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.
