It seems that even big users of energy and the owners of residential mansions are choosing to cut their links with the main network, and go off-grid.
Installers and energy consultants tell One Step Off The Grid that the numbers of consumers choosing to go off grid is rising quickly, in response to rising cost of grid energy, and the hopeless political environment.
And it’s not just small or energy conscious households making the shift.
Recent data shows that the number of off-grid installations is increasing rapidly, a combination of new homes that don’t bother connecting to the grid, and an increasing number of on-grid homes that have had enough.
The official data, however, may not capture the scale of what is happening now as solar and battery storage options become more attractive.
“Many people are sick of the grid, of the prices and the outages,” says Jerry Robinson, the head of installation company The Green House Effect. “When they do get the chance, even if it is a little bit dearer to go off the grid, they will take it.”
One of the most stunning exits has been this property above, in the heart of the Yarra Velley, just an hour’s drive from Melbourne, that had an average daily consumption of 190kWh before deciding they had had enough.
That consumption is around 10 times the average household, but it seems the owner, a business man who does not want to be identified, was sick of the regular outages; power was lost almost weekly because of some local network fault – and so he decided to look after his own energy needs.
A 46kW rooftop solar system has been installed, by Robinson’s team, on just about every bit of roof space available on sheds and car ports. (This photo above shows the planning, not the actual installation).
There is also 300kWh of lead acid batteries, but no back up generator, so the owner – who has already trimmed his average consumption to 100kWh through various efficiency measures, is determined to ride through.
“This guy has done it because he can,” says Glen Morris, from SolarQuip, who advised on the installation and sizing. (See this story for more on this property, and for photos of the actual installation and graphs of the output).
Morris says there is mixed bag of people leaving the grid –and a mixed bag of reasons. Some do it because of bushfire risk, some for independence, some because they are sick of outages, others to avoid smart meters and others to see money.
“In my area it costs at least $32,000 to connect a new home. For that money you can do modest stand alone system and for $40,000 to $50,000 you can have a very nice system, and you won’t pay any more bills.
This, of course, has implications – not for network owners and retailers, but also for the managers of the grid, and for other consumers.
The huge surge in the uptake of rooftop solar – installations are up 50 per cent from the same period last year – suggests that forecasts that up to half of all demand will be met by distributed energy resources – solar, batteries, and demand management – could be easily met.
The question becomes how many of these stay on the grid. The CSIRO and Energy Networks Association produced a report in 2016 that suggested one third of homes could quit the grid, in anger and frustration, if policies did not address high emissions and high costs.
Little has been done since, and it seems that the exodus is gathering speed, thanks to the increasing availability of battery storage options, and of course the continuing fall in solar prices. Many customers have simply had enough.
Trent Rogers from Northern Rivers Renewable Energy, based in northern NSW, says he has taken 30 customers off grid in this financial year.
“More and more people are getting very irate,” he says. “Some big customers have had enough. Some of them just want to save money. Some just want independence.
“Everyone is getting sick of it,” he said, and predicts more people going off grid if networks continue to jack up the daily service charge. In regional NSW, that amounts to $540 a year, just for the connection.
Rogers points not just to rising grid prices, but also new metering rules in regional NSW and the privatisation of meter reading.
For some customers in areas with no mobile phone reception, which means the smart meters can’t be read remotely, they face a charge of $45 per meter reading.
Others have a different reasons for avoiding smart meters. SolarQuip’s Morris says some don’t like the potential privacy intrusion. They are happy to have smart software in their own off-grid system, but not have others able to see what they do and when.
“For some it is environmental, for some it is financial, for some it is about charges. It’s a bit of everything to be honest with you,” Rogers says.
He also points to the demographic change. Baby boomers leaving the city, and pocketing extra money from the sale of Sydney real estate. Many want independence.
Others have no choice. One big bakery in Grafton can’t get enough supply from the grid, while most new buildings are better off installing their onw solar and storage systems rather than paying for a new conection.
“More people will go off the grid. The snowball has left the top of the hill. They can try and stop it, but bits of it (the snowball) will come off and they will keep rolling down the hill.
“It’s the only thing that keep me going. Otherwise I would throw my hands in my air.”
Robinson, from The Green House Effect, says the off-grid ambition is moving from smaller high efficiency houses to “normal” houses, and are including geothermal heat pumps, and underfloor heating.
“I don’t sell payback. I sell conscious and green and that kind of thing. Payback is not in my vocabulary,” Robinson says. But he notes the off-gridders are either green, or they have been quoted quoted $150,000 to install three poles and a transformer to connect to the grid.
“Ordinary people are doing it. They are sick of the grid, the prices and the outages. When they do get the chance, even if a little bit dearer to go off the grid, they will take it.”
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of One Step Off The Grid, and also edits and founded Renew Economy and The Driven. He has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.
This post was published on April 24, 2018 2:18 pm
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I wonder how many people live at that place with 190 kwhr a day consumption. In a modern complex with energy sharing, that would provide for 50 people.
Yeah, I can't get my head around that number 190kWh per day. What appliances are running to gobble up all that electricity.
I am at the other end of the scale, here in the Philippines. A near-constant temperature of 33 deg C means that two people use a fan each, day and night. LPG cooking, plus an electric rice cooker and electric jug. The refrigerator is labelled as consuming 0.5 kWh/day. No hot water necessary, as the tap water provides a good shower except for the first five seconds of thermal shock to the body. Our usage? 2.5 kWh/day.
A refrigerator rated 100 watts will consume 2.4 kwhr per day. Your electric load must be one 100 watt refrigerator only and that's all.
Of course the pump motor turns on and off, so the rated power is not the continuous or average power.
White Westinghouse HRM1708-DA 175 litres frig-freezer. Outside label says 363 energy efficiency factor and 0.53 kWh/24 hr. Rated power input 65 W. A few months old. My meter is not with me, so I accepted the label value.
I'll measure it, as I have a project 'on the shelf' to develop a very low power refrigerator. I think I can bring it down to a very small value.
Electricity is expensive in the Philippines, but discounted in steps below 100 kWh/month. Discount 100 % below 20 kWh/month - lifeline supply for the very poor. As the meter reading charge is not discounted then that is the price per month - 5 PhP = 13 cents Aussy.
umm .......let me think........ grow lights for tomatoes?
Ha, ha, ha.... I am a Tomato grower myself but only with 'Mr Natural' high above!
well i chew up 86kw per day .......not for nefarious reasons.......I run a cleaning company and we use the old fashioned grandma cleaning method........ everything is done with cloth nappies....so I have washing machines and dryers going day and night.......thus a $3k bill per quarter despite a 10 kw solar system!
Did you watch the NEM today? reckon we came close to a system BLACK! One of the old coaler must have chucked the shits........we in S.A. were even burning DIESEL to export to the other states.......our price in the last 30 min was minus $1000.00 so I guess the big battery made a killing!
Where are The COALition, The MOANash Forum & Rupert's newsrags on this piece of news..'.Intermittent and Unreliable Coalers' is the headline!
no where to be seen obviously!
please read giles reply to my post just above......Bastards
More price gouging...no surprise really.
It was a transmission fault. The gas generators piled in to gouge the market and there were so many of them they start to pay each other so they could cash in on the brief 5 minute spikes. You see same sort of thing at boarding school and deserts.
Thanks for the info giles!
wasn't going to write about it but might have to if the mainstream media gets silly.
FFS PLEASE DO! I've been watching it all day!
soz giles i wasn't edumicated in a private all boys school.....lol
Rob....more solar upstairs, if you have the space and spare $'s of course.
Done heaps of research Joe mate........but I need to build a huge new pergola to fit on another 20 Kw of solar plus the cost of the solar installation of course (TINDO) cos they are excellent and manufacture 10 km away from me, move to 3 phase and at least 2 or 3 tesla batteries = over $100k...... just can't afford the upfront cost ATM........But it could take me totally off grid..... office /workshop/home is all in 1...... jesus a hard decision! But I so want to do it!
You could always try and.... 'Holler for a Marshall' ? What is The Marshall RE Plan these days anyway. I live in Sydney and since ex-Premier Jay left the stage we hear nothing about SA and RE anymore.
sobbing now.......thanks for the reminder!
The article says that they have reduced their consumption to 100kwh per day through energy saving techniques - LEDs, insulation etc. That is the heart of the matter. It's only when you are generating your own power that you begin to conserve it.
Most Australian households and businesses could halve their consumption with a similar efficiency drive. By adding storage, load shedding and shifting, we could generate all the power we really need with half the installed capacity we already have.
True, before we installed our Hybrid/Off grid system, we left the ducted and installed 4 Fujitsu inverter splits, which saved in excess of 60% of power consumption over worst case scenario.
Hopefully we are included in those figures from 2016. I designed and built our 4 bedroom house to 8.5 star energy efficiency rating. We planned everything around going off-grid with an 11 kW solar system, 24 lead acid batteries and an 8 KVA backup diesel generator (which hardly ever gets used). Our consumption is about 30 kWHr per day, which saves about 11.6 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
The decision to go off-grid was aided by the avoidance of underground connection to the front of the block (at $20,000 this was about the same cost as the battery component) but the main motivation was to gain control of our expenditure on energy into our retirement. We could see what a nightmare the LNP energy fiasco was becoming and wanted no part of it. Anybody in a semi-rural environment (with room for a $5,000 generator) can now economically leave the grid. In an urban environment, hybrid solar and battery systems with smart controllers would be the preferred option. Particularly with the ability to pool excess electricity, the future of distributed energy generation among connected households appears to be the best way consumers can mitigate against the risk of being extorted by the oligopolies that dominate the electricity market.
$20,000 for 24 lead acid batteries!? Seems a lot? Have I misread it?
My 37kwh of battery cost me $12,500 wholesale, so $20k sounds about right for Paco's batteries. Good quality lead acid ain't cheap, but still cheaper than LI at this point in time.
But surely you wouldn't use 30kwh every day though?
Yes, that is our average for the past 12 months. The day before Christmas we used about 70 because we had lots of aircon on all day (it was 40 degrees) and the oven etc. We use pumps for drinking water and irrigation, we use a heat pump for hot water etc... The point is we designed the system specifically to support our lifestyle and it works exactly to spec. Our aim was to keep the inside of the house within a band of 20 to 24 degrees all day, all year. In our semi-rural area in Qld the main issue is keeping the heat out, so airconditioning accounts for a lot of our power usage. We hardly need to heat the house at all in winter, even though it gets down close to zero. Going off-grid in a well designed house means you don't have to live like a hillbilly and the cost premium up-front is not that significant.
No you don't have to rough it going off grid. 70kwh for one day is high, perhaps you have a ducted A/C, but you have it covered anyway.
FYI, I designed my system to go unplugged if needed, I design grid and off grid systems for a living, but because of 12.5cent/kwh FIT we are making money selling excess to the grid, speeding our pay back.
Our system is this: 9.3kw PV, 37kwh BAE Gel LA batteries, LPG gas for stove and oven use, cost $17/q. E.T. SHW completely free hot water for 357 days p.a. 4 x Fujitsu split A/C's. 2 x fridges and a freezer, plus the usual dish washer, 3 x TV's, dryer and water pump.
On the 7/1/18, we had a nasty 45c day with a hot westerly blowing, all our A/C's running all day and 2 into the night. In fact it was 38c at 8pm, 37c at 11pm. PV produced 54.2kwh, sold 9kwh to grid, consumed 45.2kwh and that so far has been the worst.
28/3/18 32c, produced 45.6kwh, sold 25.2kwh to grid and consumed 20.4kwh. Not as much A/C used, but I think we do pretty damn well and not using the grid at all!
wait until the desertions become a flood then the market take notice
Let us hope that it won't be too late to create a sensible shared grid, which would be much more reliable and half the cost.
A sensible shared grid would mean a financial benefit to the ratepayer.
To date the net metering wars in the US is a class war on the working classes.
Americans are only beginning to understand the company store that they have been shackled to.
This movement cannot happen fast enough for true progressive advancement to most societies.
The bottom line for investors is not the only life for the majority of earth's inhabitants.
If anyone with a good FIT and a stable supply, plenty of solar and battery, goes off grid, they have got rocks in their head, however if they need the energy of the nearest black hole, having a grid connection won't be a help, unless the get a generators license.
190kwh/day WTF?
WHAT IS THE REALITY OF THE REALTY?
The true number of urban off-gridders may be being kept hidden from public view. I suspect that urban off-gridders having gotten their sparky to cut the conduit between meter and switchboard, having installed a reg-compliant LV feed from their new inverter, perhaps the NMI does not get extinguised in the great big AEMO database, despite a formal request having been made in writing. The DNSPs know who has gone off-grid, but are they pretending to the world that it didn't happen? i.e. the dwellings appear to be grid-connected in the NMI (e.g. untenanted, disconnected) but the reality of the realty is that they are refugees from the grossly overpriced monopoly poles and wires. Secondarily do DNSPs get paid something based on an inflated number of residences apparently serviced by mains electricity?