America’s largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built.
Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection’s territory, which covers 13 states - from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey - serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world.
The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people’s power bills.
For context: In 2019, I was paying $0.09/KWh and today I pay about $0.29/KWh with yet another rate hike looming.
Behold, the actual “trickle down economics”.
I am very happy to not be on the grid. We have a smaller setup, but it runs the AC during the day (even when we are not home) and it’s FREE.
Oh yea and during recent heat waves people in town have been having power outages, not us.
I’d love to be self-sufficient but not quite able to do so right now.
Hopefully you will be able to someday!
We have been off grid about 8 months now. Right now we don’t even have water access. We haul water from Walmart. Just got a free rainwater roof a few days ago, and found free gutters, but need to find IBC tanks. It’s a ton of work but so satisfying.
I’ve got 4x55 gallon rain barrels for watering (they’re food grade but advised for non-potable water only). Definitely not enough to cover the household usage even if they were potable. I couldn’t imagine living without water service or a well on my property (not sure if a well would even be practical/possible here).
That’s a great start! I’m sure it can be filtered and sanitized. Filter out solids and kill the bacteria.
We use very little water, we wash dishes with a pump sprayer. The biggest use of water is drinking.
I don’t ever see myself disconnecting from the water company since I have to use sewer service and lack the space to install a septic system. Though I have been looking into plumbing in a grey water system to capture from sinks, showers, dishwasher, and the washing machine. Can do some simple filtering to re-use that for flushing or watering the lawn/garden.
My neighbor does that with his grey water. Just be sure to use the right biodegradable soaps.
bUt i wAs tOLd tHaT AI iSn’t bAD fOr thE enViRoNmeNt 🙃
The only silver lining here is that it’s lit a fire under me to get my small grid-tie solar setup out of storage (haven’t installed it at my new house yet) and expand it.
When I had that running at my old house ($0.09/KWh), my 1.2 KW setup was only saving me about $7-10/mo at most, but at $0.29/KWh, I’m looking at about $27-30.
Don’t you need an electrician to wire your house to tie in the panels?
Not really, unless you dont feel comfortable doing it. It’s like hooking a generator to the house. You just need to connect the AC output of your inverter to the new circuit breaker in your electric panel.
Checking prices the break even on that is years. So hook them up if you got them.
In this one, it’s all in the inverter. You just plug it into an outlet, and it can do up to 1000W (though 950 was the most I’ve ever gotten from 1.2 KW of PV coming in at ~90 volts).
You can have multiple inverters; they match the frequency and voltage of the incoming utility power and won’t output anything if there’s no utility power coming in (anti-islanding protection).
The only thing to be aware of is not over loading a circuit where you have them connected. I do have a dedicated circuit/outlet for that.
They’re useless if the power’s out, but I’m looking into something of a transfer switch to redirect the PV output from the grid-tie inverter to a regular one, but I haven’t gone too far down that path yet.
Edit: It’s the same principle that’s used in balcony solar
