After reading the N&O story about businesses generating their own power, it made me wonder what it would take to do this at home.
The typical residential power rates are pretty high. If I converted to a Time-Of-Use plan and found an alternative way to cover my demand during peak hours, I wonder how much money I could save? Certainly not enough to afford a big, honking, million-dollar diesel generator, but how about a bank of batteries and an inverter? Or a smaller generator (preferably powered by natural gas)? What would it take to cover my air conditioning?
Of course, I don’t use nearly as much electricity as would be required to make this a worthwhile endeavor, but its fun to imagine, anyway.
When I worked in Tampa we found that it paid for itself. The power company gave us a discount for being able to turn off our power for a bit during the summer. They even promised not to ask us to do it more than once every two years. We needed to run our diesel generator that much anyway just to make sure we still had good fuel.