Off the Grid

Back in the 1980’s my mother moved to the coastal mountains of northern California – a place that was very much off the grid. Homes were few and far between. Minimum lot sizes were 20 acres and more. The clay roads were rugged – unpaved and undrivable for weeks at a time if there was rain or snow – and no one had electricity or running water. Some people built wells that hit water 30 feet down. Others dug 800 feet and were still dry. At first, we would drive into town and fill five-gallon buckets at the drinking fountain in the park to use at home. Eventually, we were able to clean out a cistern and have water trucked in to use for our toilets and shower. We bought drinking water from a neighbor’s spring.

But electricity was another issue. Everyone had a different solution. Some had tiny windmills. Others had mini water wheels that worked in ephemeral streams in the cooler months but dried up in summer.

We chose solar panels that would be mounted on a rack on the hillside next to the house and would charge half a dozen 12-volt batteries under the house. A manual inverter which had to be carefully watched would convert the 12-volt DC power to work on our 110-volt AC appliances and lights. And when there wasn’t enough power in the batteries we had to manually switch over to a gas generator. They wouldn’t even install the solar panels without a generator and I had to build the generator shed with manual tools because we had no power.

All this was backed up by good quality wood stoves for heat, a 1950’s era kerosene refrigerator, and lots of kerosene lamps. Needless to say, when I contemplated putting solar panels on my roof in West Virginia, my expectations didn’t exactly match modern reality.

The first time I talked to solar contractors in West Virginia was at an Earth Day celebration. They came and looked at my house and told me to forget it. They only put panels on rooftops nowadays – not in the yard – and my house didn’t have enough sun exposure to power modern electrical needs. I sighed. And I waited.

I kept seeing advertisements, and when the Inflation Reduction Act made installing solar panels much cheaper, I tried again. In November 2022, I had another company look at my house. They wanted to replace my roof and then cover every possible surface with panels to cover the high electric bills, but this was too much money. I couldn’t do it.

I told them my kids had moved out with all their energy intensive toys and I had stopped heating my barn, so we could go with 30% fewer panels. That made the price reasonable. Then I told them I needed it completed in three months, because I was planning to retire and I would be out of town after that. They promised they could do that. Boy were they wrong.

West Virginia isn’t exactly a green friendly place. Despite this company’s claim that they worked all over the state, they didn’t know how to deal with our special problems. Permit after permit was rejected, because they didn’t know how to fill out WV’s special forms and they weren’t accepted until I went in to the permit office myself. Then there was the fight with the power company over who had to pay to modernize the neighborhood transformer which is a box on the telephone pole down the block from my house that hadn’t been updated in decades. Modern equipment was needed to deal with solar energy being generated. Then there’s the fact that West Virginia doesn’t pay for solar credits because they don’t want to encourage green energy, so deal had to be made to sell my solar credits to Ohio.

It took until February 2024 to get my solar panels on my new roof, and another three months before I was able to get the power company to install special meters that could count how much power I generated and how much power I used separately. This was needed because I wasn’t getting batteries or a generator, and any excess power that I generated would be sent back to the grid for someone else to use.

Meanwhile, if my solar panels were covered in snow, I would get electricity from the power company. And all this would happen automatically. No manual checks of the inverter. No starting the generator. No worrying about aging batteries. Actually, no active effort on my part at all.

My solar powered house works like any other house that’s on the grid. I use power when I need it and lose it when a tree falls on the power lines (as it occasionally does around here). I have a brand-new roof that should last 50 years, and solar panels that will outlast the 20 years I will be paying for them. My electric bills are $6 per month (for administrative costs for the power company) and I get back anywhere from $25 to $250 for my solar credits depending on how much the sun shines.

In winter, when the is less sunlight, I use more electricity than I generate. I pay for this extra usage with the power I generated in summer, and when that gets used up, I pay regular rates. For the entire winter combined last year I paid about $300, but before I had solar my bills sometimes topped $700 in a single month. The sale of my solar credits to Ohio more than covered my winter bills.

It was about 18 months from beginning to end putting solar panels on my house – a very long slog with many troubles along the way. Financially, it was well worth it. My monthly payments for my new roof and solar panels are way below what my average monthly cost for electricity alone used to be. The solar company says this system increases the value of the house by about $100,000.

Emotionally, it’s also worth it. I didn’t get a battery pack that would allow me to have power when the grid goes down, but I also don’t get any of the hassles of having a battery and generator. I know that my costs will be stable over the next few decades when fossil energy prices fluctuate. And best of all, I have the peace of mind of knowing that I am doing the best thing I can to protect the environment. Solar energy makes me feel good.

Jenny Thacker