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DAVE BROOKS
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Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Off the
grid
By DAVID BROOKS
brooksd@telegraph-nh.com
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Correspondent photo by Jodie
Andruskevich
Mike Kaelin of Lyndeborough points to a
stack of batteries that store the energy for his solar-powered
home. |
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| If
he wasn’t such a nice guy, Mike Kaelin would have been snickering
when I talked about the two-day blackout I endured after the
windstorm we had earlier this month.
He
certainly had cause. While my family was huddled around the wood
stove, trying to pretend that a second night of cooking marshmallows
was fun, Kaelin’s house in the wilds of Lyndeborough was warm and
well-lit, with refrigerator, TV and computers humming as if nothing
had happened.
And nothing had happened,
because Kaelin lives completely off the grid – no connection to PSNH
whatsoever. Roughly 100 square feet of photovoltaic cells on his
roof feed 3,000 pounds of batteries in the basement, providing about
12 kilowatt hours of power: all the juice this gadget-filled home
needs for at least five days straight.
“There
were a couple times I’ve gone to bed early in winter instead of
going out and firing up the generator (to recharge the batteries),
but that was with the old batteries. With these new ones, I don’t
have to worry about that anymore,” he said during a recent
tour.
If he ever gets married and fills the
house with power-hungry teenagers, he’ll just add more
panels.
The best thing about Kaelin’s house on
Curtis Brook Road is that it doesn’t look weird. It does look
unusual, but that’s because Kaelin lived in Switzerland for five
years and has designed it to be more like an Alpine chalet than a
Colonial. (The home’s name is Sonnehüüsli, Swiss German for “sun
house.”)
It is an open, timber-frame design by
Lyndeborough homebuilder Phil Brooks, with walls made of
high-insulation foam panels called Stresskin, but that’s not too
unusual anymore. The solar panels are impossible to see unless you
know where to look, and except for the extra electrical boxes in the
basement, nothing reflects Kaelin’s off-the-grid
life.
“I didn’t want to live underground or
anything like that. I lived in the basement for two years (while
building the house), and that was enough for me,” he
said.
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David Brooks
Previous columns by
David
Brooks
David Brooks has spent a quarter century as a
reporter, editor and columnist for daily newspapers in
four states, including the past 15 years with the
Telegraph.
Holder of a bachelor's degree in
mathematics, he has written Science from the Sidelines
since 1991.
He lives in Mont Vernon with his wife and
two children. He can be reached at 594-5831 or brooksd@tele
graph-nh.com | | It’s
rare to find a house that gets a portion of its power from solar
cells – as compared to passive solar houses that use design elements
to reduce heating costs – but much rarer to find one completely off
the grid.
That’s too bad, because as Kaelin
points out, photovoltaics are a perfect distributed power source
that could ease our dependence on a creaky, under-funded electric
system.
“I bet if 10 percent, 15 percent of
power came from solar cells, the grid wouldn’t have gone down
(during the August blackout),” he said.
But
even Kaelin, a promoter of photovoltaics, admits this won’t happen
anytime soon.
Solar power has long been one of
those technologies that is always five years out of reach. The
problem isn’t so much the science, although efficiency levels
haven’t lived up to early predictions, but manufacturing costs.
As long as people or companies can get their
power cheaper from power plants than from photovoltaics – and they
still can, by a long shot – we’re going to stay plugged into
Seabrook et al.
Such financial realities are
reflected in the loss of Advanced Energy Systems of Wilton, the
region’s best-known solar-power company. It made systems to convert
solar DC power to AC power for home use, but in March it sold the
rights to Beacon Power of Wilmington, Mass.
Even Kaelin’s decision had a monetary
aspect.
He has built his home atop a steep
hill (is there any other kind in Lyndeborough?) at the end of a
1,200-foot driveway. PSNH would have charged $10,000 to hack through
the woods and bring a power line to his house, whereas his
solar-power hookup has cost him about
$12,000.
Kaelin can recoup the extra $2,000
from his lack of power bills, but there’s no way he’d ever recoup
the whole $12,000. Folks who don’t live in the midst of 125 acres
don’t have his financial incentive to take the solar
plunge.
Also, Kaelin is an electrical engineer
with solar-power experience. He likes playing with stuff that would
scare most of us, and a certain level of knowledge is still helpful
with solar power.
Kaelin, like many
solar-power fans, thinks the government should kick-start the
industry the way it has done to many others. If the U.S. would build
a gigawatt solar-power plant in the Nevada desert and plug it into
the grid, he says, the economies of scale would percolate through
private industry and bring costs down to the point where
photovoltaics could be part of the energy mix.
It couldn’t be any more expensive than
pouring billions more into the traditional power sources, and it
even has homeland-security aspects: Terrorists can sabotage a power
plant a lot faster than they can sabotage 1,000 different solar-cell
arrays.
But don’t hold your breath. For now
and probably for years to come, sagas like Kaelin’s will remain the
exception.
Science From The Sidelines
appears Wednesdays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at
594-5831 .
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