Please check out this video on the off-grid Youtube channel – the film takes us back to the earliest days of the grid and shows how Thomas Edison quickly switched from selling light to selling power – and the best way to sell power was to make lightbulbs consume as much power as possible. From the start, the aim of utility companies was to sell us more energy rather than helping us save energy. It is now impossible to reverse that business model. We need a fresh start.
Most of us, most of the time can do without the grid. In an age of batteries, solar, and low-energy gadgets – the grid may only be needed for server farms, hospitals, and heavy industry. And governments – which always prefer large centralised projects to small decentralised ones.
The US army, for example, started taking its bases off-grid over a decade ago. The UK army, not so much, beyond a few diesel emergency generators.
The future is off-grid.
