[NCLUG] Re: "Green" power

[DJ Eshelman]

Paul, (and anyone else), I could tell you more of my story off-list.

I spent my teenage years in a home without running water, electricity or 
sewer- we got phone in 1988 but that's been it.  They moved from 
Colorado Springs to outside Penrose, Colorado because they wanted to 
'get off grid' (read:  Hippies).  I don't know if they really knew what 
they were getting into...

My parents recently got some solar panels, which I think was a waste of 
money- but it took them almost 20 years to get to that point, all to 
power a little 12" television and some florescent bulbs.  Before that it 
was charing 12 volt batteries by running the car, a generator, or 
depositing a charger somewhere 'on-grid' and swapping the batteries 
every few days.  I think of the waste and environmental irresponsibility 
that this caused and it makes me a little ill.  There are broken husks 
from 5 generators, countless batteries and whatnot littering their property.

I bathed about once a week in bathwater shared with the entire family, 
hauled into the bathroom in 2 gallon stewpots off the stove- we'd take 
turns on who was first.  That water was then used during the week to 
flush the toilet.
Odd that I'm where I'm at today has so little to do with that life.

I'm all for being 'Green'- but I've been 'Green' for the majority of my 
life and can tell the difference between practical reasons and just 
plain blind idealism.
"Green" usually is much more "Brown" then people realize.  It's not as 
pretty and refined as most view it as, unless you are willing to put a 
LOT of money towards it.

Now, if you want to talk conservation and being energy independent- I'm 
all for the conversation - but I can't help but take offense at the 
world's sudden obsession with 'green' because I've seen first hand that 
it's not all it's cracked up to be.

-DJ

Paul Hummer wrote:
>> And the new Li batteries are great, but expensive....just for
>> fun, I priced them to run my house (I'm off grid). Including all the
>> special charging equipment, it was just under $100k for 20 kwh capacity,
>> for which my current lead-acid batteries cost $2k
>>     
>
> I would be VERY interested in knowing the process you took to get off
> the grid.  That's a life-goal of mine.  While I don't think that my
> entire house will be off the grid anytime soon, if I could offload
> devices that need to be "always on" onto something that I'm not paying
> the monthly for (servers, etc.), then it'd be a good start.
>
> Last item I looked, solar power was getting cheaper, and I thought
> (theoretically) that I might just be able to run off solar power during
> the day (when I obviously don't need lights, etc), and then switch to
> the grid at night.  That way, I'm technically only paying far
> electricity that ~10 hours out of the day.  There were some issues with
> that, but I don't remember the big ones.
>
>
>