Alternative Energy So Your Home Can Go Off the Grid

The trend toward homes that get power from alternative energy, sources, ranging from turbines and solar collection cells to hydrogen fuel cells and biomass gases, is one that must continue into the 21st century and beyond. We have great need of getting more energy independent, and not being forced to depend on the supplying of fossil fuels from unsteady countries who are commonly hostile to us and our interests.

But even beyond this factor, we as individuals need to get off the grid, and also stop having to be so dependent upon government-lobbying giant oil firms who, while they are not truly concerned in any covert conspiracy, nevertheless have a stranglehold on folks when it comes to heating their homes ( and if not thru oil, then heat sometimes supplied by grid-driven electricity, another stranglehold ).

As Remi Wilkinson, Senior researcher with Carbon Free, places it, unavoidably, the expansion of distributed generation will lead on to the restructuring of the retail electricity market and the generation, transmission and distribution framework. The power providers might need to diversify their business to make up for earnings lost thru household energy microgeneration.

She is making reference to the conclusions by a group of UK researchers, herself included among them, who call themselves Carbon Free. Carbon Free has been studying the ever-growing trend toward alternative energy-using homes in Britain and the West. This trend is being driven by ever-more government recommendation and sometimes backing of alternative energy research and development, the rising cost of oil and other normal fuels, concern about environmental degradation, and wants to be energy independent.

Carbon Free concludes that, assuming traditional energy costs stay at their present level or rise, microgeneration ( meeting all of one’s home’s energy needs by installing alternative energy technology like solar cells or turbines ) will become to home energy supply what the internet became to home communications and information gathering, and eventually this could have deep effects on the enterprises of the present energy supply corporations.

Carbon Free’s analyses also show that energy corporations themselves have jumped in on the game and seek to leverage microgeneration to their own advantage for opening up new markets for themselves. Carbon Free cites the example of electricity firms ( in the UK ) reporting they are seriously researching and developing ideas for new geothermal energy facilities, as these firms see geothermal power production as a highly worthwhile wave of the future.

Another conclusion of Carbon Free is that solar electricity hot water heating technology is a productive technology for reducing home water heating costs in the longer term, although it is initially quite dear to install. But solar electricity isn’t yet cost-effective for firms, as they need too much in the way of specialised plumbing to effect solar electricity hot water heating.

Ultimately, Carbon Free tells us that installing turbines is an efficient way of reducing home electricity costs, while also being more independent. But again this is at first a very costly thing to have installed, and firms would do well to begin chopping their costs on these devices or they could find themselves losing share of the market.

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