WHY GO OFF-GRID?
TWO wonderful things happen when you move from the grid-connected life to an off-grid existence.
The first is that you become instantly attuned to the natural world. You centre yourself around the daylight hours, because your batteries, if you have any, must be preserved for the essentials. The rain, sun and wind directly affect your daily routine. The many varieties of rain, each with their own atmospheres, become your friends. They clean you and your surroundings. They nourish you and your crops.
The second change is that you are confronted by the need to run your own power station, and manage your own water supply and waste. You literally have to deal with your own shit.
These changes are, for want of a better word, electrifying. They are liberating. You feel in control of your own life.
“FIND your place on the earth,” says American poet Gary Snyder, “Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” In the on-grid world, that place is very hard to find. Everything from planning laws, to electricity regulations, to the neighbours and their codes of what is acceptable behaviour, are pitched against anyone who wants to live the lowest of low-impact lifestyles.
So the primary rule of living off-grid is not to do it on your own, but as part of a community. By community, I don’t mean a commune. I have nothing against communes, but I wouldn’t want to live in one myself because it makes decision-making difficult and long-winded. Instead, I recommend a collection of separate households in the same patch of land, or the same area, where people pool skills and share resources as far as its practical to do so, or a more dispersed community brought together because of a local council with looser planning laws than most.
THESE are such strange times. Everybody knows our “advanced” economies are speeding us towards collapse and social breakdown. It’s perfectly obvious we must cut global energy consumption by 75% – and since at least 2 billion of the world’s poorest are using hardly any energy, the advanced economies are going to have to cut consumption by perhaps 90%. And that is simply not happening.
There is a rising interest in off-grid techniques for saving energy, and learning how to bypass the utility companies, which until very recently were entirely focused on selling us more electricity. But today, we are in the paradoxical situation of expecting those same utility companies to sell us less of what they make. Their business models are not designed for that. The giant Swiss bank UBS is forecasting that $160 trillion will be spent between now and 2050 “decarbonising” the energy grid. That is $160 trillion of our money – in taxes and energy bills – being handed to the same companies that caused the problem of high prices and pollution in the first place. That, says UBS, will …