It grew organically so there was never a huge cost
Really, except when we decided to build a building for
The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.
The total cost of the system so far is about $87k, and operating cost is around 4000 a year (includes equipment amortisation, slow expansion, direct operating costs). In all, for several homes, and a farm it’s very affordable. Getting power hooked up to a single house from the utilities is about $9000, so our buildout is roughly 2x what we might have spent just to get hooked up to the grid.
We do buy carefully, and all the engineering is done by me. We have employees on the farm so much of the labor of installing underground cable etc was “free” (lol).
Still, we are miles ahead of our costs if we were hooked up to the grid (which also would have cost us an additional $20k just for poles to get close, and we still would have had to bury the cables on campus along with the water and data, if we didn’t want ugly poles all over, so that part is a wash)
I spend about 4 hours a week on utilities based projects, mostly engineering monitoring and control systems so that I spend less time working on the utilities. (So, futzing around with electronics because I have an excuse to) it feels like meaningful work that I care about, so that’s nice.
That sounds incredible. This is the first year I've really started digging deep into solar generation and battery storage and it's one big fascinating rabbit hole.
I've looked at it from a bunch of different angles and keep coming to the conclusion that for rural and suburban areas with the space for panels, off-grid solar is the future.
Thank you so much for these posts! It makes me very optimistic about the future.
For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines, hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me we have a path out of this mess.
Rant your stupid “drill baby drill” crap all you want magats, we are going to solar, wind, and fusion our way to a better world, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.
That’s silly, why make it political? If anything the political encroachment came from the green crowd first, cafe standards, EV mandates and the like.
The best way forward has always been to explore all energy avenues, and that will include fossil fuels as well. At least you’ve included nuclear, but left out fission, strangely, which is the best hope of electric generation replacement we currently have.
I’m tired of this team blue for electric (except Tesla now, lol) and team red for oil. They are choices with trade offs, and are friends, not enemies.
No offence, but everything is political. Much of our lives are controlled by laws. These laws are all politically controlled. To say it's silly to make something political, usually suggests your supported political slant is difficult to justify. Trade offs are only possible when the party in charge is willing to work with EVERYONE, we don't have that now. Thus the criticism.
Fission first! Let's build more nuclear power plants too. We know how to do it, and it's only so expensive because we got scared and stopped. Economies of scale for clean, safe, reliable baseload power.
What I've done is tap into an existing fission reactor. It's some distance from my house, but there's a lot of excess energy there leaking out. I put up some collectors to capture it.
Was really quite cheap to do, and I don't have to pay anyone to actually run the reactor.
I don't know if you were being ironic or not but... that's an absolute truth. Our free time doesn't have a fixed rate. It doesn't have a rate at all. What you do during free time can be basically seen as either:
* a chore you don't like to do
* something you like to do.
Any task can swing between those states depending on your mood. If installing your own solar plant or self-host your server rack (as OP is doing) is something you enjoy doing, then yes, it costs exactly $0 in labor.
Agreed. I get asked to repair electronics for people quite often and I charge drastically differently for labor depending on whether I will enjoy the job or not.
How much are you valuing your own time? Theres money cost, then theres time cost and the final one is in more remote communities with cold weather… insurance costs on failure…
Also to be clear - good on you for building out rural off grid electrical. Its a fun project and satisfying no doubt (outaide of costa)
I don’t know the OP’s situation but I’ve seen that many coffee growers have to do this because in high altitude tropical areas there is simply no one who will do the work anyway. They also have a very different regulatory structure in practice to what we have in the continental US and Europe.
I’ve spoken to people from Rural Georgia (which is about an hour from Atlanta depending on the direction you’re driving) in Microcenter that are usually there to wire up their farm or factory with sufficient network capacity to keep production rolling. They have mentioned that they have had to do their own trenching for last mile for various services. Sometimes that means they literally drive down to Herc rentals, pick up a trenching machine, and do it themselves since the wait for someone else to do it is months away and that’s a long time if your business needs internet, water, power, etc.
It’s been an adventure, but it would be disingenuous to imply that a don’t enjoy the challenge. It is very satisfying to have your work be so useful to many people. As for failure, we have them sometimes, but our casualty downtime for the last 6 years is <15 minutes. We have a highly redundant system that can run on as few as 2 of the 6 inverters, 8 separate battery banks, 16 separate panel banks with 9 separate charge controllers, 2 generators, and a completely separate redundant inverter for emergency power, as well as a separate power reserve system for control and monitoring power.
