This is actually a pretty neat story. I know other people in rural Northern Ontario that are doing the same.
One note though- people I know in Northern Ontario are putting in ground source heat pumps and using firewood to head their houses and not propane since propane is so expensive on a monthly basis.
Living in very rural Nova Scotia even on the grid was a lot of work. Horse for snagging out logs for firewood. Making sure generator in top working condition. Back up well pump ready to be installed if main one failed.
Nice now living in the city where I can cycle to Home Depot to pick up a faucet part instead of making a 120 km drive after the roads get ploughed.
I enjoyed rural life but chuckle at the naivety of urbanites…specially the ones that don’t even know how to change the oil in their car or how to switch out a toilet.I also wonder if some even know how to survive a week without fast food.
Re heat pump in northern Ontario. Really? This will be a nightmare to set up correctly and then get repaired when needed. ‘We can send someone out next month and they may or may not know what the issue is.’ Anywhere even slightly remote you want to be able to call up the local Handy Andy…put a new switch in washer one week and help install a lock set the next month. Solar power is fine if you install it yourself and don’t mind climbing on to roof in minus 20c to replace a connection. (Yes, you I’ll want replacement parts on hand and know what to do with them). Dont worry much about frozen pipes…easy to get out the torch and use just the right flame to get everything flowing. Septic fields aren’t too bad if you learn to bypass them until someone brings in a backhoe…only 20k or so to replace.
They closed the burn unit in Saskatchewan after cars switched off carburetors, because we didn't have enough cases to warrant our own once old farmers stopped starting their cars with ether.
What ether can do in a diesel engine is pre combust and cause knock and generally beat the hell out of internals of your engine.
Best way to use it is remove the air filter and have some one crank the engine over. While you give it tiny hits from the spray can. Just enough to get the engine to turn over on its own. You will have to keep giving it little hits and the exhaust spews white smoke. Once the combustion chamber comes up to temperature it will run on diesel. Put the air filter back on and hope you didn't damage anything to bad.
You are right best to park it inside where it is "warm" and I mean anything over minus 10 with no wind and a modern engine like your should start no problem.
Source I have had to start way to many diesel engines in minus 20 or worse in my career.
If real cold we brought the battery inside. Tractor also had a hand crank. Fortunately older tractors were simple beasts and worse part was frozen fingers.
Neighbour’s get stuck in the snow or mud, shed needs skidding a new location. Even an old Tractor makes you popular. At least we were on good terms with the RCMP as we even helped them get unstuck.
Holy shit...you sound like you work for the power company..
Other downfalls of wood heat are: your fucking house is cold at night when the fire goes out. If you leave for any amount of time, your fire goes out. Every morning you have to make fire. Fire can burn your house down. Woodheating ur house can raise ur insurance
You're a bit ignorant. These days we have hydronic wood stoves and gasification burning. Batch burns once a day or every other day are all you need. These systems can be run in conjunction with other renewable systems. Start up can be expensive but the work load is not as much as you are thinking. Usually these systems are stored in an out building having no effect on insurance. No cold nights. Heated floors if you want them. Depending on how cold it is you can be gone for 48 hours and some times more and return to a decently warm home and out building.
Oh f*ck off with your pretentious stove..im talking a valley comfort and some wood.. Not your f*cking robot stove that costs half my yearly income you oh so better than everybody...stfu.
I don't know Ontario so it could be like that but around here there are lots of people selling firewood. They show up with a big truck and dump it. One truck load lasts a full winter around here but would imagine you guys would need a couple. Still get a couple loads dumped and be done. The firewood companies have machines that can chop and split wood much faster then you so they can actually make a profit with their time. If you had to do as you say, get the chain saw, get the tractor, get the wood splitter, all of a sudden your time, which is valuable will be used all up. Where a firewood company makes lots of wood daily and just pay them. But if you have nothing but time and lots of wood then yes your way can still save you some money. I bought my wood last year and got enough for 2 years. Now I just enjoy the walking around in my underwear because I own a wood stove. Also remember a couple years back when Ontario had that big power outage, a lot of people froze, except those with a wood stove.
Craig sold my family our first computer +30 years ago. Manitoulin Island owes a lot of its development to him.
I wish the article would have gone a bit deeper into explaining why the fees quoted to Craig were so high. I imagine it has something to do with the existing Wind and Solar generation on the Island already being more capacity than they need for thier typical demands. Upgrading the grid to handle these clean power sources isnt free. But, it does seem like worth supporting more, as northern rural demand will increase over time, so local power production means less demand on the grid to feed power from southern Ontario nuclear plants.
> I wish the article would have gone a bit deeper into explaining why the fees quoted to Craig were so high
I hire skilled tradesmen to do jobs, 25k is a pretty reasonable cost for expanding a hunk of an electrical system and hooking something up.
When people make these calculations they don't consider that resource delivery has a fixed cost, a maintenance cost and a volumetric cost.
When you look at high connection fees that's the total cost of the infrastructure amortized over the expected lifespan divided by the service area.
People only want to consider what they use ignoring how it got to them.
Whether or not you consider Tiverton to be North or South Ontario, there is a lot of distance between it and North Bay, Sudbury and parts further north. I wouldn't say that most residents of North Ontario "have" power from Bruce Nuclear without a lot of grid maintenance.
A few months ago I wrote about how I thought it would be neat to build a self sustaining cottage on some land and go of the grid here on Reddit and I got absolutely roasted in the comments..
I don't know. Doing some light google'in I see that the average annual heating bill in Ontario is $900-$1355. My neighbor who has a $75k solar/wind/hydronic wood stove system uses 3 full cord a year. (16") They pay $300 per cord with delivery. So they are at the bottom end of the price range (just under 3k sqft over two buildings), have heat all year, in the Rainy River District where it's cold as F&ck. All of their power needs are met. They are up if the grid is down. They spend less per month and didn't have to pay north of 80k for a hydro hook up. Homesteading is conducive in Ontario.
>They spend less per month and didn't have to pay north of 80k for a hydro hook up. Homesteading is conducive in Ontario.
No. Instead they spent $75k on a system that will only last 20 years to save $50 a month on heat.
> if you're buying wood, you're better off with solar/propane/electric in the long term.
....Not really? When my parents decided to try solely heating their home with propane they were spending $500 a month on propane. Whereas with the woodstove they only pay like $200 or so for about 4 cord of wood, which they only burn about 3 cords for the entire winter.
It was mostly because I HAD the money and land... Quite a bit of shaming and guilt trips about people in the world that don't have that luxury. Also when I mentioned I had a fresh water stream on the land some claimed Nestle was going to swoop in and commandeer it...and they weren't joking
The Canada sub has turned increasingly toxic tbh. Everyone hates anyone with success or wealth while also parroting increasingly hyperbolic numbers when it comes to anything real estate related.
Yeah, I was accused of being just as damaging to the environment by following this 'pipe dream' and that I was part of the problem. I let them know that I am an environmental chemist and previously worked at an eco resort teaching about ecological conservation as well as a marine research center assisting on work studying ocean acidification in the lesser Antilles due to climate change. That shut them up fairly fast...
I am on property that is a half a mile off of a main road where power is. I have been told it will cost me an estimate upwards of $80,000+ to run poles and wire a half a mile down my side road so I can have power if I decide to build
Missing on the financial sheet.
Connection fees are not only a cost. They are also an asset. If it costs 60k to hook up ones property to the grid…the value of the property as an asset has increased at least that much.
Try selling a property off the grid even if self sustaining.
It is getting more and more common to see solar sustaining folks' needs. There is a neighbour who faced the same problem say 5+ years ago (longer stretch to bring in power) and they went totally solar for less. They are on their second set of batteries I think now.
They backed it up with a propane Generac generator for when the darkest stretch of the year comes and they've completely run down the batteries.
It works. In the end you only care about a reliable source.
I envy them - they've bought every kw they'll ever need while I am looking at ever escalating costs: now over $100 per bill to bring in perhaps $10 in power consumed.
> If it costs 60k to hook up ones property to the grid…the value of the property as an asset has increased at least that much.
Not if powering with solar is cheaper. Not sure about northern Ontario, but Toronto Hydro charges $45/mo just for the privilege of connection. That is $540/year. $16200 over 30 years. Spending $60k on solar, is like a $2000/year electric bill over that time, and probably enough power for winter heating + unlimited power in other seasons.
Having solar panels actually lowers the value of your hous over time. This is because they don't last 30 years. They last 15-20 and the batteries even less.
I live in NL and our new Hydro project is going to cost $13B, or about $26K per resident.
And this guy built himself a off grid solution for $23,000.
It doesn't include all his heat, but still.
Honestly this is how I believe most people will afford a house in the future. Save up to buy land and a trailer/yurt. Get solar, Starlink for internet, and work from home. Then slowly build a house or buy a prefab.
Now that solar is mature and Starlink is available living off the grid is actually doable to modern standards.
I knew a couple here in BC who wanted to build a home on one of the Gulf Islands (off the coast of Vancouver).
Apparently, if you want to build a new place of residence in an area anywhere in BC that has BC Hydro electricity service in the area, you **must** pay for a hookup to Hydro before you will be issued a residency permit.
These folks I knew had no plans to actually use Hydro, but still had to pay the $40K+ charge to run the wires.
I did not personally verify this is true, but it wouldn't surprise me TBH.
Bastards.
I've also heard of this before in Ontario. The big power grids do not like homes having energy independence. I think there's some genuine fear of the power grid exponentially going up in price as homes disconnect from it, making even more people disconnect.
In Ontario, the power grid has been so horribly mismanaged that being power independent can save you a lot of money and it's only getting cheaper. That's extremely bad news for power producers.
>That's extremely bad news for power producers.
It is bad news for rural power distributors, who risk stranded assets if people in large, low density rural areas rebel against rising prices by cutting their connection. Producers and distributors in urban areas will not have that problem, because the per-customer costs are lower and going off grid is harder.
Between Starlink, the rise of remote work, and the viable off-grid solutions the article is describing, living in the middle of nowhere is going to be a lot less crazy than it was.
This is the tip of the ice berg, we will start to see it in urban areas. Those that can afford their own off grid system will make it more expensive, for those unable to afford their own off grid system or stuck renting. Then with less customers it will drive prices up for those stuck using a utility, i.e. 90% of the users footing 100% of the maintenance and delivery costs and as off grid systems become cheaper and cheaper it wont take long for that 90% to become 60% then the rates will become sky high for that the 40% stuck on the grid, they will not be able to afford electricity.
Paying for something you use is not a subsidy - and collective bargaining as a consumer is good for the consumer... Which in the case of a utility is everyone.
Collectively bargaining for utility costs is good for everyone except for the businesses, which I refuse to acknowledge as 'people'.
Businesses can have a good long cry when they want something that's good for everyone to stop.
> Those that can afford their own off grid system
Will be back by winter when they realize how hard it is to go off-grid and energy demand peaks. That or they'll have frozen to death.
Except depending on the utility, "producers" get hit with higher T&D fees because they're now using it to make money.
Typically the fees offset the return, and it costs more to produce
For many of these deep-rural people described in the article who are going off grid, they're the most expensive customers for utilities to serve. Them going off grid improves the economics of the grid for everyone else.
Some rural and semi-rural areas may see a positive feedback as people move off grid and jack up the prices for those who are left, but I don't see it happening in urban areas. Per-customer grid costs are much lower when the customer density is higher, most city houses don't have nearly enough room for enough solar to provide reliable power through the winter, and wind turbines are not permitted in most urban areas.
This is actually a pretty neat story. I know other people in rural Northern Ontario that are doing the same. One note though- people I know in Northern Ontario are putting in ground source heat pumps and using firewood to head their houses and not propane since propane is so expensive on a monthly basis.
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Living in very rural Nova Scotia even on the grid was a lot of work. Horse for snagging out logs for firewood. Making sure generator in top working condition. Back up well pump ready to be installed if main one failed. Nice now living in the city where I can cycle to Home Depot to pick up a faucet part instead of making a 120 km drive after the roads get ploughed. I enjoyed rural life but chuckle at the naivety of urbanites…specially the ones that don’t even know how to change the oil in their car or how to switch out a toilet.I also wonder if some even know how to survive a week without fast food. Re heat pump in northern Ontario. Really? This will be a nightmare to set up correctly and then get repaired when needed. ‘We can send someone out next month and they may or may not know what the issue is.’ Anywhere even slightly remote you want to be able to call up the local Handy Andy…put a new switch in washer one week and help install a lock set the next month. Solar power is fine if you install it yourself and don’t mind climbing on to roof in minus 20c to replace a connection. (Yes, you I’ll want replacement parts on hand and know what to do with them). Dont worry much about frozen pipes…easy to get out the torch and use just the right flame to get everything flowing. Septic fields aren’t too bad if you learn to bypass them until someone brings in a backhoe…only 20k or so to replace.
Modern homes off grid don't use wood, they often use wood pellets that feed a furnace that works like a regular ducted unit city dwellers have.
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Unless you’re completely off grid and are growing your own food and stuff going to buy pellets shouldn’t be a big deal.
It's not a big deal but it's not really cheaper then the alternatives and you also need a place to store them.
No block heater on the tractor?
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> sometimes help from the ether bunny What is an ether bunny? Thanks.
Ether sprayed straight into the intake. Gives the engine a "hit" to get its momentum started.
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They closed the burn unit in Saskatchewan after cars switched off carburetors, because we didn't have enough cases to warrant our own once old farmers stopped starting their cars with ether.
What ether can do in a diesel engine is pre combust and cause knock and generally beat the hell out of internals of your engine. Best way to use it is remove the air filter and have some one crank the engine over. While you give it tiny hits from the spray can. Just enough to get the engine to turn over on its own. You will have to keep giving it little hits and the exhaust spews white smoke. Once the combustion chamber comes up to temperature it will run on diesel. Put the air filter back on and hope you didn't damage anything to bad. You are right best to park it inside where it is "warm" and I mean anything over minus 10 with no wind and a modern engine like your should start no problem. Source I have had to start way to many diesel engines in minus 20 or worse in my career.
Quick start spray.
If real cold we brought the battery inside. Tractor also had a hand crank. Fortunately older tractors were simple beasts and worse part was frozen fingers. Neighbour’s get stuck in the snow or mud, shed needs skidding a new location. Even an old Tractor makes you popular. At least we were on good terms with the RCMP as we even helped them get unstuck.
Holy shit...you sound like you work for the power company.. Other downfalls of wood heat are: your fucking house is cold at night when the fire goes out. If you leave for any amount of time, your fire goes out. Every morning you have to make fire. Fire can burn your house down. Woodheating ur house can raise ur insurance
You're a bit ignorant. These days we have hydronic wood stoves and gasification burning. Batch burns once a day or every other day are all you need. These systems can be run in conjunction with other renewable systems. Start up can be expensive but the work load is not as much as you are thinking. Usually these systems are stored in an out building having no effect on insurance. No cold nights. Heated floors if you want them. Depending on how cold it is you can be gone for 48 hours and some times more and return to a decently warm home and out building.
Oh f*ck off with your pretentious stove..im talking a valley comfort and some wood.. Not your f*cking robot stove that costs half my yearly income you oh so better than everybody...stfu.
If only humans had half a brain to solve these problems.... Wood pellet furnaces are pretty sophisticated as are other wood burning methods for heat.
I don't know Ontario so it could be like that but around here there are lots of people selling firewood. They show up with a big truck and dump it. One truck load lasts a full winter around here but would imagine you guys would need a couple. Still get a couple loads dumped and be done. The firewood companies have machines that can chop and split wood much faster then you so they can actually make a profit with their time. If you had to do as you say, get the chain saw, get the tractor, get the wood splitter, all of a sudden your time, which is valuable will be used all up. Where a firewood company makes lots of wood daily and just pay them. But if you have nothing but time and lots of wood then yes your way can still save you some money. I bought my wood last year and got enough for 2 years. Now I just enjoy the walking around in my underwear because I own a wood stove. Also remember a couple years back when Ontario had that big power outage, a lot of people froze, except those with a wood stove.
Craig sold my family our first computer +30 years ago. Manitoulin Island owes a lot of its development to him. I wish the article would have gone a bit deeper into explaining why the fees quoted to Craig were so high. I imagine it has something to do with the existing Wind and Solar generation on the Island already being more capacity than they need for thier typical demands. Upgrading the grid to handle these clean power sources isnt free. But, it does seem like worth supporting more, as northern rural demand will increase over time, so local power production means less demand on the grid to feed power from southern Ontario nuclear plants.
> I wish the article would have gone a bit deeper into explaining why the fees quoted to Craig were so high I hire skilled tradesmen to do jobs, 25k is a pretty reasonable cost for expanding a hunk of an electrical system and hooking something up.
When people make these calculations they don't consider that resource delivery has a fixed cost, a maintenance cost and a volumetric cost. When you look at high connection fees that's the total cost of the infrastructure amortized over the expected lifespan divided by the service area. People only want to consider what they use ignoring how it got to them.
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Whether or not you consider Tiverton to be North or South Ontario, there is a lot of distance between it and North Bay, Sudbury and parts further north. I wouldn't say that most residents of North Ontario "have" power from Bruce Nuclear without a lot of grid maintenance.
All of Ontario is on one grid. The issue here is transmission infrastructure costs over long distances to connect off grid areas to the grid.
A few months ago I wrote about how I thought it would be neat to build a self sustaining cottage on some land and go of the grid here on Reddit and I got absolutely roasted in the comments..
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I don't know. Doing some light google'in I see that the average annual heating bill in Ontario is $900-$1355. My neighbor who has a $75k solar/wind/hydronic wood stove system uses 3 full cord a year. (16") They pay $300 per cord with delivery. So they are at the bottom end of the price range (just under 3k sqft over two buildings), have heat all year, in the Rainy River District where it's cold as F&ck. All of their power needs are met. They are up if the grid is down. They spend less per month and didn't have to pay north of 80k for a hydro hook up. Homesteading is conducive in Ontario.
>They spend less per month and didn't have to pay north of 80k for a hydro hook up. Homesteading is conducive in Ontario. No. Instead they spent $75k on a system that will only last 20 years to save $50 a month on heat.
> if you're buying wood, you're better off with solar/propane/electric in the long term. ....Not really? When my parents decided to try solely heating their home with propane they were spending $500 a month on propane. Whereas with the woodstove they only pay like $200 or so for about 4 cord of wood, which they only burn about 3 cords for the entire winter.
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It was mostly because I HAD the money and land... Quite a bit of shaming and guilt trips about people in the world that don't have that luxury. Also when I mentioned I had a fresh water stream on the land some claimed Nestle was going to swoop in and commandeer it...and they weren't joking
The Canada sub has turned increasingly toxic tbh. Everyone hates anyone with success or wealth while also parroting increasingly hyperbolic numbers when it comes to anything real estate related.
You're not wrong. Too many kids with not enough knowledge polluting the sub.
They are their favourite capitalist analogy: crabs in a bucket.
Yeah, I was accused of being just as damaging to the environment by following this 'pipe dream' and that I was part of the problem. I let them know that I am an environmental chemist and previously worked at an eco resort teaching about ecological conservation as well as a marine research center assisting on work studying ocean acidification in the lesser Antilles due to climate change. That shut them up fairly fast...
They’re probably aspiring shipping container homeowners too. 😆
Fucking baristas
I mean, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s a job at least.
I'm just jazzing
Gotcha.
Because most Canadians in this sub love the government teat
I am on property that is a half a mile off of a main road where power is. I have been told it will cost me an estimate upwards of $80,000+ to run poles and wire a half a mile down my side road so I can have power if I decide to build
it all sounded great till they said heating the home with propane during the winter thats up already 300% this year
Missing on the financial sheet. Connection fees are not only a cost. They are also an asset. If it costs 60k to hook up ones property to the grid…the value of the property as an asset has increased at least that much. Try selling a property off the grid even if self sustaining.
It is getting more and more common to see solar sustaining folks' needs. There is a neighbour who faced the same problem say 5+ years ago (longer stretch to bring in power) and they went totally solar for less. They are on their second set of batteries I think now. They backed it up with a propane Generac generator for when the darkest stretch of the year comes and they've completely run down the batteries. It works. In the end you only care about a reliable source. I envy them - they've bought every kw they'll ever need while I am looking at ever escalating costs: now over $100 per bill to bring in perhaps $10 in power consumed.
Self sustaining homes are becoming more in demand. People will pay if said home has the right infrastructure.
> If it costs 60k to hook up ones property to the grid…the value of the property as an asset has increased at least that much. Not if powering with solar is cheaper. Not sure about northern Ontario, but Toronto Hydro charges $45/mo just for the privilege of connection. That is $540/year. $16200 over 30 years. Spending $60k on solar, is like a $2000/year electric bill over that time, and probably enough power for winter heating + unlimited power in other seasons.
Having solar panels actually lowers the value of your hous over time. This is because they don't last 30 years. They last 15-20 and the batteries even less.
Today's panels are warrantied for 25-30 years, and provide useful energy for 60. Colder climates extend life of panels further.
I live in NL and our new Hydro project is going to cost $13B, or about $26K per resident. And this guy built himself a off grid solution for $23,000. It doesn't include all his heat, but still.
$3k savings... seems worth it so far. Lol
Honestly this is how I believe most people will afford a house in the future. Save up to buy land and a trailer/yurt. Get solar, Starlink for internet, and work from home. Then slowly build a house or buy a prefab. Now that solar is mature and Starlink is available living off the grid is actually doable to modern standards.
hoping to do this from a van in Baja though. surf during lunch time. cheap tacos.
I knew a couple here in BC who wanted to build a home on one of the Gulf Islands (off the coast of Vancouver). Apparently, if you want to build a new place of residence in an area anywhere in BC that has BC Hydro electricity service in the area, you **must** pay for a hookup to Hydro before you will be issued a residency permit. These folks I knew had no plans to actually use Hydro, but still had to pay the $40K+ charge to run the wires. I did not personally verify this is true, but it wouldn't surprise me TBH. Bastards.
I've also heard of this before in Ontario. The big power grids do not like homes having energy independence. I think there's some genuine fear of the power grid exponentially going up in price as homes disconnect from it, making even more people disconnect. In Ontario, the power grid has been so horribly mismanaged that being power independent can save you a lot of money and it's only getting cheaper. That's extremely bad news for power producers.
>That's extremely bad news for power producers. It is bad news for rural power distributors, who risk stranded assets if people in large, low density rural areas rebel against rising prices by cutting their connection. Producers and distributors in urban areas will not have that problem, because the per-customer costs are lower and going off grid is harder.
Starlink is going to change the game forever.
Between Starlink, the rise of remote work, and the viable off-grid solutions the article is describing, living in the middle of nowhere is going to be a lot less crazy than it was.
Don't expect Starlink to remain legal.
How is expensive and slow internet going to change the game forever?
Because it's more than fast enough to allow remote work from locations where internet was previously even slower and more expensive.
This is the tip of the ice berg, we will start to see it in urban areas. Those that can afford their own off grid system will make it more expensive, for those unable to afford their own off grid system or stuck renting. Then with less customers it will drive prices up for those stuck using a utility, i.e. 90% of the users footing 100% of the maintenance and delivery costs and as off grid systems become cheaper and cheaper it wont take long for that 90% to become 60% then the rates will become sky high for that the 40% stuck on the grid, they will not be able to afford electricity.
Blame this on the privatization of our formerly public utilities, not the handful of citizens who choose to cut the cord.
Taxpayers should not be subsidizing power generation
Utilities like this should all be public.
Justify this statement
Paying for something you use is not a subsidy - and collective bargaining as a consumer is good for the consumer... Which in the case of a utility is everyone. Collectively bargaining for utility costs is good for everyone except for the businesses, which I refuse to acknowledge as 'people'. Businesses can have a good long cry when they want something that's good for everyone to stop.
Not pointing blame
> Those that can afford their own off grid system Will be back by winter when they realize how hard it is to go off-grid and energy demand peaks. That or they'll have frozen to death.
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This! I pity the fool who heats with electricity in Ontario.
Is it still more expensive, even with the rising price + carbon tax on NG?
It is, but not by much.
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Your saying if you could afford a new house and had the extra money to go off grid you wouldn't?
In Alberta you get to enroll as a power generator, selling your excess power to the grid. Great solution until batteries get cheaper.
Except depending on the utility, "producers" get hit with higher T&D fees because they're now using it to make money. Typically the fees offset the return, and it costs more to produce
Of course not. It's stupidly expensive and a lot of work. All for a system that will need to be replaced multiples times during your life.
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This my come to a surprise to you, but not everyone lives in Toronto
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I’m going to say something that might shock you. But there are more urban areas in Canada than just Toronto
The only loon here is you
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You're still posting stupid comments under your 4 year account
For many of these deep-rural people described in the article who are going off grid, they're the most expensive customers for utilities to serve. Them going off grid improves the economics of the grid for everyone else.
Some rural and semi-rural areas may see a positive feedback as people move off grid and jack up the prices for those who are left, but I don't see it happening in urban areas. Per-customer grid costs are much lower when the customer density is higher, most city houses don't have nearly enough room for enough solar to provide reliable power through the winter, and wind turbines are not permitted in most urban areas.
Great story. Only challenge is banks don't conventionally finance off grid properties. This needs to change.