Choosing Renewable Energy
(Page 2 of 7)
April/May 2008
By John Gulland and Wendy Milne
Energy doesn’t come easily these days. A few decades ago, huge new oil fields were being discovered all over the world. In the past, oil companies could get 100 barrels of oil to sell by investing one barrel of oil in production costs. Today, the return on energy invested is closer to 10-to-1. We’re convinced that replacing oil and gas with other energy options as their reserves deplete will not be easy or cheap.
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Our experience is that energy doesn’t come easily at home either. We have found the journey to household energy self-sufficiency challenging in many ways. These challenges often aren’t reflected in the upbeat articles on achieving home power and the seductive ads for solar panels and wind turbines.
Wendy: During my ongoing research with renewable energy users, I have found they have a surprising range of backgrounds and motivations. As I expected, many of the people I met were concerned with lightening their ecological footprint and reducing their dependence on oil and gas. I also met a handful of others who had less concern for environmental issues or conservation, but were instead motivated by religious beliefs or survivalism, and for whom independent energy systems met certain personal objectives.
Just as there is no single motivating factor for all renewable energy users, there may be more than one motivation within a household. Our house is a perfect example. While John revels in the intricacies of the technology, my interest in energy is more social, more about understanding energy in relation to people, politics, economics and the environment.
John: When we started down this path, my focus was on generating our own electricity at least partly because I was interested in the technologies. I resisted advice that the first thing we should do is analyze our electrical consumption, a task I found boring and unrewarding. I wanted to be the builder of an exotic system, not a parsimonious bean-counter with clipboard and calculator. This urge to obsess about electrical generating equipment rather than first changing our energy patterns was a mistake. I console myself with the knowledge that it is a near-universal trait of home energy newbies. Any solar and wind power dealer will tell you that the first task with new clients is to talk them out of their preconceived and wildly incorrect impressions about living with renewables.
Wendy: Drastically cutting our electricity consumption meant spending a lot of time thinking about energy, which seems to be the way of life for most renewable energy users. We check meters, adjust our tasks to the available energy and negotiate with each other whose task is more worthy of the power. This is a very different relationship to energy than for most North Americans. Conventional energy is ever-present, so easy and relatively cheap as to render it almost invisible. It takes no more effort than flipping a switch, spinning a dial or turning an ignition key. The upshot is that energy use has remained a largely unexamined activity in our everyday lives.
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