In the last 20 years, Florida has had the most people per capita impacted by power outages — more than 900,000. In 2022.”
Lately, California, Texas, and Pennsylvania have been making the news for grid unreliability. Most power outages are caused by storms, earthquakes, lightning strikes; those are the usual suspects. Increasingly other factors are coming into play. Cyber-attacks, equipment failures, and overloads are new factors to consider. Brownouts are now a thing.
Ever wonder why power companies encourage their customers to go solar? It seems counterintuitive, right? It’s like a Ford dealer recommending Chevy. What do they know that we don’t? They know that the grid is being asked for more than it can deliver. As more people flee to Florida from other states with harsher weather, less beaches and theme parks, and unfavorable politics, the demand on our grid is increased. Every family that goes solar decreases that demand. We think power companies in Florida are planning for a future where the grid is not capable of meeting demand.
It seems like every other news story we hear about the GWoT (Global War on Terror), someone mentions how nukes are not necessary because the US electric grid is so vulnerable. We don’t know the specifics on what it would take to take down the grid, but those that do claim to be concerned. They use words like “crippling” and “devastating” and say horrible things about the population after nine months without electricity.
Electric equipment, the wires, transformers, towers, etc. that get electricity from the source to our homes, fails. Some of it is decades old. As long as one piece at a time fails, it’s not a huge deal. Those affected are inconvenienced for the time it takes the power company to get out there and fix it, but it’s typically not a newsworthy event. What if more of it failed at the same time. It’s all the same age (roughly) and some of it is already failing. We suspect that if that ever happens, it will take a while to fix, and we’ll hear about it on the news, on our little hand crank radios as we hunker down and try to avoid the rioting hordes of looters.
So, are you scared? Have we shattered your peace of mind? Maybe we were trying to, just a little. Some people call us and mention these same concerns. Maybe you had them even before we mentioned it to you, you just didn’t know what to do about it. We don’t like to shatter peace of mind without being able to put it back together. There is a solution.
Five years ago, if someone wanted to have power if the grid went down, we recommended a generator. The problem with that was that we don’t sell generators. We just couldn’t, in good conscience, recommend batteries and solar, which we do sell, to them at the prices that battery manufacturers were charging for batteries that didn’t do much. The juice was not worth the squeeze. That has changed. Battery technology has advanced, and the prices have come down. Today, we wonder how the generator industry is going to stay in business.
Let’s talk about three different kinds of battery utilization.
1. Solar Generator
This is basically a silent generator that puts off no carbon monoxide. It is a battery, hooked up to solar panels, that is big enough to run the essentials for twenty-four hours and recharges fully in the four to six hours of usable sunshine there is in a day.
Downsides are that you will have to be selective about what qualifies as “essential” just like with a traditionally fueled generator. Small systems can handle things like a fridge, a few lights, a fan. Bigger systems can handle all that and your AC and washer and dryer. Price will correspond to how much you want to keep running during a grid down situation.
Upsides are that they require no fuel other than sunshine. When the grid is down, fuel gets scarce. If the power is down at your place, it’s probably down at the gas stations too. No power to get the gas out of the ground. Long lines if they find a work-a-round.
No fumes. Every outage there are stories about carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator run indoors or too close to a window. No risk of that with a solar generator.
There is no pull-start on a solar generator. You turn it on and off with a button. There is a gauge to tell you how much power you are using, and how much you have left. Some can be automated, so they come on automatically if the grid flickers.
2. Backup Batteries
Back-up Batteries. This is for homes that have 100% offset or more in solar panels. That means they produce all the electricity they need with solar and feed it back into the grid to fully offset their consumption bill. They have batteries, enough to run the essentials or their whole home, they get to pick, and the panels fully charge them every day they are needed. The batteries only come into play when the grid goes down.
3. Continuous Consumption Batteries
Continuous Consumption Batteries. This set-up pulls all the power the home needs from the batteries. If too many cloudy days in a row deplete them due to the solar array not fully recharging them, then the system uses grid power as a last resort. These are popular in states like California that allows the power companies to sell electricity at a high rate but buy it from solar overproducers at a low rate. If you want to take a deeper dive into the legislation affecting this, google “Net Metering” and then see they are considering ending it in Florida.
So, these are the three most common uses for batteries. The technology is good. They make batteries that will run your entire home that click on so fast after a power outage you won’t even have to reset your clocks. They are less expensive than whole house generators and cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, and easier to operate.
There are other uses. Nomads and off-gridders are also outfitting their van-homes and homesteads with batteries. Campers are converting to glampers. Beachgoers are taking portable batteries to power their refrigerated coolers, play their radios, and recharge their phones and tablets. Because battery technology has advanced and the price has dropped, electricity is now portable.
Unlike solar, batteries do not “pay for themselves” in dollars and cents. They are an added out-of-pocket expense to a solar system. However, they do provide peace of mind. Remember how we shattered that earlier? If you have ever been without power for a significant amount of time you may have, like many people, reached a point where electricity was worth any amount of money just to feel your AC kick back on. If you, or a family member, relied on electricity to keep medication refrigerated or a medical device functioning, electricity can be priceless. In that way, batteries can and do pay for themselves in avoided frustration and danger for us and our loved ones.
Now, if you decide to have batteries installed on your home, you will have some choices about how you want to be a battery owner when the grid fails. You can be the way ahead of the Jones’s type that smugly walks around in his air-conditioned home and smirks at the neighbors. You can watch them wearing themselves out trying to pull start their gas generator in the Florida heat. They haven’t touched it since the last storm, so the remnants of bad gas are struggling to find a spark. For extra fun, offer them a cold drink. Give them some of our cards, please.
Or you might be the benevolent neighbor who opens your home to your less prepared fellow citizens. Maybe you let them put their medication in your fridge, their spoiling food in your freezer, and take a shower every couple of days. You have peace of mind and choose to share. It’s an option and those are good to have. When they come get their stuff back, please give them cards too.
So, we’ll end how we started. What is peace of mind worth to you? When the grid goes dark is not the time to start shopping for solar or batteries. You want them to be installed professionally and be functioning well before anything happens. Guess what? It might not even be an option for you. Solar will not work on every property. It’s better to know this ahead of time so other arrangements can be made. Know what it costs to find out?
Well, that’s free. Call us. We’ll ask you for your last twelve months of kWh consumption. (You can get that from your power company.) That tells us how much electricity your solar panels need to produce, and how much electricity storage (Batteries) you will need. We’ll design the system for you and give you an initial quote. We look forward to hearing from you.
