Sounds good to me... I don't know of anywhere now that is completely off-grid. However, when I was a boy we moved from very quaint and civilised Dorset to a very un-civilised farm in Western Australia - no grid power or water (came off the house roof) or mains sewerage and only one TV channel (in monochrome!). We had a diesel generator and a bank of lead acid batteries in a tin shed at the bottom of the garden.
A bit later, in my teens and now back in the UK schooling, a friend I used to spend my holidays with (as my parents were still in Oz) lived on an island off the West Coast of Scotland. They, too relied on diesel generators for power (they got an undersea power cable around 1980). Both situations now would be ideal for renewable, off grid power - tho PV would have worked fine in Australia, a wind turbine would have been more appropriate in Scotland! The cost of installing mains power to remote dwellings can be astronomical and so, particularly considering how much cheaper PV is now than it was even 10 years ago, it can make huge financial sense to 'roll your own'. Even a mile or 2 of utility installed power cable could cost 10's of thousands to install and there are no government grants to help. There are thousands of derelict, extremely remote houses (mostly old farmers dwellings) dotted about the country here in the UK, most in wonderfully scenic places that would make fabulous homes where just this sort of improvement in technology would make resurrecting them a real possibility. A side-benefit would be improving communities and helping to reverse the flow of people away from the countryside to the cities and, at the same time, helping to preserve some of our most fabulous cultural and architectural heritage. MW On 17 Apr 2014, at 16:30, EVDL Administrator wrote: > In the US, the New Deal's Rural Electrification Act was quite successful. > However, in some European nations even today you can still find old farms > out in the sticks that have never had electricity. Imagine fitting such a > place with a generous offgrid PV array, and parking your EV beside it. (In > a lot of the more derelict cases you'd have to put up a new roof before you > could add PV to it. :-\) > > I welcome comment and criticism from our European correspondents, but if my > admittedly cursory reading about this is right, this might actually be > practical - at least for some (patient) folks. Many of these places, while > well away from big cities, are near small villages, and within EV range of > train stations. Who needs to rent an ICE for long trips when you have a > complete rail network at your disposal? Better yet, at least some of the > trains are electric. > > Just dreaming, I guess, but still ... > > David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA > EVDL Administrator _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
