Ask
any north-country resident about sunbathing and you’ll soon understand this is
one place the sun seldom shines.
One
look at climate data from the National Weather Service is enough to discourage
anybody hunting for photons in Coos County. Statistics for the average
annual percentage of possible sunlight show Mount Washington and Quillayute,
Washington, tied near the bottom of the list at 33%. (Only Juneau,
Alaska, is cloudier, receiving about 30% of possible sunlight annually, while
Yuma, Arizona, is the clear winner with 90%.) The eastward movement
of weather across the North American continent means that systems tend to pile
up on the slopes of the White Mountains. As the air rises and cools,
their moisture condenses, creating the clouds that blanket our region about
two-thirds of the time.
But
north-country innovators enjoy a challenge, and they have been working—some for
decades—to use locally available sources of energy, including our limited sunlight, to take steps
toward energy independence. Wind, water,
and sun all have parts to play, and so does The Grid, that complex network of
interwoven wires and switches that gathers and distributes the electricity to
power the conveniences of modern life.
John
and Amanda King of Lost Nation have
never connected to The Grid, and they don’t want to. In a south-facing, amply windowed house they
built themselves, they take advantage of whatever passive-solar gain the
weather may offer, and they heat their house with wood. But they also enjoy the comforts of modern
living, including an electric washing machine, a television, and various
electric appliances, all without the electric bills they have actively sought
to avoid.
Several
years in a rented duplex in Whitefield cost them more than $100 a month for
electricity more than ten years ago. “It
wasn’t all usage,” observes Amanda.
“More than half was fees, including servicing debt from the nuclear
power plant in Seabrook.” They started thinking
about what an off-Grid existence might be like.
When
they investigated the cost of running Grid-power to their building site in Lost
Nation, they learned they would have to foot the bill for poles running wires
from the main road. And, they realized, after
that they would still be paying monthly electric bills. So they decided to invest instead in six
solar panels and a bank of batteries to store the collected energy for later
use when the sun was not shining. They
also bought a gasoline-powered generator for backup, and they installed a
propane stove, on-demand hot-water heater, and refrigerator. This system cost them $1,000 less than they
would have had to pay Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH) for the installing
the poles.
The
infrastructure covers all contingencies. “We never know when there’s a (Grid)
power outage,” says Amanda.
For
the Kings, it’s all about self-reliance.
They acknowledge the carbon footprint associated with the manufacture of
their solar panels, but they consider it a one-time expense, and they are
working to reduce the amount of petroleum they now use to maintain their
independence from The Grid. They plan to
add another six panels, these facing west to take advantage of abundant
sunshine some winter afternoons.
Photovoltaic
panels gather solar energy as direct current (DC), which is stored in a battery
bank. The Kings’ is in the utility room of their house. An inverter changes the DC power to the alternating
current (AC) that powers their house through an ordinary breaker box. They read their own meters to monitor their
use, but no monthly electric bills come in the mail.
The
Kings’ system requires some maintenance and attention. John, self-employed as Goblin Masonry, checks
the water level in the battery bank every 45 days. In winter he uses a roof rake to clear snow
from the solar panels, which he operates in two modes, depending on the
season. He changes from summer to winter
mode and back again by switching the angle of the panels about thirty degrees
to accommodate the seasonal change of the angle of the sun.
In
addition, he fills and lugs a five-gallon gasoline container about 15 times a
year to fuel the generator that recharges the batteries in the darkest part of
winter.
But
the Kings believe the results are well worth their efforts. Their three kids get it, says Amanda. They all know how to read the meter that
records how charged-up the batteries are, and they watch what they use. “Somebody is always telling somebody, ‘Shut
off the lights!’” and they check the meter before deciding to turn on the
television or leave it off and read a book.
This awareness transfers, she
says, citing their older son’s frustration at college when his roommates waste
electricity.
The
Kings’ electric coffee maker is just like everybody else’s, but when it’s done
perking, they dump the hot coffee into a thermos and shut off the
appliance. Observing this procedure, a
visiting family member recently admitted she could easily conserve electricity
by doing the same. Energy-use awareness
is contagious.
Amanda
dismisses arguments about the relative inconveniences of their system: “People are soft. They want their modern conveniences. Our modern conveniences are ruled by us. We are not ruled by our modern
conveniences.” John has virtually
eliminated phantom load—the power that gadgets draw even when they are shut
off—by disconnecting appliances when they are not being used. The Kings note that in addition to their
coffee maker, their vacuum cleaner, microwave oven, and toaster draw the most
power, so they pay attention to the weather and watch what they use. John explains, “We are in 100% control of our
electricity here.” Amanda adds, “Today the
sun’s out, so we vacuum!”
A
few miles away in Northumberland Joe Keenan, a local psychologist, is involved
in what he calls a “nuanced” relationship with The Grid. About six years ago he purchased a home with
an adjacent, operating hydropower utility.
The system had been designed and built by Bruce Sloat, a gizmo-loving
engineer who had gotten interested in hydropower while working for the hut
system of the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Keenan’s
system is capable of producing a maximum of 50 kilowatts—10 from a smaller
turbine and 40 from a larger one, and he can operate them independently of each
other. The system uses an 1800-foot drop
in elevation from a square-mile water shed in the White Mountains National
Forest, just behind his house, to a
catchment (dam) across Whipple Brook. From
there, a 10-inch penstock (pipe) carries part of the brook’s flow into a small
building housing the turbines. The drop
in elevation creates water pressure of 165 pounds per square inch, so his
house, which also draws water from the system, is gravity-fed.
He
does not run the system at maximum production, he says, because he wants the
equipment to last his lifetime, and because it’s not worth generating much more than he
uses, less than 10 kilowatt-hours. The latter reason is the basis of his give-and-take
relationship with The Grid. He
acknowledges that when his generating system is down occasionally for one
reason or another, he must rely on The Grid to power his house. When that happens, his electric bill is about
ten times higher than it is when the system is producing power. And he leans on the technical expertise of those
who service Public Service’s Grid to keep the system going. For example, when Keenan’s system kept
tripping a shut-off relay-switch, a PSNH engineer was able to diagnose the
problem (branches on a line) and advise a solution. When lightning fried a meter, PSNH donated a
refurbished one to replace it.
But
such perks are “hardly cost effective,” says Keenan. “If I thought of it as a business, it
wouldn’t make any sense.” Instead, he
considers his power plant a hobby. In
winter he snowshoes to the turbine-building twice a day to keep his eye on
things. In the fall he clears leaves and
twigs from the catchment grate lest they clog the stream and lessen its
flow. “I’ve done that,” he recalls with
a smile, “at night in the rain with my head lamp on.”
Annually
he spends four hours or so shoveling, raking, and washing detritus through the
catchment grate to keep Whipple Brook healthy.
Sometimes in the driest months he foregoes generating power to maintain
the flow and health of the stream.
He
is responsible, also, for the cost of maintaining poles and meters and for the
cost of an annual inspection of the equipment connecting his plant to The Grid. He pays property taxes on his utility to
Northumberland.
And
there is paperwork—lots of it. He must
send water-use reports to NH’s Department of Environmental Services, while PSNH
sends him monthly reports about how much power it has purchased from him and at
what prices. PSNH also provides hourly
updates, in columns and columns of dates, times, amounts, and prices that
document the highly variable economics of his system. He explains that PSNH is required to draw a
certain percentage of its power from “green” sources like his. “They buy from me when they need extra help
with their numbers,” he says.
Those
pages and pages of numbers reveal the details of a complex relationship. Theoretically
his payback from PSNH should offset the cost of his connection to The Grid. When
he bought the plant, PSNH was paying nine or ten cents per kilowatt-hour. But this month, it’s paid him an average of
2.23 cents. Recently the payback has
ranged from $1.20 one hour, when some distant problem must have created a need
for his plant’s power, to zero cents
another when it wasn’t needed.
And
what happens to the hydropower then?
Because he’s hooked up, it flows onto The Grid anyhow, regardless of how
much he’s paid. He’s hooked up because
if his plant went down, he’d need power to fix it, and he’d need to keep the
turbine station from freezing, should a problem occur in the winter.
He
attributes the dramatic drop in payback rates to fracking (extracting petroleum
from rock formations), which has dramatically reduced the price of natural gas
that PSNH purchases as part of its energy portfolio. Keenan is a member of the Granite State
Hydropower Association, which PSNH has encouraged to negotiate better base
rates, but its membership is small.
These
factors help create a disincentive that keeps Keenan and others like him from
generating as much green power as possible.
Still, he enjoys a certain satisfaction from producing the energy that
powers his house, including its electric heat.
(He also burns wood and a small amount of oil.) “Every time I flip off a switch, somebody
else is buying power from me,” he admits.
Another
aspect of Keenan’s relationship with PSNH is more contentious. Below his house, Whipple Brook tumbles into
Israel’s River, which then empties into the Connecticut. That valley is part of the route proposed by
PSNH for the one-hundred-thirty-five-foot Northern Pass towers carrying power
south from Canada, a sharp contrast to the buried ten-inch pipe that carries
part of Whipple Stream to Keenan’s turbines.
The vista from his front porch, he says, would be “ruined.”
David
Craxton of Roots and Fruits and Joel White of White’s Septic, both in Dalton,
have more straightforward relationships with The Grid. Craxton generates more than half of his
electricity from a series of twenty 208-watt photovoltaic panels—eight in a
5-year-old part of the system and twelve in a 2-year-old part--across the roof
and south wall of a barn on his farm.
White
has nearly completed the refurbishment of a wind-turbine he bought secondhand
more than eighteen years ago. When it is
tied to The Grid, he says, “It should make more power than I’ll ever
need.” Both men acknowledge that, given
the size of their operations, being “Grid-tied” makes the most sense for them.
The
panels of Craxton’s system are connected in series to inverters—one for
each of the two parts—that convert the
DC power they produce to usable AC. He
rakes snow from the panels, adjusts the panels’ angles with the seasons, and
monitors his power use like the Kings, but Craxton does not store energy in
batteries. Instead, the approximately
2.6 kilowatts of AC power goes into a meter that offsets the power he uses from
The Grid with what he generates and sends onto to The Grid. This set-up spares him the expense and
maintenance of storage batteries while it protects his anonymity. PSNH knows
“only how much I use, not how much I make.” The refrigerators he uses in his organic-vegetable
business and the lights that keep his chickens laying in the winter consume
quite a bit of energy, and he appreciates the relative reliability of The Grid. He acknowledges, though, that his
relationship with it does not allow “islanding”—the continued generation and
use of power if The Grid goes down.
Still, he is happy with his situation.
State-of-the-art panels produce some power even when the sun doesn’t
shine. “It can be snowing, cloudy,
raining. I’m still making power,” he
notes. His electric bill varies with the
seasons—one summer month he had none—but is reduced more than half overall by
his system.
As
for the expense of equipment and its installation, Craxton took advantage of
Federal tax credits that helped with the costs, and he notes that his choice to
accept energy credits from PSNH (in exchange for what he produces) means they
are computed at a retail rate, unlike Keenan’s arrangement. He notes also that panels even more modern than
his two-year-old ones now include built-in inverters that make them easier to
install and operate.
Referring
to the cost of installation, he says, “It’s cheaper than buying a car. I’d rather drive a beater [car] and make
power. It’s the right thing to do.”
White
agrees, though his installation has been—and continues to be—more
hands-on. Beginning with six-foot-deep anchor-holes
drilled into ledge, he and a couple of friends then poured by hand the concrete
footings that support the four legs of the galvanized steel tower he bought
from a defunct college radio station in Massachusetts. Piece by piece the tower was moved,
reassembled, then raised by hand in seven sections to its 75-foot height. A wooden service-deck was constructed on the
ground and winched into place about two-thirds of the way up. Work continued on the tailless, five-bladed
nose cone that will generate power from the wind while the tower supports the
antenna of the FM station White uses when he is on the road. (His business’s motto is “We Rush So You Can
Flush.”)
The
generator, which sits behind the nose cone near the top of the tower, was built
to be used in icy conditions by Extrawatt, a Canadian company no longer in
business. The generator itself can be
raised and lowered with a winch for maintenance. Each of the five blades had to be repaired
and re-fiberglassed before the cone could be put into place.
With
the end of the project in sight, White discovered that some of the wiring in
the swiveling top of the cone had deteriorated.
At the moment he is working on the wiring and making arrangements to
meet PSNH requirements to become Grid-tied.
These include the installation of an inverter, followed by a requisite
inspection.
When
it’s on line, his wind turbine ought to generate 19 kilowatts when wind conditions,
which he has clocked at 45 mph, are
favorable. Many would-be wind users
purchase generators that do not produce until the wind reaches a speed of 7 mph
and thus do not maximize their investment, but White attributes the efficiency
of his system to a generator that can create power from wind speed as slow as 5
mph.
Like
Craxton, he has side-stepped storage batteries, choosing instead to accept the
retail-value of offset credits instead of the 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour he
would otherwise be paid. It’s worth more
to him to accept the credits against his electric bill than to get a check in
the mail each month from PSNH.
Asked
about his total investment in the project, he replies, “ No idea. Really it costs so much to do this, and you
get so much into it, you can’t stop.”
Whatever relationships they have with The Grid, Coös
innovators know exactly where and how close to their properties PSNH’s Northern
Pass proposes to place the towers to carry Canadian power to be consumed in
southern New England. Generating
backyard power produces increasing awareness of the costs of consumption.
With a spirit of independence—some partial, some total—they agree with
Keenan, who gives good advice: “Use less.”
No comments:
Post a Comment