Does he have a wood or pellet stove for heat? Many up my way burn wood to save money on heat (vs oil and gas) and as a failsafe when Jack Frost wreaks havoc during the Winter.
Well of course he does, as do I. It would be reasonable around here to say that everyone has wood fired stoves, if only for emergencies - though a large portion here still use it as their primary heat source, even in town.
Now, people are getting whacked with higher natural gas heat bills and high electrcity bills due to the constrained supply of affordable energy because of the Global Climate Change nitwits' opposition to natural gas pipelines, natural gas midstream processing facilities, fossil fuel generating plants, nuclear power plants, and long-distance electricity transmission lines.
The New England Clean Energy Connect has yet to go online due to oppostion by trust fund NIMBY environmentalists in Maine.
Cape Wind (off Martha's Vineyard is state waters) is still a twinkle in Deval Patrick's and Charlie Baker's eyes due NIMBY environmental opposition and unfavorable economics.
Vineyard Wind (off Nantucket in Federal waters) has managed to pollute regional waters before even generating its first kilowatt of power. It's still being built, and GE Vernova just paid a $10 million settlement to Nantucket for last Summer's wind blade malfunction.
Now that costs for renewable power project costs are showing up in their electricity bills, people have figured out the wind and solar are far more expensive than fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
It's been made worse by coal, gas, and nuclear generating capacity being shuddered without adding generating capacity from reliable sources.
So, the economic forces of supply and demand are walloping electricity customers and natural gas heat customers because there is insufficient available, reliable, affordable supply.
Kermit the Frog was right. It's not easy, or affordable, being Green ... and stupid.
And all of those are industrial level projects which are doomed to fail.
I am talking about a distributed model, where each household takes care of its own solar and batteries. Where each household can be taken off-grid for several hours, if not days, without effect, or at least with a lessened effect.
A reasonable solar system would be around a 10-15k investment - no small thing - and will be an unreliable source. Even here, where it is done, where many people live beyond the reach of power and gas lines, even here it is unreliable. No homestead gets through the winter without firing up the jenny.
But it is not wholly unreliable... These homesteads, for that investment, have batteries that will power them (sans heat/ac) for a few days, with no input... add in a reasonable amount of solar and that can be increased by many days. But invariably, it is cloudy here in the winter, and solar will inevitably give way to the jenny... but, run the jenny through a tank of gas, and your batts are charged back up and you can go another 3 days... And with the spring sunshine, all the way through summer and into the fall, the solar is king, and the jenny is put away.
Again, that is assuming wood heat and no AC... but that is a fair flavor of what folks here do.
Now... make that a hybrid system. one that is grid-tied, but still takes care of itself first if it can. It is independent at least as much as it is dependent, and probably more independent than not, with times of abundance where it is generating more than it needs.
That extra could be bought back by the grid and used for local load balancing, reducing it's needs, which leaves power elsewhere in the greater grid to go toward needs elsewhere.
And now that power is being treated as a commodity, with expensive vs inexpensive hours during the day, a solar/batt equipped house could function from solar/batt during the expensive hours of the day, and rely on the grid only during the inexpensive hours.
And as I said before, if there is an outage, he obvious inbuilt resilience of 3 days of battery power, not to mention a solar array, has its own value too.
And that is here, where we have a whole lot of cloud. Down south they can make due with half of what we would need in an array and batteries... In the desert southwest it is extremely viable. A big array down there can handle heat and AC too.
Solar/batt is a viable thing one house at a time.
Wind is utterly unreliable. There are a whole lot of folks that have wind generation up here, and it blows a lot up these canyons... but it is token power, and is always unreliable and very supplemental.
