately with both energy and water. In fact, last fall after we bought a travel trailer, parked it up on our land and started visiting it every other weekend, I dug in my heels and made Jerry buy a generator to produce our electricity.

Have I ever told you I don’t like noise? I don’t like noise. A generator makes a lot of noise, even if it’s not very close to you.

If you used to read my former blog, or have read my book Hatching The Nest Egg, you know that one thing I do like is saving money.

A gas generator eats money like it was ice cream. Two weekends after using it, I did the math and realized that if we used the thing during the summer when the A/C would be going most of the time, we would be spending as much money to cool a 21-foot travel trailer as we used to spend to cool our 2159 square-foot house with central air! We’re talking around $200 per month.

Not only that, in order for me to use the Vita-Mix early in the morning, that meant for Jerry having to go out and start the generator in the dark, and in very cold temperatures (we moved at the end of January). And besides that, the generator was noisy. Oh, did I say that already?

With some reluctance, I agreed to go on the grid with energy until we got settled – until we built our permanent house, really, which I was hoping would be less than a year.

But one thing bothered me about solar photovoltaic, and that was the price. Even for a small system, it would take something like eight years to recoup our investment, compared to paying the local electric co-op $40-$50 a month. So I did a bit more research on the issue, and found a blog post explaining how extremely inefficient and expensive solar photovoltaic energy is compared to grid energy. I told Jerry that I now understood his reluctance to use solar for electricity production. He is much better than I about not saying “I told you so,” but I could see it in his eyes. I rationalized that our severe cutback in our energy needs and subsequent usage was enough to do our part to save the planet.

I change my mind

Now, I want to get off-grid with energy ASAP. I don’t care how much the initial investment is.

Why? Every month, the local electric co-op sends out a publication. In the most recent one, they talk out of both sides of their mouth. At the beginning, they have a blurb about some legislation passed in Oklahoma that will make it easier for electricity companies to diversify their sources of energy (e.g., wind, hydro). Then there was a column singing the praises of that bill having been passed.

Flip through a couple of pages, and what do I find? A long-ish article explaining why the Oklahoma electric co-ops use coal. Okay, fine. I don’t mind if someone wants to explain their position. My problem with the article is that they ignore the two biggest problems with using coal: the pollution it costs, and the lives that the mining of it impacts in sometimes tragic ways.

Cleaner burning coal

Everyone knows that when coal is burned, it produces black smoke. Forget the whole stupid carbon dioxide-global warming debate. My concern is lung cancer and other fun diseases like that. The author of the article brings up this fact, but immediately blows it off by stating that people have invented cleaner burning coal. And then goes on to lament the fact that such coal is beyond Oklahoma’s budget right now, how sad.

Not to mention the fact that there is no truly “clean” burning coal. A person may be able to reduce some of the chemicals and carbon dioxide going into the sky, but it will never burn as clean as nuclear power, or be as clean as wind.

The tragedies of strip mining

The article completely ignores that the way in which some of the coal in this country is mined is via mountaintop removal. Now, from my understanding, southeast Oklahoma coal comes from underground mines. Be that as it may, the fact is this dependence on coal does have a negative impact on folks elsewhere in the country. 

Let’s set aside the sad destruction of the beauty of this country that causes, and consider the people. The people who live in the areas where mountaintop removal goes on are very poor, and cannot afford to relocate. Some of these people are killed in mining-related landslides, many other seriously injured and without the money to take care of these injuries properly. Houses are sometimes destroyed. And these mountain residents hardly have the financial resources to pursue and legal recourse against the mining companies.

So that gives me an ethical problem with coal overall. Besides, how healthy is coal mining, anyway?

I want off-grid…YESTERDAY

I got mad. Are you kidding me? Rationalizing your determination to stick with coal by ignoring two huge ethical and moral problems with it?

My “compelling reason” to go off-grid is that the electric co-ops of Oklahoma are practicing deception in order to make a few extra bucks. (I haven’t even mentioned that we are paying $.06 more per kilowatt hour for coal energy than we did for wind energy in Plano, TX.)


I don’t care how much off-grid solar will cost us. Three thousand dollars or so is a small price to pay to know that I am no longer contributing to the pollution of this planet or potential death of a resident of Appalachia every time I turn on my blender.