We’re an average family doing everyday things. The only difference between your morning and ours is that you’re probably pulling your power from the grid. We’re not.
Let me tell you about my morning.
I got up, turned the bathroom light and fan on, had a shower, dried my hair and then used the straightening iron to get rid of the annoying kinks. Bedroom and hallway lights went on before I fired up the oil heater in my daughter’s room, which is always quite chilly in winter despite the insulating layer of boy band posters on the wall.
I stoked the fire and put the fan on, Red Symons started squawking from the radio, the microwave pinged as three bowls of porridge were cooked, a load of washing went on and the fridge opened and closed a dozen or so times while I made school lunches.
Now, I won’t continue to bore you with the minutiae of our typical weekday routine because I’m sure you get enough of that from your more annoying Facebook friends.
The point I’m trying to make is that we’re an average family doing everyday things. The only difference between your morning and ours is that you’re probably pulling your power from the grid.
Generally, when I tell people that our family-sized, 38 square home in semi-rural Little River, west of Melbourne, is completely solar powered, they think I mean we feed power back into the grid. Others, once I’ve explained that we have no physical grid connection, don’t quite believe it’s possible to have total freedom from energy costs.
And, strictly speaking, it’s not. But it is possible to have freedom from energy companies.
In 2012 when we started to build on the 17 acres we’d purchased in Little River six years earlier, it marked the start of our off-grid adventure. We’d spent considerable time trying to find an alternative to a grid connection quote upwards of $30,000 for a new power pole, 400 metres of trenching, conduit and cabling with the added cost of ongoing quarterly power bills.
The answer lay in 30 shiny PV panels (total of 5.5kW), a main AC switchboard Selectronic SP Pro 7kW inverter charger, a Kaco 6002 5kW inverter and a 24 cell 48v flooded lead acid (FLA) battery bank.
It’s a beautiful thing, this grouping of parts and components that, when connected as a whole, creates a perfectly serviceable personal power station. For me, helping to lug each battery cell into place in our garage – literally, a tonne of weight in total – it represented a lifestyle I wanted and that other people tell me they dream of.
But before I get carried away with rose-tinted poetic musings of energy autonomy, I must explain that this off grid goodness isn’t for everyone.
Our system cost $60,090, with around $7500 in government rebates for selling our renewable energy certificates (RECs) so someone else could pollute with impunity. Not ideal, but hey, a mortgage is a mortgage.
I consider people like my family and others in Australia to be the off-grid solar guinea pigs. And not tie-dye wearing, dread-locked guinea pigs either. The off-gridders I’ve spoken to are business suit-wearing teachers, civil servants, builders, engineers and journalists and I’m yet to hear any of them say they’ve compromised their lifestyle to live this way.
While off-grid isn’t yet viable for most, here’s my two cents worth; despite the damage our federal government is doing to the renewables sector, the cost of storage will eventually reduce enough for all those people dreaming of freedom from energy companies. We’ll see an explosion in consumers rethinking their energy consumption and their reliance on the grid.
Whether this takes the form of stand alone systems or community based storage banks, the future of affordable off-grid living is now being shaped. And I look forward to you joining us.
Emma Sutcliffe blogs about her family’s experiences at www.theoffgridsolarhouse.com
Originally published on RenewEconomy.
This post was published on March 11, 2015 4:52 pm
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Our power bill is around $150 per month in the NW suburbs of Melbourne. Considering your system costs $60k, that would take us around 33 years to pay off if we went off grid? And surely you'd have to replace equipment before then? I just don't see the numbers adding up if you're already grid connected.
Hey John - no, the numbers don't add up...yet. But considering the same system I installed in 2012 at $60k would now cost around $45k (assuming the same rebate) and the tech is moving so rapidly forward, it won't be long. Viva la energy revolution!
"Viva la energy revolution" is going to be a slow grind unless engineers, journalists and installers primarily focus on approaches and solar systems all of us can step into, to get that one-step-off-the-grid.
And it'll be interesting to see how that shapes up - end of street communal battery banks or individual inside-the-garage systems? But I do feel concern for lower income earners and renters for whom the cost will be prohibitive and who might get caught by utilities charging more to prop up their failing profits as energy storage becomes large scale.
Hi Emma, end of street communal battery banks sound fantastic. The more local electrons stay the better for less resistance on their travels, less transformer loses, less thick copper, less maintenance on expensive networks and so on and on. Yes I'd like to see the tenancy act in each state change so there are no double standards on how Landlord's and Tenants live, hence Tenants be provided with contemporary energy efficiency standards and a basic amenity of solar power. If people don't want to do this, care equally for others, I think they should not own houses rented to others. I agree with you, I'm concerned too and my view is history will favour the local electron and that's best for the earth. It is not always easy retrofitting old houses and yet there's no excuse. If people cannot afford to, they need to downsize into something they can reasonably live in, without damage to the earth, and people definitely need to sell their rental properties if they have no intention of maintaining them fairly for others.
Hi Emma, end of street communal battery banks sound fantastic. The more local electrons stay the better for less resistance on their travels, less transformer loses, less thick copper, less maintenance on expensive networks and so on and on. Yes I'd like to see the tenancy act in each state change so there are no double standards on how Landlord's and Tenants live, hence Tenants be provided with contemporary energy efficiency standards and a basic amenity of solar power. If people don't want to do this, care equally for others, I think they should not own houses rented to others. I agree with you, I'm concerned too and my view is history will favour the local electron and that's best for the earth. It is not always easy retrofitting old houses and yet there's no excuse. If people cannot afford to, they need to downsize into something they can reasonably live in, without damage to the earth, and people definitely need to sell their rental properties if they have no intention of maintaining them fairly for others. My house has been rented the majority of the time I have owned it and the last seven years I have added solar hot water, roof insulation, ceiling fans, 22kL water tank, induction cooktop, 100% LED lights, skylight, efficient reverse cycle split system air-conditioning, spinaways and interior ceiling vents, and repainted the roof a light colour. For me, the solar system parts I've just purchased for $8741 ($7821 after rebate) are a year of solid savings. When I fit them, they will power the house fairly autonomously in summer (5.5kW/hr daily electricity usage) and transition the house to off-peak rates in winter.
Hi Emma, your going to be in a similar boat to myself, that the Powerwall is the wrong voltage for our Inverter/Chargers. With your Selectronic running at 48V, this gives you a choice of AGL powerlegato (48V), Akasol NeeoQube (48V). The other choice is continue on as we've always done over the last 40 years or more, by simply getting 12V batteries and assembling them in series and parallel for the desired voltage. For you that's 4x 12V = 48V. There are Lithium batteries around if you wished to switch to those. Fusion (3 year warrantee) and Victron (2 year warranty) have lithium batteries on eBay and there's a very cheap Chinese brand called Sinopoly (1 year warranty). Not allot of choice at present. There may also need to be a BMS (battery management system) purchased for some of those.
Just thought I'd mention this, as allot of us can't easily swap over to the vastly different voltage of the Powerwall (350-450V). It would mean buying another inverter/charger when we have perfectly good ones and also perhaps rewiring the solar panels, e.g. to get the higher minimum input voltage that the http://www.fronius.com inverters like. The current Fronius Symo, that has been put forward for mods to work with the Powerwall, currently has a model with a minimum input voltage of 150V to get the MPPT going and another has a minimum of 200V to get the MPPT going. The new specs are not really published though the situation isn't looking good for people already with solar systems, changing over to the Powerwall, as Tesla seem to be inventing their own high voltage battery bank.
No different to the Tesla Wall; both lack quick charge / discharge rates. C/3 on the LG with a peak of 110A only gives you 110 / 3 ~ 37A * 50V ~ 1.8kW. I am running a Selectronic 7.5kW, 2x KACO and 12kW in panels; using an average of 15-20kWh per day on a 20kW LiFePO battery run down to a SoC of 30% if required, thus providing 14kWh during non-sunshine hours... I charge this battery at 100A in 3 hours.
It's a fantastic state of the art system. There are ways to get the price down:
a) The inverter/charger is one of the biggest costs and there's smaller models like 3kW, 4.5kW, 5kW that Selectronic also make. If your thinking that's not enough output power for my kettle, toaster and hotplate to run at once, Selectronic provides a backup feature where the inverter/charger can drag an extra 15kW from the grid. I've seen the 3kW (plus 15kW grid) Selectronic on eBay for $4.6k. Selectronic is also perhaps the most highly engineered Australian industry leader.
b) 1500W of good solar panels are now about $1.5k and that's enough for this house in summer with a 5.5kW usage on the previous electricity bill.
c) batteries are cheaper. I found a site called http://www.everybattery.com.au and used them as a starting point before talking to installers, so I knew the rough price when getting quotes.
The hybrid solar system here costs $7821 after the government rebate. That's with me running cables then the electrician will do the final connections. Every step up in solar generation, inverter power and storage costs extra, then again most good inverter/chargers are designed to have others of their mates added later.
Hear what you're saying, but we didn't have the technical capability to put this system together, so the costs of having it professionally designed have to be considered in our total cost. But yes, I'm hoping the batteries will cost about twenty bucks to replace in 7-12 years time!
Hi Emma, what I hear you implicitly acknowledging, is the batteries are the biggest part of the cost. I agree. A far easier goal is using the batteries for a Hybrid Solar System to:
A) for emergency backup in a power outage,
B) transition the house to off peak electricity rates (here 13.4 cents/kWhr from 10pm).
Like yourself, this gives families some power in their relationship with utilities. Whereas you have the ultimate power to turn the electricity meter off, for many families reducing the majority of their electricity with solar panels and reducing how much they pay for any remaining public electricity, is an extremely exciting goal towards their empowerment and freedom. The big challenge for people in your position is having enough batteries, so you have to doubly oversize your battery storage for winter as compared to summer, and additionally you have to doubly oversize your battery storage for five days of cloud in winter compared to one sunny winter day.
So people don't get disheartened, they need achievable goals within reach now - to give hope. Solar is already viable for small systems for less than a ten year payback, if people organise their appliances to use some power during the day and use a modest amount of batteries to progress themselves from dusk to off peak electricity rates.