As #ClimateChange and extreme weather bump against decaying infrastructure, personal energy resilience becomes an increasing concern. I've been working at this for my own home the last four years. Here's the advice I wish I'd gotten.
If you have outages more than once a year, start with a generator. Of all your options, it has the lowest initial cost and works at all times of day and in all seasons.
For a fraction of the cost of a standby generator install, you can get a really nice portable inverter.
I use this model from Duromax and it has been awesome. Inverter means clean, 60Hz power that will not damage your sensitive electronic equipment. It can be powered with propane, which is much easier to store and transfer than gasoline, which is also just a disgusting substance.
If your home has a propane tank, it's cheap to add an outlet (called a BBQ box)
You're also going to need an electrician to install a power inlet and hardware that prevents your generator from feeding back into the grid (interlock).
For an order of magnitude more cash, you can add battery backup. This is much pricier, but it's pretty neat: the right model can charge from the grid, from the generator, and from solar panels.
Fuck Elon Musk, there are options besides Powerwall. I ended up with a Sonnen Eco, and it has worked great. Sadly, the company was bought by Shell.
Part of the upside of battery working in concert with a generator is that you can run the generator much more sparingly. The battery system can charge pretty quickly relative to how fast it discharges, if you're careful about your loads.
Even an inverter generator is loud, so the battery gives a bit more of a sense of "normal" during an outage, reducing the sanity hit you take from these disruptions.
This is especially valuable for keeping your boiler/furnace and lights running at night.
The last and perhaps most expensive component of your grid resiliency infrastructure is your green power supply. Solar is most common, but has limitations based on time of day and length of day. It's a real crapshoot during winter, and especially during stormy winter weather, which can leave clouds behind (this is why you should start with a generator if resiliency is your goal)
Residential turbines are starting to come into the picture, but I don't have any experience there.
Still, a decently beefy solar investment can do miracles, especially for outages in warmer months.
With the grid online, your solar can fully offset your cooling. The same sun that's baking your house is also hitting your panels.
With the grid OFFLINE, you can have enough energy to fully run your cooling, which is again huge for sanity. A power outage that also leaves you deeply, physically uncomfortable just wrecks your morale and the consequences can really last.
Solar is the hardest part of this to price because you've got all kinds of fly-by-night scam operations trying to foist their bullshit on you
Generally: find your energy bill and learn the cost you pay per kWh. Your installer quote will tell you how much your system will generate in a year. Knock off 10% from that, then divide the kWh per year into the cost of the financing per year (amortized over 20 years)
If it's lower than you pay the energy company, great. If not, find another quote.
There are other factors, like how much credit you can get sending energy back to the grid, which will further complicate the economics. These vary dramatically by jurisdiction, so I can't help you too much there.
Still, part of the upside of solar is that you’re locking in your energy costs for the life of the panels, around 20 years. Your energy company is certain to increase their rates several times over that period.
It’s common with battery/solar setups to have a “critical loads" panel. This ensures that you don't drain your battery running loads that you can live without in an outage, especially if it happens while you're away
But if you want to use heat pumps, for example, with your system, you might want yet a third panel that you can transfer between grid and battery power.
Alternatively, if your system is supported, you can use something more cutting edge:
Now, my FANTASY is using all my excess solar generation to create and store hydrogen, and an electric generator that runs on hydrogen
But we're not there yet, and maybe it wouldn’t even be practical
Still, battery is nice but I hate its price/performance. There has to be a better way. As ever across my lifetime, we await a breakthrough in energy storage.
@danilo community pumped-storage hydro is where it’s at! Anything that is going to be sufficiently energy-dense to provide a viable solution for residential installations is also going to be a safety nightmare. These giant potential lithium bombs we have strapped to our houses are bad enough, but “we will inflate the Hindenburg under your house every day and then set it on fire at night to keep your lights on” does not feel better :-)
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