The Generator Generation

It's the two racketeers, in a photo taken a few weeks ago at the local hardware store. These are the items that are increasingly being used to keep houses warm and food cold through power outages like the one following Hurricane Sandy. They also added a considerable din to the post-storm atmosphere, and keep their owners running to the local gas station to (hopefully) get more gas to feed the little beasties. Last year, a neighbor almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning when he made the mistake of running one indoors to keep the sump pump going.

That many people see no option but to buy one speaks to the failed policies of the past thirty years, marked by a grievous underfunding of renewable energy production and storage which would otherwise by now have made our homes much more self-sufficient and resilient when the grid breaks down.

Though a generator such as these has a significant upside, it's counterweighted by a significant downside. As stated in an opinion piece in the NY Times, co-written by David Crane of the Princeton-based NRG energy company , "these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a power failure. And they’re not much help during a failure if gasoline is impossible to procure."

For several thousand dollars more, one can get a natural gas generator installed next to the house, which is quieter and will automatically kick on if the power goes out. Their power can be shared among neighbors, but they simply shift dependence on the electrical grid to dependence on the natural gas grid.

Both of these options, though rational for some households, represent a collectively irrational approach to solving the energy problem. When the uber-problem is dependence on climate-changing fossil fuels, generators just provide one more way to incrementally destabilize the climate. They represent an emergency room approach. Even for those who can afford them, they provide power, but no empowerment to change the world for the better.

Crane's oped calls for every home to have solar panels that could be used to provide power when the grid is down. (Most solar arrays automatically shut down during power outages, but there's apparently a switch that can be installed to feed power directly to the house in these situations.) Solar panels, unlike generators, would produce power not only during grid failures but year-round. What's missing from the equation, though, is batteries that can sustain power through the night and cloudy days.

My ideal is an approach in which one brings one's home energy needs down while developing enough home energy generation (some solar panels, plus battery storage in the house and/or electric car) to shift away from dependence on the grid. Thus far, in this friend-assisted search, the closest I've come to finding anything in the real world similar to this concept is a WholesaleSolar website, which looks worth exploring.

Solar panel prices have dropped dramatically in recent years, but battery improvements are coming much more slowly. That's why any shift away from our grid dependency--our seemingly perpetual state of arrested energy development--requires bringing energy consumption down to better match the generative and storing powers of solar panels and batteries.

Civilization's holy grail is getting energy right. We are offered endless, deceptively cheap ways to consume it, but no easy way to generate our own. How extraordinary, how earth-changing, to ween ourselves of star-crossed fuels from the underground, and segue as soon as possible from a generation of generator owners to the Generation Generation.