The following transcript comes from a recent interview with Nicole Foss covering a wide range of practical steps and considerations for maintaining a fully or partially-sustainable home. The full audio interview can be accessed here.
Jim Puplava: Joining me on the program is Nicole Foss from the Automatic Earth and Nicole you recently did a video and it is called How I Prepared My Family for Peak Oil. I thought we would start our discussion today because I think one of the factors that we are starting to see right now, with oil prices at $90 in a weak recession along with high unemployment, is we are starting to see the effects of peak oil because you kind of wonder why we are at close to $90 given such weakness. Now some may say that is speculation but, putting that aside for now, I would like to talk about what you did to prepare your family. Now as I understand it Nicole, you sold your house in England in the 1990’s and you bought a farm in Ontario and lets talk about what you did as you discovered peak oil to get your family and prepare for it, what did you do first?
Nicole Foss: Well first, we looked at the viability of the model we had. We were living in England and the property bubble in England is quite extreme. It was extreme even then—it is worse now—but at the time we looked at a situation where everything that we had was tied up in our property. We would not have had the ability to be self-sufficient in any way, we would not have had enough land, and we wouldn't have had any spare resources so we thought this is probably not the best place to be. So we sold everything we had in England, we moved to Canada where I grew up, so I already had citizenship. We bought a farm and because property is a lot less overvalued in Canada we were able to buy a 40 acre farm with seven barns for half what we sold our house in England for. That gave us enough spare resources to then be able to install a renewable energy infrastructure for instance, and we also spent the next several years learning how to do things on a farm. So what we built was a system with three kilowatts of solar panels, we have a battery bank in the basement that runs all the essential loads 24 hours a day. So we are not off grid but all the essential loads are effectively off grid.
Jim Puplava: If I may stop you there, let us talk about the importance of batteries because a lot of people here in the US have solar panels but don't have a battery backup system. Let’s talk about the importance of those batteries.
Nicole Foss: Yes, if you do not have storage capacity, if the grid goes down, you have no power anymore than anybody else does. So what you have—if you have say a contract through feed and tariff—you have solar panels, you sell power to the grid, what you have installed is a money generating machine so long as the grid is still in existence. But if what you want is the power then you need to have a storage component. Now there are a number of feed and tariff contract systems that do not allow you to do this, so if you want a feed in tariff and you want to get a premium price for the electricity you produce, you cannot include a storage component. To me that completely misses the point of installing solar panels in the first place. We refused to connect towers to the grid even though they would have paid us 82 cents a kilowatt-hour had we done so because for us the storage component was critical. We have six deep cycle marine batteries in the basement; the system is designed so it will run the essential loads for four days even without any sun, any main power, or any generator fuel. We can charge those batteries with any one of those. If the sun is there fine, we can charge them with main power. We have two different kinds of generators, a gasoline generator, and a diesel generator that runs off our tractor. If we have any one of the above, we can charge the batteries and therefore we can run the essential loads. Four days without any of those and we might have a problem but there is a limit to what contingencies you can realistically cover. Now the essential loads are things like a fridge, freezer, a few lights, the security system, the sub pumps—the well pump is probably the most important because if we did not have the ability to run that we would not have any water in the house. If we could not run the sub pumps our basement would flood so we put in a system that runs only the essential loads off that battery bank and it runs them all the time.
There is another raft of things that are less essential but run off the generator panel, so for that we would have to have the main or either one of the kinds of generator fuel. So that would include things like a microwave or washing machine, things that are not essential but are rather nice to have and other than that, the remaining loads we would only have if we had main power. Things like the ability to cook with an electric stove for instance; it is far too big a load to run off any kind of renewable energy system or realistically any generator either. So when people put in renewable energy systems, they have to think about what are the essential loads. If they are trying to satisfy or to supply all the load they currently have, all their current demand, it is going to cost them a ridiculous amount of money and it is really not a good use of money. What we did when we moved into that house was we dropped our demand by 90% before we tried to supply what was left and we do not supply all of what was left, only the most essential things. So it is always better value to reduce your demand first—they would call it megawatts—so invest in reducing your demand before you attempt to invest in supply. If you cannot afford supply and storage, I would go for storage on its own because if you have simply a battery bank in your basement, if you have the ability to store say perhaps a weeks worth of electric power for your essential loads, chances are the main power is going to be available within some point within that week.
All the more likely, if you live in an urban area, if you are in a rural area it is harder—you have to be a lot more self-sufficient. You probably do want the ability to generate power, but if you live in a city—well even Bagdad gets a couple of hours of electricity a day. What the storage component does is allow you to not have to care when that couple of hours of electricity is because it simply recharges your batteries whenever it is available and then you can run your essential loads. So that really I think is the important way of looking at it, you want to have redundancy in your system so that there are many ways to achieve the same essential factor. So many ways to charge the batteries for instance or at my house one of the things we looked at was how many different ways could we cook and looking at all the different possible inputs that we might have. Well there is the electric stove, there is a wood stove in the kitchen, a 1928 Aga—we could run a microwave from a generator. We have solar cookers, we could cook on propane with the barbeque, or butane with the Coleman stove. We could set up a tripod outside in the courtyard and cook on an open fire with a dutch oven. When there is that many different ways of achieving the same essential function, then the odds are you are going to be able to achieve that function even if you do not have the full range of input.
Jim Puplava: Nicole you have a farm outside the city and you elected not to use wind power, why did you make that decision.
Nicole Foss: The effectiveness of wind power really critically depends on wind energy density because the amount of power you produce depends on the square of the wind velocity. So if you do not have good wind resources you are more or less wasting your money if you put in wind power. We do not have particularily good wind resources where we are; we are not by a lake or anything like that. We could have done it—it would have cost us the same amount as our solar panels, and we would have gotten about 15% of the energy from wind, 85% from solar for the same amount of money. Now it is useful if you are going to be off grid—you have no choice because there are three months when you really get no sun and you cannot cope with that unless you have an alternative. So for that you would have whatever you could get from wind and you would have a backup generator as well and maybe if you wanted to be particularily environmentally minded, you can run that generator off biodiesel so there are a number of ways to approach it. Another factor with wind power where we have our farm is ice storms, so if you have your wind turbine that gets iced unevenly, then the wind blows, it can simply rip itself to shreds. So you might be climbing up a 100-foot tower with a hammer in your hand in the middle of January trying to knock the ice off your wind turbine so that it is not wrecked the next time the wind blows. So there are a number of issues with wind where we are, I would say that if you are in a place with good wind resources, it is fine, but if you are not it is probably not a good use of your capital. You would be better off going with say more storage or say fuel storage for a generator but that can be difficult as well because fuel storage can be challenging. If you use gasoline you have to use stabilizers, even so it will not last more than two years at most, diesel will last longer but it can corrode your tanks from the inside out. Then the whole bottom of the tank can collapse so you have to have pretty good storage facilities if you are going to look at storing liquid fuel and that can be a challenge, plus it can also be expensive. So there are a number of quite the choices that have to be made and the right answer will really depend on where you are and what your personal capacity happens to be. Some places with geothermal is going to be wonderful, some places solar, some places wind, some places all three. The storage component is going to be critical whichever way you go I would argue though.
Jim Puplava: Nicole, you have done this on a 40-acre farm outside the city, let us talk about an individual living in the city because most people live in large metropolitan areas. Would you say solar is probably going to be the most practical way to implement something in that case because obviously in a city you cannot erect a wind turbine at least with the HOAs and probably the city would not let you do it? So is solar the most practical?
