Looking for Our Energy Independence Day: Setting ourselves free from the grid
by ROBIN DUTTA
It’s natural around July 4th to think about one’s own independence. Not strictly in the governance-sense (we already threw that tea overboard), but more in personal and economic terms. How free and independent are we in our daily lives? Can we fully support our families? Can we live and have fun? And how tenuous is that independence and security?
We definitely feel trapped and captive if we don’t have energy to power our days and nights. Your home is primarily or all-electric. Heating, cooling, refrigeration, internet, and perhaps also sanity is powered or maintained by electricity. In the past, running out of gas on the road would make you feel powerless. Increasingly, the worry is whether your electric vehicle is out of charge. If your house is in the middle of a power outage, you cannot charge your EV. That outage could also close schools and businesses, leaving you in a powerless home trying to help your family survive. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) already warned that two-thirds of the United States are at elevated risk for power outages if higher than expected temperatures cause extremely high electric demand. So, this isn’t idle thought.
Having unaffordable energy will also make you feel trapped. If you are dealing with a heat wave, air conditioning is a necessity, and you know your wallet will be held captive to your electric bill. If you are lucky, you can still pay that spiking bill. If you work one or more minimum wage jobs, you may already struggle to pay that electric bill. Energy costs represent double the percentage of take-home pay for low- and moderate-income households compared to higher income families. The cool air from those AC units doesn’t bring that much comfort, or security.
That’s where we are now. We have an electric grid that is increasingly unaffordable, lacks resiliency, and suffers from poor reliability. Those flaws are passed on to consumers in the form of higher bills, dirtier energy and weakened national security.
We only have energy independence if we have the real choice to decide how we get our electricity. Otherwise, we have to take the price and service we are given. If all we can choose is power from the electric grid produced by far-away power plants, we don’t have energy independence. If our electricity is prone to outage and we have no back-up, we don’t have energy independence. And, if geo-political conflicts between Russia and Ukraine can cause natural gas supply shortages that spike our electric bills, we don’t really have energy independence.
So how do you get energy independence at home? First things first, you need to relieve the burden caused by your faulty and failing electric grid. That grid is the source of rising prices and intermittent service. It relies solely on far-away power plants, and poles and wires to transmit electricity to you. If a storm knocks down power lines, you have an outage. If those power plants can’t meet your community’s energy demands, you have an outage. And, the grid is getting even more expensive to operate. So, let’s try not relying solely on the electric grid to bring electricity from far away.
As a homeowner, you have options. You can adopt local solar and battery storage. Residential solar can be installed on your roof or on your property, often lowering your electric bill in the process. Add in a battery and you can keep your lights on during the next power outage. As a business, you can install solar and batteries as well to lower your electric bill, including extra line items like demand charges that utilities levy on companies. Can’t install solar on your property? Then you can subscribe to a shared community solar project and lower your bill that way.
Community-wide, if you, your friends, and neighbors all get solar and storage, you’re actually helping stabilize and strengthen your electric grid. You help build in risk management by accessing back-up battery storage. If your town has multiple community solar projects connected with battery storage, there’s even more assets. Altogether, if your community can generate a lot of electricity locally, you won’t need to rely on those distant power plants and the fragile electricity grid. Your community can even influence the energy markets with your own clean generation, especially in moments when everyone needs a lot of electricity.
Let’s zoom out even more. If we are generating more local clean energy, that’s less natural gas that we need to generate electricity. That lowers risks to families vulnerable to mishaps like a natural gas pipeline freezing up. And that’s less need to import natural gas from places like Russia. That would be a significant improvement in our national security. Local Solar for All’s work showed that mainstream adoption of local solar and storage would save Americans nearly half a trillion dollars on the path to a clean energy grid. A more affordable and reliable electric grid is a national security asset.
The more clean energy you can generate at home and in your community, the more energy independent you are. And, the more energy independent the United States will be.
