Planning on going fully solar and wind on an off-grid property in my old age.
I understand the desire completely, though I suspect that being grid-tied is cheaper in most locations:
- wind is a lot cheaper with bigger turbines, which don’t make sense for individuals (though community ownership would be reasonable)
- grid-tied systems are a lot cheaper than fully disconnected ones in most locations, and need a lot less storage, since they move electricity from where the sun shines or the wind blows to where people are
Though while you save some in upfront costs, you loose out on the benefit of eliminating an ongoing cost thanks to still requiring a connection. Given how solar and battery prices continue to drop, it’s likely they will eventually hit the point where it may be cheaper with inflation to buy now and save later when it comes to retirement.
It’s not just the upfront savings; it’s that it takes truly huge amounts of storage to deal with intermittency in one location. You need a lot less storage in the aggregate if you can move power from one location to another. This makes systems where almost everybody is connected cheaper for society as a whole.
You need less on a social scale if everyone is interconnected obviously, but at the individual level it may well cost more. People were doing household scale off grid with a pile lead acid for decades after all.
Households don’t necessarily need that much power, and while heat pumps change that up north in the winter, when it comes to modern day solar off grid you often use two to three times the inverting capacity worth of panel, precisely because it allows for reliable near full power generation on cloudy or snowy days.
I’ve lived with one of those systems:
- it didn’t use the electricity for heating, cooling, refrigeration, water heating, or cooking
- It was 12v electricity, so you had to have specialized lighting and other appliances to use it
- you tended to have limited electricity available in the winter
It’s not the same as the almost-always-available situation that people expect.
So have I, and nowadays it very much is almost always available situation people expect, even for fully electrified homes. PV paneling cheaper per square m than fencepost plus being able to store a full weeks worth of average amarican home consumption for 20k of new battery have combined to make generatorless off grid a lot more practical.
Yes, if you’re not running HVAC in a northern climate. Those use enough electricity that grid-connection is incredibly valuable.
You forgot to mentioned being grid tied also enables the use off excess energy. Being off grid can be a waste.
