I'm off grid. Its nice to not have a monthly bill. But its definitely expensive. Parts break, replacements might not be manufactured anymore, there's a hard limit on available power. Even with the shortcomings, I prefer it. And I have a milk cow. She is awesome, why wouldn't you recommend one? Its like a giant lawnmower-rabbit-dog that transmutes weeds and grass into milk, which we then make into cheese and butter.
@@David-bh7hs Good. The arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else. That means the arctic is becoming habitable instead of the equator becoming uninhabitable. Climate change is beneficial, and part of a natural cycle.
@@David-bh7hs unironically I took a Co2 footprint test. I use less then someone living in an apartment. Partially because I plant trees every year. ( go orchard go!!) And partially because I use well under a kw a day. The test took into account my moomoo. Also the fact that they don't really do much damage. You are thinking of industrial farming with thousands of cows.
I served on nuclear submarines, which is technically off-grid I suppose. We made our own electricity, potable water, and even oxygen if the mission demanded it. It isn't nearly as romantic as you might think. One problem is milk; we only had it for about a week and a half and may have been "off grid" for up to about 90 days.. I recommended that we get a cow to get around that problem, but one cow probably doesn't provide enough milk for 121 crewmen and cows tend to go up slopes more readily than down, so you'd end up with a bunch of cows in the control room and that may not be safe. So I changed my recommendation to goats because they are more compact and go down as easily as up. They newer got back to me on that.
I had this brilliant mental image of a goat manning the periscope of a nuclear sub. I then remembered that 'Goat Simulator' game from a few years back and got a proper chuckle from it. Cheers mate- you put a big smile on my face.
I think a good solution is a hybrid system, at least for things like water and electricity. Where homes and apartments should have solar and batteries, but also have a grid connection. And you might have a well and/or rainwater collection system, but also have a city water connection. We're already seeing a lot of small island communities setup microgrids like this, where everyone has solar and battery, but they also share energy on the microgrid
Thanks for bringing that up, that was one I thought of using as an example too but the script was getting long and I was having problems getting a good list of examples.
Are apartments suitable for solar and rain connections? (limited roof) On site storage for water and eletricity though means you do not need to spend as much keeping the grid up 24/7.
I live on a boat, got solar and wind power and LiPo batteries, Starlink etc. Haven't got the room to grow food but could feasibly live off fish and crabs if I had to, the main advantage is that it's mobile and sometimes being able to just leave an area and relocate to a better one is the important part.
What did you do to afford that were you a doctor or financewall street guy who had a mental break and went off the grid? Also how much did it cost to set that up and what is your monthly cost now?
@@HyenaEmpyema It has an old 6 cylinder Gardner engine in it, known for long lived reliability and it will run on pretty much anything that will go through the fuel filters, the manual even tells you that you can put the used engine oil into the fuel tank when you do an oil change. Sail boats need a lot of looking after, often it will be easier to find fuel than find material for sails or rigging repairs, I suspect that in the event of some kind of apocalypse most of the modern sailboats will be unusable under sail within a decade.
"Off-grid living" has less of an appeal when you have reliable municipal power generation and supply. Power cuts are very rare where I live, and I only have a UPS to avoid surprise shutdowns. Also, youtube needs to fix their site.
Yeah many cities around the world have never had 100% continuous electricity or are starting to lose it now. More importantly, cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the newer generations. Unfortunately, the country isn't far behind... UA-cam is definitely bugged to hell, they gotta fix their shit😂
Power and Sewage Independence: The Container has Bacteria that don't survive in high Oxygen environment that produces lots of methane. And heat. The heat- With a high efficiency sterling engine... The methane is burned/Used to produce (flash)graphene and Hydrogen that is *not stored* but driven through a fuel cell. The graphene is put into a 3dp(rinter) or sold. You buy food, and keep the pure water.
13:00 I very highly recommend looking into used EV car batteries as home energy storage Specifically the Tesla model 3, you can pick up a 73 kilowatt-hour standard range battery in the junkyard for less than 5 grand, combine that with a 400 volt inverter for about two grand, and then using a controller such as ingenex to control the model 3s battery contactors and charge controller So for somewhat less than the cost of a Tesla powerwall, and some know how, you get a battery system that can run your entire house for several days with zero interruption, I honestly think every new home should have one of these
Please don't ever get a Tesla. Those car batteries are bombs in the making and if it wasn't due to government protectionism, Chinese EVs would be cheaply available and safe. 10000 for a Chinese car.
I've been experimenting with apartment solar, and I've been thinking along these lines a lot. Nice to see a video. I imagine that despite the average persons watt-hours used per day will go up, the basic needs will get covered by fewer and fewer watts, making it easier to run minimalist homes off a small energy source.
I really liked this one. It is fun to imagine what the far future holds, but I'm less likely to be a colonist to Andromeda than I am to be a guy who moves to the country for some peace and quiet.
God it be awesome to run a personal passively safe reactor in the basement. I would totally geek out and also I could live in colder mountainous climates where Solar is just not as good for. As someone that wants to DIY everything ( and has the skillset to do it , just over a long bit of time due to not going into debt / being a one man show), regulator constraint is the biggest thing stopping my journey off grid currently. Most semi rural / rural areas closer than 3 hours drive to a city tend to want large sq ft area homes, won't let you live on your own land while you build , ect. Sorry for the tangent, but I think the off grid space has a lot of room to experiment if left to its own devices to some extent. Building a home out of alternative materials/ designs for insulation efficiencies or other optimization. As well as alternative sewage /water processing and filtration. If you can show that it doesn't impact your surroundings in a negative way ( lets say just neutral way instead , cause most places demand property value growth , rather than staying neutral), I think it should be allowed. We also should allow individuals more grace to engage with when it comes to regulations than a multi-million dollar home builder that is trying to cut corners.
@@DRKILLIEDistributed grids are collections of "microgrids" that allow for smaller energy production facilities that provide power locally. They can link together to provide electricity to other grids during emergencies. They would make electrical distribution more efficient and hence cheaper.
@@jhoughjr1 the individual grids would be smaller and more numerous. Individual households would be able to contribute as well ideally. Different types of power generation would be used in some locales. A fully distributed grid would not have major collapses just because of a snowstorm.
@@jhoughjr1 For example. the entirety of the US and Canada is covered by 6 electrical grids right now. Each has wide distribution of generators and consumers and all except for the Texas one (which keeps fully isolated to avoid federal regulations) have interconnect points to draw from each other when needed, but operate separately most the time so as to reduce the transmission losses. The idea of microgrids would be to have that at the scale of counties or metro areas, with them operating separately when enough power is produced locally and interconnects only when surge power is needed from the neighbors or overproduction needs to be pushed to them. Which being on a single larger grid does for you, but at the cost of higher transmission losses as local power tries going to loads in every direction, not just to local loads, and local loads draw from power in every direction, not just the local ones. Required a LOT more logic and switching components, and battery power storage facilities if you want to design around average loads not peak loads, to make equally reliable to one big centralized grid, but would save some power if implemented correctly. And encourages more generator plants to be built smaller and closer to their end users, which works great for some forms of power, not as much for others.
Been thinking about this a ton. Warning; Novel ahead. Generalities; 1. The desire for autonomy comes from the fact that nature of the distribution of personality deficits in the "average person" interact as to create large waves of disruptions which sweep through society, occasionally making dense living situations inhospitable or even straight-up *dangerous*. 2. While electricity generation options are limited, your off-grid infrastructure will necessarily have to take the highest advantage of its inclement resources. (The corollary to that is that if something were discovered to generate unlimited energy, this whole exercise would be moot, and you could just live wherever and do whatever you want). Electricity: A) Generation: Solar is a strong all-around. Roof-ridge wind feels viable (I think the cost of current vendors feels extreme -> These systems should be far cheaper). In areas with sufficient groundwater and a small elevation drop, Involute dams provide a huge amount of consistent energy (~25-125 kW?), even enough for light or medium industry. Opportunities should be kept open for special-case generators given specific climates: Solar-Thermal turbines in hot climates, Biomass Burners in agricultural climates, geothermal (neighborhood-scale) in active areas, etc. B) Future: Barring some kind of ZPT generator, which of course obviates this entire exercise, I suspect that LFTRs such as discussed on YT are the only viable nuclear-power option currently on the books, and are about as far into the future as our science can reasonably see: [Unless 'they' are holding out on us, most of the mainstream Fusion stuff i.e. TOKOMAK has proven to be a dead end]. Once LFTRs are viable for personal / neighborhood deployment, the electricity issue is as good as solved. Copenhagen Atomics seems to be at the forefront, but Kirk Sorensen's research & activities are not far behind. C) Conservation: I feel that upfront cost into buildings which are well-built to capture/shed heat/cold as necessary is CRITICAL; Far too much of our electricity is burnt simply generating heat and creating light. Electricity should be used for "more interesting things" - chemical reactions, mechanical work, etc. A central reservoir of water kept at comfortable temperature by the inputs of the home's various heating/cooling systems and pumped around into radiators, etc, should serve in every environment, desert or arctic. Heat pumps + the holistic design to support them (such as said reservoir, colocation, heat exchangers from furnaces / stoves, etc.) must be employed in ALL CASES. Since heat is a waste product of all human activity, it is necessary to use this "free waste resource" to maximum economy, even at the cost of high cap-ex. Windows should be used efficiently to gather maximum natural light; Lights during daytime are a crying waste. D) Personal Storage: Same as C, I feel that upfront costs should be spent to build as large and reliable a storage system as necessary; A "Battery Room In The Basement" should be standard in homes serious about off-gridding, and the most reliable, dense, low-tech battery possible should be used. I feel that Lithiums are less-than-ideal solution for serious "Off-Gridders" -> They are expensive, volatile, high-tech/high-input, and low-lifespan. E) Systemic Storage: For "Deep Storage" - if Sabatier Process generator ever miniaturize as to fit in a shed, it would be excellent to dump all "super-surplus" energy (i.e. once the batteries are full) into it. Before turning on the Sabatier generator, however, it would be ideal to have a Micro-Grid hookup, so that you can top up you neighbors or support their operating industries, first (in return for whatever currency you wish). Water/Sewage: A) Septic tanks are an untenable solution, and I hear no one talking about this. Waste needs to be HANDLED in-situ for true levels of autonomy. The Earthship method of utilizing grey water to nurture plants, while well-intentioned, in not viable; Human waste (particularly once combined with all of our household products and wastes-of-industry) is not fertilizer; It's literally toxic waste, and needs to be handled as such. B) The first step would be to have a small ~shed-sized plant that separates/flocculates/concentrates the solid waste, and removes most of the water. The second step would be to capture, sequester, and desiccate the waste into dry material so it can be hygienically packaged and removed into the off-site local waste disposal system. The nearly-pure water could then to through a much-simpler purification system - many of which are all already DIY buildable or available off-the-shelf, and then be reused... or at least released safely. C) The ultimate ideal for Sewage (and Garbage) disposal would be to use a "Plasma Gasifier", with accompanying scrubbing-and-sequestration machinery, to immolate the sewage down into its gaseous and mineral components; The former could be scrubbed of sulfurs, nitrogen oxides, and halides by some simple appliances no larger than your water heater, and released to the atmosphere, whereas the latter could be used as gravel. The creation of that 'scrubbing' system is simply an exercise in industrial optimization - all the technology to do this already exists, someone just needs to put it all into a neat, complete, min-maxed package. D) The 'Water' Question comes after the 'Sewage' question, because a) it is a much simpler problem to solve, and b) in extreme desert settings, the water consumed pre-terraforming will necessarily be recycled from sewage. It would be best if this water were distilled, filtered, and as an extra precaution, sent through a bio-bed first and then RE-Filtered, just to reduce any residual superficial "ick factor". Moist climates obviously would make sewage-water reuse unnecessary. Food: A) My study of agriculture shows that agricultural productivity is chiefly a function of KNOWLEDGE above all else. Even ONE person's individual work - when armed with the top knowledge and best-practices gleaned from ALL available disparate sources - and even MORESO when augmented with simple mechanical machinery - can produce an ABSURD BOUNTY of agricultural products, EASILY enough for a comfortable, nourishing, and varied diet for MANY MORE TIMES people than the one worker himself. B) The acquisition, testing, archival, organization, tutorialization, and dissemination of this knowledge should be a leading concern of a segment of the population aspiring to autonomous lifestyles. C) In the meantime, increased interdependence can allow for a broadened palette to be achieved immediately. D) Capital expenditure into highly-designed greenhouses, appropriate desert waterforming/terraforming, and other such medium/longer-term projects would allow an individual / household to realize said productivity in ANY environment, even the arctic. E) Finally, there is an abundance of food storage methods, spanning a range electricity usage, would allow for the storage of such bounties as described above, and as such would allow for an extreme level food resilience (even in excess of that of our modern grid-based food distribution system), even in a fully-autonomous setting.
I already do this. I live in a tent and have done for a decade. I couldn't have lived like this even 50 years ago. I have a modern carbon fibre and plastic tent that doesn't rot and can easily withstand bad weather, they last a year or two. I have plastic sleeping bags that last at least as long as a conventional bed in a normal home. I'm not fully off grid as I wouldn't be watching this video or writing this comment if I was, but I get my power from solar and a bunch of batteries, and my water and sewage are also sorted out locally.
Do you know what is really funny about this family of episodes. They help define our techno ecosystem cycle. So that all the crap (in some literal cases) we produce. Can be recycled back into a system some how.
We need some sort of list of basic, reliable technologies that are easy to maintain and reliable, and can be built on site. Some sort of Standard Technology Catalogue (STC)
A detail of nuclear power often overlooked is the detail that it is still a steam engine and the hot water has to go somewhere. The problem, especially with hot summers is that you can have the choice between letting your reactor work with a lower output or kill the river's ecosystem where your cooling water comes from and goes back into.
France regularly shuts down nuclear power plants in the summer when the energy is needed the most. If they don't, their rivers bake. If they aren't built on rivers, they're built on coasts and there are similar issues with the local coastal ecosystems overheating right when the power is needed most.
I'm off grid with solar for electricity, starlink for comms, and autogyro for groceries and travel. Ok, ok, I don't really have an autogyro but every man needs one, and every man needs a hatch (a bunker).
Strontium-90 would be a good RTG heat source. It is a long-lived fission product that dominates the fission product waste stream after a few years. Using it in RTGs wouod be a neat solution to the waste problem. It isn't really waste if you find applications for it. So too would Cs-137, but in more heavily shielded units.
I went and got me one of those solar generator/ power stations. The thing is absolutely amazing and what it can do even without having, Solar power running to it it has enough capacity to run my home entertainment system pulling about 400 to 500Watts for almost a day straight. Sunny days of course replenish the power almost as fast as it uses it. I've managed to put about 600-700 watts back into it at the peak of the day. But I could also Connect it to a gas generator to charge that battery supply backup running the generator just long enough to fully charge it and then turning the generator back off saving fuel since I'm not continuously needing the 2500 Watts it produces. And the Power station has enough kick to it that I can plug in High energy devices like heat guns and run them without a problem granted I'm only gonna be able to run them for about an hour but I can still run them if I needed! I can even plug in a small Electric heater and run the thing at about 600 W for about 10 hours. So I have a little bit of emergency heat should the power go out in the winter. Of course I also have a propane heater for that emergency just in case
My life had blown up, I had moved back to look after my parents and I was on antidepressants. The power went out for a week and suddenly I was in my element. I stopped the pills and managed to help out the elderly residents of the small village where they lived. For the first time in years, I had control over my life. That's something that doesn't fit into any cost/benefit metric but, to me, is truly the main factor.
Power consumption and rolling brownouts during sunny weather due to air conditioning was a thing i never thought of. Living near arctic where air conditioning for cooling isn't common and we need a lot of power for heating which happens mostly during time when the sun doesn't really shine at all and the sunny summer days having comparatively low energy needs made me ignorant of the fact that it is the opposite for lower latitude regions. It is easy to miss simple things that seem obvious to the the people experiencing it but those that don't never really consider at all
If we want to change the way people get their electricity, then scare tactics and panic talk are the worst way to convince them. THIS IS THE WAY. Push the practicality angles. Emphasize the resulting durability of a distributed grid. Preach the doctrine of energy independence. Show the benefits of mixing multiple methods of generation for brining down costs as well as hazards. Small modular reactors for primary generation, home-scale solar/battery combinations for long-term savings, natural gas for rapidly available on-demand power during peak periods. Add in new technology to replace components with better options as they become viable.
The problem is small modular reactors are not only expensive but with the amount of solar on grids currently their is not any room for 24/7 generation.
As is brought out here... the biggest problem with nuclear is SCALE. Controversy and overregulation (not necessary safety stuff, but things actively designed to hinder new construction) have made them artificially expensive. If we scaled up production of fissile materials, savings would be realized. Too many people are afraid of nuclear power for either outdated or overhyped reasons.
@@man_at_the_end_of_time Look up the duck curve. Due to solar their is a very low demand during the day and that is your limit for additional baseload 24/7 generation.
As a fellow soldier, I have to say your videos really helped me relax before sleep at night in Iraq last year when all the one way UASs were dropping. Thanks for your service both as a soldier and a science communicator
Many homes on the plains had wind generators and storage batteries. IMO grid connected solar farms in the south west U.S. would be better. In the north when days are short is when we need power the most.
I've seen reports pointing to the $20 per kWh range for iron-air batteries, and if they pull that off they'll be an excellent choice for all kinds of stationary storage solutions.
I have heard that they can only be discharged at 1% (It may be a diffrent chemistry though.) Which means that you need 10Kwh of batteries to power the same amount as 1Kwh of a 10 hour battery. or 100 times a 1 hour battery.
I would love to go off the grid so no one can find me or bother (tip: build a fence on your property like to strengthen the legal “cartilage” of your private property). I imagine that if I could open portals like Dr. Strange/Dr. Fate/Sonic The Hedgehog I would live in a state with no state income tax, shop in states with no sales tax, and gas my car in an alaskan locality with no sales tax on top of having the lowest gas tax!
@swamphawk6227 Corrections: *bother me *property line (YT won’t let me edit for some reason). I like to imagine using tiny portals just big enough for a signal to pass through so I can live on the Moon/Mars/further still and still have access to all my old streaming services accounts & etc. I also like to imagine using Forerunner ftl or Borg Transwarp corridor to make the trip to Earth from Proxima Centauri (2.55060729 minutes using Forerunner ftl) or the KOI-5889 system (slightly over 50.6 hours using Forerunner ftl or less than 5 minutes using Borg Transwarp corridor) at least for the holidays & family get togethers.
Then you would have to teach any kids you may have, not have any legal solutions to any civil dispute, and have no emergency service upon which to preserve the life you have built. Anyone could come and take what was yours with no more reprisal than what you could personally deliver. It would be a very paranoid existence.
I have heard it said that most people's personal groups are no larger than 150 people, family, friends, and acquaintances, and they are most comfortable in a town of between 5 to 10 thousand.
I live off grid in the UK, rural, we have to drive for 20 minutes to take kids to school or go shopping. I lived in london for 20 years and I had enough, I hate cities. Over crowded, expensive, polluted, unfriendly. Now I live in a nice modest house and I fitted solar, wind, we dug a well and installed an RO filter for it. I have absolutely 0 bills for the house except the local taxes everyone pays. When the cost of energy in europe skyrocketed, we were thankfully unaffected. This year, we're planting corn in the field and I hope to get some chickens. It's not for everyone, younger me hated it because I grew up in the countryside and then moved to london and stayed after education. Now I wouldn't give up being off-grid for anything. Thankfully I can work remotely and starlink made that possible (there's no fibre here)
An interesting related topic is present day tech supporting “Producerism” as distinct from traditional off grid strategies; understanding your nexus between off grid and space colonization. Producerism seeks to use technology to create multiple income or avoided cost strategies to empower the middle class. An ancillary benefit is some robustness and protection against supply chain disruptions. It also builds local economies.
It would be awesome to have bi-directional diesel fuel cells. Sure, the round-trip efficiency would be bad, but think of the low cost per kWh stored. You could store enough energy for a whole winter!
Would desalination via freezing be easier/cheaper than via boiling? Osmosis filtering seems to be what the industrial scale is leading towards, and maybe some solar based greenhouse style smaller output bigger footprint but cheaper ones. How bout a video on desalination, or just getting water anywhere and everywhere?
Nickel-Iron batteries were invented by Edison. They have cycle lives which make Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries seem flimsy. Their big disadvantage is very low energy density, low voltage, and very high weight. However, none of those is that big a deal stationary use.
Low voltage is not that big a deal: 3 nickle-iron batttries in series = 3.6V - According to wikipedia though: You get -6.6Wh/ $US for Nickle-Iron. -8.7Wh/ $US for Lithium Ion - The big thing I cannot find is how long it takes to discharge. I know pure iron batteries take 100 hours to discharge which means you need 10 times the amount of them to provide the same amount of power.
A solar powered pump or a windmill like my grandparents had, a cast iron wood stove for cooking, hot water and heat and keroscene or LED lights are about all that is really needed. To heat with electricity is prohibitively expensive and heat pumps are not a good option up here in minnesota. We do like our showers, clothes washers, dish washers, wide screen tvs and vacuum cleaners though which necessitates adding a lot of complexity.
No. Heat pumps, even converting the heat energy from your wood stove to electrocity, heat pumps are more effcient, they heat up better then the direct heat. I know it sounds like ot breaks physics, but thats because a heat pump is more or less as close to a maxwells demon as you can get.
(Hee, though in your woodland scenario, it occurs to me that if the people there are logging to any extent , they may as well do some of the cutting in the shape of a road: makes moving and potentially processing that wood a lot easier. (I happen to tend a few acres of woodlot, the paths through there are pretty important for daily tasks and certainly if you were harvesting or having someone harvest some of the timber. Even just to build all that stuff, getting it there is likely to be a lot easier with at least some form of road.
Another option for battery storage is sodium-sulfur batteries. They would allow us to reduce the use of our limited supplies of lithium for stationary uses where we don't get all that much benefit from the higher energy density we can get out of lithium batter chemistries.
In a slightly less optimistic Future of the grid would be less of a choice and more of a necessity, as it is currently for many people in less fortunate parts of the world.
@@HyenaEmpyema Their is a mesh on top to stop the big things coming in. Our main tank by accident also has a first flush diverter. (basically the first bit of rain does not go into the tank)
I live completely off grid. Solar panels and Lithium batteries have DROPPED in price by 30-50% in the last four years. Meanwhile local electric company has raised rates 8-12% every other year. Solar power has no moving parts and should last decades.
@@dansmith1661 The answer is both, in no small part because governments and energy companies the world over are pushing a decent sum to attempting to crack better panel and battery configurations. Li-ion wins out at the moment because of the current inertia behind it. Doesn't mean alternatives don't exist, or that nobody's looking into them. It's just "the easiest" right now.
I used to dream of living off the grid. It never happened - too much city life and expensive real estate here in old Europe - but I've never stopped imagining what it would be like. These days, I'm more thinking of having an AI assistant that's not connected to the network of some super-corporation, because why would I ever trust a corporate AI? As an aside, I wonder if these dreams of personal independence are a particularly western idea, or something universal to human beings. In any case, nice to see an episode dedicated to it.
Actual independence where nobody is around? That's a Purely AMERICAN idea. No sane Asian would do that since community is what kept them alive during times of crisis. You just bought into American propaganda...
My home in Minneapolis Nordeast was a Grain Mill cookie-cutter, but a wonderful house, STILL has _some_ knob and tube (now replaced). House foundation laid 1894. "Universal" utilities are rarely evenly-distributed in space and time. Universal "Internet" is the most recent entitlement, but I think it is correct. If I can own even a military-restricted desktop Atomically-Precise Fabricator (APF) or access to an APM (Atomically-precise Manufacturing utility) then I would feel rather autarchic but it would not increase my belligerence.
You forgot Kid Energy. Generators attached to exercise equipment can kill two birds with one stone. Put a screen on an exercise bike and call it a Fully Immersive Virtual Video Game and they will beg you to power the house. 😅😂 😎🤖
Um. About 20-50W out, before generation and transmission losses. That won't run a house, that'll run a 3-spot phone charger. Note that a gym tried this, and found a gym full of hard-riding gym junkies wasn't enough for the gym's lights. Let alone the fridges and other power-hogs.🎉
I'm trying to do some sci fi, and I'm having trouble trying to imagine what sympathetic aliens would be like. I did a search, and I saw that you don't have a video on sympathetic aliens! the best I can imagine is something like the relationship between aphids and ants, or maybe how some dolphins would defend a human from a shark, but i'm very curious to know what you think. Can you do a video on sympathetic aliens?
"Why don't we put our power lines in the ground where they belong?" "Because they break all the time, and it's way cheaper to fix them in the air." "Why do they break all they time?" 🤦♀️
I see all this talk about self-reliant options as purely transitory, belonging to a period roughly started off with Edison et al. All this chaos re. fossil fuels/solar/wind/geothermal/space-based/batteries/nuclear should end as soon as economical, small fusion power modules become available. Thereafter I don't foresee the energy landscape changing for quite a long time.
When I was a kid, we had city water or irrigation water. Can something like that be done with electricity? Some rooms powered by the grid and others by the generator? There are variations. Think of the red emergency power outlets in hospitals.
A lot of companies make "smart load panels" now that dynamically switch outlets between grid power & batteries, or turn on an auto-start generator. I don't have one of those, but we do have solar + batteries, and the inverter has a 60A "critical loads sub-panel" that keeps our fridge and furnace running during outages. It beats indoor camping.
or not, as not live in a city. without the need of the massive workforce for factories, he cities are not the best way to live. especially not the skyscraper style ones. so it could easily be reversed within the next few decades and more and more people will live in a strange, advanced rural way.
Cities have advantages beyond manufacturing. They are one of humanity’s oldest inventions. More people might go suburban/rural, but cities are safe for quite a while.
@@highlorddarkstar cities as we think now is quite new idea, what ancient people called cities were mostly not even town, but slightly bigger villages today, and the actual cities were also just a large stretch of town with individual houses and their own little everything that a village house would have today. so not really safe. and not much benefit today, actually mostly only negatives.
@@thorin1045 historical cities in antiquity had apartment buildings, fast food, street food, and lots of things we consider modern. Cities allow for certain efficiencies, which couldn’t be provided outside of cities historically. Today, we can tolerate the inefficiency required for suburban and rural amenities, but that doesn’t mean that the cost isn’t there. Cities drive specialization. Every town can support a doctor, but you need a centralized network to support a pediatric oncologist. That may be changing with remote medicine technology, but you still have a center to be remote from.
My wife and I are building off grid. For a time it will be a vacation home. But eventually we’ll retire there. There will be nothing more technologically advanced than a propane refrigerator. We’ll die younger than we have to and we’re fine with that.
@ old people on there own in the middle of nowhere with wood heating and no electricity. Medical services hours away. Die young is meant relatively. Doesn’t mean we’ll die at 50. But younger than we would have had f we had grocery stores, pharmacies, and doctors near by.
@Fred-rv2tu you'd be surprised. My country's backwoods are full of 80+ year olds living like that. And that's with their understanding of healthy life habits. If you were somewhat intentional about it and were diligent about not neglecting health issues as they occur there is no reason why you wouldn't reach 90+. Sure, emergency services are good for accidents, but dying of that is more bad luck than inherent con if rural life.
The desire for independence is a, not necessarily uniquely, but very American impulse. I'm not sure that it is anywhere near as common outside the U.S.
Wouldn't it be easier to just use nuclear waste in a pool, with a pool around it like a heat exchanger so the useable water isn't radioactive but it melts the Arctic ice into drinkable water for 100 years with no servicing required except for dumping more snow into the outer bowl?
Huh. Well that viewership is *_thoroughly_* disappointing to me! For reasons you've already described, in-situ-resources-utilization and it's affliated manufacturing and developmental implications are like... top five in my interests in technologies of this century. I feel like I'd even be studying something adjacent to it if I were doing a Ph.D, and it's an _obvious _*_game-changer_* for all colonization let alone simply space colonization. Even though this episode was far more grounded than many, I still didn't forsee this "dip". 😓
I'm off grid. Its nice to not have a monthly bill. But its definitely expensive. Parts break, replacements might not be manufactured anymore, there's a hard limit on available power. Even with the shortcomings, I prefer it. And I have a milk cow. She is awesome, why wouldn't you recommend one? Its like a giant lawnmower-rabbit-dog that transmutes weeds and grass into milk, which we then make into cheese and butter.
But what about their farts melting the ice caps??
@@David-bh7hsis certainly not animal life warming the planet lol
@@David-bh7hs Good. The arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else. That means the arctic is becoming habitable instead of the equator becoming uninhabitable. Climate change is beneficial, and part of a natural cycle.
@@David-bh7hshopefully in the future they can capture those farts , dream big.
@@David-bh7hs unironically I took a Co2 footprint test. I use less then someone living in an apartment. Partially because I plant trees every year. ( go orchard go!!) And partially because I use well under a kw a day. The test took into account my moomoo. Also the fact that they don't really do much damage. You are thinking of industrial farming with thousands of cows.
I served on nuclear submarines, which is technically off-grid I suppose. We made our own electricity, potable water, and even oxygen if the mission demanded it. It isn't nearly as romantic as you might think. One problem is milk; we only had it for about a week and a half and may have been "off grid" for up to about 90 days.. I recommended that we get a cow to get around that problem, but one cow probably doesn't provide enough milk for 121 crewmen and cows tend to go up slopes more readily than down, so you'd end up with a bunch of cows in the control room and that may not be safe. So I changed my recommendation to goats because they are more compact and go down as easily as up. They newer got back to me on that.
I had this brilliant mental image of a goat manning the periscope of a nuclear sub. I then remembered that 'Goat Simulator' game from a few years back and got a proper chuckle from it. Cheers mate- you put a big smile on my face.
10/10 big brain 🧠 here op
That was good!!!
Well first, thank you, I've never figured out how they recruit folks for submarine duty, I'd go mad :)
"May not be safe" lol.
I think a good solution is a hybrid system, at least for things like water and electricity. Where homes and apartments should have solar and batteries, but also have a grid connection. And you might have a well and/or rainwater collection system, but also have a city water connection.
We're already seeing a lot of small island communities setup microgrids like this, where everyone has solar and battery, but they also share energy on the microgrid
Thanks for bringing that up, that was one I thought of using as an example too but the script was getting long and I was having problems getting a good list of examples.
Are apartments suitable for solar and rain connections? (limited roof)
On site storage for water and eletricity though means you do not need to spend as much keeping the grid up 24/7.
I live on a boat, got solar and wind power and LiPo batteries, Starlink etc. Haven't got the room to grow food but could feasibly live off fish and crabs if I had to, the main advantage is that it's mobile and sometimes being able to just leave an area and relocate to a better one is the important part.
What did you do to afford that were you a doctor or financewall street guy who had a mental break and went off the grid? Also how much did it cost to set that up and what is your monthly cost now?
Is it a sailboat? Otherwise you are limited by fuel availability.
Stock up on vitamin c, guy
@@cowboyjohnn Im a truck driver, was cheaper than buying and maintaining a house.
@@HyenaEmpyema It has an old 6 cylinder Gardner engine in it, known for long lived reliability and it will run on pretty much anything that will go through the fuel filters, the manual even tells you that you can put the used engine oil into the fuel tank when you do an oil change.
Sail boats need a lot of looking after, often it will be easier to find fuel than find material for sails or rigging repairs, I suspect that in the event of some kind of apocalypse most of the modern sailboats will be unusable under sail within a decade.
Your videos on near future themes are so good, never miss them
"Off-grid living" has less of an appeal when you have reliable municipal power generation and supply. Power cuts are very rare where I live, and I only have a UPS to avoid surprise shutdowns.
Also, youtube needs to fix their site.
Yeah many cities around the world have never had 100% continuous electricity or are starting to lose it now. More importantly, cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the newer generations. Unfortunately, the country isn't far behind...
UA-cam is definitely bugged to hell, they gotta fix their shit😂
Happy Arthursday! If you're living off the grid, I'm glad to know that you make an exception for streaming Isaac Arthur.
You don't think off grid means no internet do tou?
Power and Sewage Independence:
The Container has Bacteria that don't survive in high Oxygen environment that produces lots of methane. And heat.
The heat- With a high efficiency sterling engine...
The methane is burned/Used to produce (flash)graphene and Hydrogen that is *not stored* but driven through a fuel cell.
The graphene is put into a 3dp(rinter) or sold.
You buy food, and keep the pure water.
Imagine that not that long ago everybody was off grid.
And millions more died every year.
@@iExploderthats what happens when you good medicine just does not exist.
Not because the average person lacked electrcity
@@notyetdeleted6319Actually no, availability of electricity DOES help!
@iExploder so nothing's changed
A lot less of everybody
13:00
I very highly recommend looking into used EV car batteries as home energy storage
Specifically the Tesla model 3, you can pick up a 73 kilowatt-hour standard range battery in the junkyard for less than 5 grand, combine that with a 400 volt inverter for about two grand, and then using a controller such as ingenex to control the model 3s battery contactors and charge controller
So for somewhat less than the cost of a Tesla powerwall, and some know how, you get a battery system that can run your entire house for several days with zero interruption, I honestly think every new home should have one of these
Please don't ever get a Tesla. Those car batteries are bombs in the making and if it wasn't due to government protectionism, Chinese EVs would be cheaply available and safe. 10000 for a Chinese car.
I've been experimenting with apartment solar, and I've been thinking along these lines a lot. Nice to see a video. I imagine that despite the average persons watt-hours used per day will go up, the basic needs will get covered by fewer and fewer watts, making it easier to run minimalist homes off a small energy source.
I really liked this one. It is fun to imagine what the far future holds, but I'm less likely to be a colonist to Andromeda than I am to be a guy who moves to the country for some peace and quiet.
God it be awesome to run a personal passively safe reactor in the basement. I would totally geek out and also I could live in colder mountainous climates where Solar is just not as good for. As someone that wants to DIY everything ( and has the skillset to do it , just over a long bit of time due to not going into debt / being a one man show), regulator constraint is the biggest thing stopping my journey off grid currently. Most semi rural / rural areas closer than 3 hours drive to a city tend to want large sq ft area homes, won't let you live on your own land while you build , ect. Sorry for the tangent, but I think the off grid space has a lot of room to experiment if left to its own devices to some extent. Building a home out of alternative materials/ designs for insulation efficiencies or other optimization. As well as alternative sewage /water processing and filtration. If you can show that it doesn't impact your surroundings in a negative way ( lets say just neutral way instead , cause most places demand property value growth , rather than staying neutral), I think it should be allowed. We also should allow individuals more grace to engage with when it comes to regulations than a multi-million dollar home builder that is trying to cut corners.
Distributed grids are possible.
what's that?
@@DRKILLIEDistributed grids are collections of "microgrids" that allow for smaller energy production facilities that provide power locally. They can link together to provide electricity to other grids during emergencies. They would make electrical distribution more efficient and hence cheaper.
@@AnthonyMorris-e3cso what we have now
@@jhoughjr1 the individual grids would be smaller and more numerous. Individual households would be able to contribute as well ideally. Different types of power generation would be used in some locales. A fully distributed grid would not have major collapses just because of a snowstorm.
@@jhoughjr1 For example. the entirety of the US and Canada is covered by 6 electrical grids right now. Each has wide distribution of generators and consumers and all except for the Texas one (which keeps fully isolated to avoid federal regulations) have interconnect points to draw from each other when needed, but operate separately most the time so as to reduce the transmission losses. The idea of microgrids would be to have that at the scale of counties or metro areas, with them operating separately when enough power is produced locally and interconnects only when surge power is needed from the neighbors or overproduction needs to be pushed to them.
Which being on a single larger grid does for you, but at the cost of higher transmission losses as local power tries going to loads in every direction, not just to local loads, and local loads draw from power in every direction, not just the local ones.
Required a LOT more logic and switching components, and battery power storage facilities if you want to design around average loads not peak loads, to make equally reliable to one big centralized grid, but would save some power if implemented correctly. And encourages more generator plants to be built smaller and closer to their end users, which works great for some forms of power, not as much for others.
Been thinking about this a ton. Warning; Novel ahead.
Generalities;
1. The desire for autonomy comes from the fact that nature of the distribution of personality deficits in the "average person" interact as to create large waves of disruptions which sweep through society, occasionally making dense living situations inhospitable or even straight-up *dangerous*.
2. While electricity generation options are limited, your off-grid infrastructure will necessarily have to take the highest advantage of its inclement resources. (The corollary to that is that if something were discovered to generate unlimited energy, this whole exercise would be moot, and you could just live wherever and do whatever you want).
Electricity:
A) Generation: Solar is a strong all-around. Roof-ridge wind feels viable (I think the cost of current vendors feels extreme -> These systems should be far cheaper). In areas with sufficient groundwater and a small elevation drop, Involute dams provide a huge amount of consistent energy (~25-125 kW?), even enough for light or medium industry. Opportunities should be kept open for special-case generators given specific climates: Solar-Thermal turbines in hot climates, Biomass Burners in agricultural climates, geothermal (neighborhood-scale) in active areas, etc.
B) Future: Barring some kind of ZPT generator, which of course obviates this entire exercise, I suspect that LFTRs such as discussed on YT are the only viable nuclear-power option currently on the books, and are about as far into the future as our science can reasonably see: [Unless 'they' are holding out on us, most of the mainstream Fusion stuff i.e. TOKOMAK has proven to be a dead end]. Once LFTRs are viable for personal / neighborhood deployment, the electricity issue is as good as solved. Copenhagen Atomics seems to be at the forefront, but Kirk Sorensen's research & activities are not far behind.
C) Conservation: I feel that upfront cost into buildings which are well-built to capture/shed heat/cold as necessary is CRITICAL; Far too much of our electricity is burnt simply generating heat and creating light. Electricity should be used for "more interesting things" - chemical reactions, mechanical work, etc. A central reservoir of water kept at comfortable temperature by the inputs of the home's various heating/cooling systems and pumped around into radiators, etc, should serve in every environment, desert or arctic. Heat pumps + the holistic design to support them (such as said reservoir, colocation, heat exchangers from furnaces / stoves, etc.) must be employed in ALL CASES. Since heat is a waste product of all human activity, it is necessary to use this "free waste resource" to maximum economy, even at the cost of high cap-ex. Windows should be used efficiently to gather maximum natural light; Lights during daytime are a crying waste.
D) Personal Storage: Same as C, I feel that upfront costs should be spent to build as large and reliable a storage system as necessary; A "Battery Room In The Basement" should be standard in homes serious about off-gridding, and the most reliable, dense, low-tech battery possible should be used. I feel that Lithiums are less-than-ideal solution for serious "Off-Gridders" -> They are expensive, volatile, high-tech/high-input, and low-lifespan.
E) Systemic Storage: For "Deep Storage" - if Sabatier Process generator ever miniaturize as to fit in a shed, it would be excellent to dump all "super-surplus" energy (i.e. once the batteries are full) into it. Before turning on the Sabatier generator, however, it would be ideal to have a Micro-Grid hookup, so that you can top up you neighbors or support their operating industries, first (in return for whatever currency you wish).
Water/Sewage:
A) Septic tanks are an untenable solution, and I hear no one talking about this. Waste needs to be HANDLED in-situ for true levels of autonomy. The Earthship method of utilizing grey water to nurture plants, while well-intentioned, in not viable; Human waste (particularly once combined with all of our household products and wastes-of-industry) is not fertilizer; It's literally toxic waste, and needs to be handled as such.
B) The first step would be to have a small ~shed-sized plant that separates/flocculates/concentrates the solid waste, and removes most of the water. The second step would be to capture, sequester, and desiccate the waste into dry material so it can be hygienically packaged and removed into the off-site local waste disposal system. The nearly-pure water could then to through a much-simpler purification system - many of which are all already DIY buildable or available off-the-shelf, and then be reused... or at least released safely.
C) The ultimate ideal for Sewage (and Garbage) disposal would be to use a "Plasma Gasifier", with accompanying scrubbing-and-sequestration machinery, to immolate the sewage down into its gaseous and mineral components; The former could be scrubbed of sulfurs, nitrogen oxides, and halides by some simple appliances no larger than your water heater, and released to the atmosphere, whereas the latter could be used as gravel. The creation of that 'scrubbing' system is simply an exercise in industrial optimization - all the technology to do this already exists, someone just needs to put it all into a neat, complete, min-maxed package.
D) The 'Water' Question comes after the 'Sewage' question, because a) it is a much simpler problem to solve, and b) in extreme desert settings, the water consumed pre-terraforming will necessarily be recycled from sewage. It would be best if this water were distilled, filtered, and as an extra precaution, sent through a bio-bed first and then RE-Filtered, just to reduce any residual superficial "ick factor". Moist climates obviously would make sewage-water reuse unnecessary.
Food:
A) My study of agriculture shows that agricultural productivity is chiefly a function of KNOWLEDGE above all else. Even ONE person's individual work - when armed with the top knowledge and best-practices gleaned from ALL available disparate sources - and even MORESO when augmented with simple mechanical machinery - can produce an ABSURD BOUNTY of agricultural products, EASILY enough for a comfortable, nourishing, and varied diet for MANY MORE TIMES people than the one worker himself.
B) The acquisition, testing, archival, organization, tutorialization, and dissemination of this knowledge should be a leading concern of a segment of the population aspiring to autonomous lifestyles.
C) In the meantime, increased interdependence can allow for a broadened palette to be achieved immediately.
D) Capital expenditure into highly-designed greenhouses, appropriate desert waterforming/terraforming, and other such medium/longer-term projects would allow an individual / household to realize said productivity in ANY environment, even the arctic.
E) Finally, there is an abundance of food storage methods, spanning a range electricity usage, would allow for the storage of such bounties as described above, and as such would allow for an extreme level food resilience (even in excess of that of our modern grid-based food distribution system), even in a fully-autonomous setting.
I already do this. I live in a tent and have done for a decade. I couldn't have lived like this even 50 years ago. I have a modern carbon fibre and plastic tent that doesn't rot and can easily withstand bad weather, they last a year or two. I have plastic sleeping bags that last at least as long as a conventional bed in a normal home. I'm not fully off grid as I wouldn't be watching this video or writing this comment if I was, but I get my power from solar and a bunch of batteries, and my water and sewage are also sorted out locally.
I would love to be a sentient spaceship that can do basically everything I want to.
Great episode! In thinking of far future off the grid: How feasible is a Space Engineers-style portable refinery and assembler architecture system?
Thanks for the content posting on RUMBLE today as well, I watched it there and enjoyed it.
Do you know what is really funny about this family of episodes. They help define our techno ecosystem cycle. So that all the crap (in some literal cases) we produce. Can be recycled back into a system some how.
We need some sort of list of basic, reliable technologies that are easy to maintain and reliable, and can be built on site.
Some sort of Standard Technology Catalogue (STC)
This makes my top 5 of all your videos.
A detail of nuclear power often overlooked is the detail that it is still a steam engine and the hot water has to go somewhere. The problem, especially with hot summers is that you can have the choice between letting your reactor work with a lower output or kill the river's ecosystem where your cooling water comes from and goes back into.
France regularly shuts down nuclear power plants in the summer when the energy is needed the most. If they don't, their rivers bake. If they aren't built on rivers, they're built on coasts and there are similar issues with the local coastal ecosystems overheating right when the power is needed most.
@@KentoLeoDragon France won't need energy since they care so much about Ukraine and global alarmings.
Air cooling towers but that is more expensive and has to be designed.
I'm off grid with solar for electricity, starlink for comms, and autogyro for groceries and travel. Ok, ok, I don't really have an autogyro but every man needs one, and every man needs a hatch (a bunker).
Strontium-90 would be a good RTG heat source. It is a long-lived fission product that dominates the fission product waste stream after a few years. Using it in RTGs wouod be a neat solution to the waste problem. It isn't really waste if you find applications for it. So too would Cs-137, but in more heavily shielded units.
A leak would devastate the local region for all life for thousands of years. I hope you trust your maintenance company.
I went and got me one of those solar generator/ power stations. The thing is absolutely amazing and what it can do even without having, Solar power running to it it has enough capacity to run my home entertainment system pulling about 400 to 500Watts for almost a day straight. Sunny days of course replenish the power almost as fast as it uses it. I've managed to put about 600-700 watts back into it at the peak of the day. But I could also Connect it to a gas generator to charge that battery supply backup running the generator just long enough to fully charge it and then turning the generator back off saving fuel since I'm not continuously needing the 2500 Watts it produces. And the Power station has enough kick to it that I can plug in High energy devices like heat guns and run them without a problem granted I'm only gonna be able to run them for about an hour but I can still run them if I needed! I can even plug in a small Electric heater and run the thing at about 600 W for about 10 hours. So I have a little bit of emergency heat should the power go out in the winter. Of course I also have a propane heater for that emergency just in case
Meanwhile: Me living in a tree baking cookies.
Wait, for real? Like a treehouse?
Getting off grid will be the future.
My life had blown up, I had moved back to look after my parents and I was on antidepressants. The power went out for a week and suddenly I was in my element. I stopped the pills and managed to help out the elderly residents of the small village where they lived. For the first time in years, I had control over my life. That's something that doesn't fit into any cost/benefit metric but, to me, is truly the main factor.
Power consumption and rolling brownouts during sunny weather due to air conditioning was a thing i never thought of. Living near arctic where air conditioning for cooling isn't common and we need a lot of power for heating which happens mostly during time when the sun doesn't really shine at all and the sunny summer days having comparatively low energy needs made me ignorant of the fact that it is the opposite for lower latitude regions. It is easy to miss simple things that seem obvious to the the people experiencing it but those that don't never really consider at all
Splendidly informative. A good Arthursday video.
Happy Arthursday!!!
If we want to change the way people get their electricity, then scare tactics and panic talk are the worst way to convince them.
THIS IS THE WAY.
Push the practicality angles. Emphasize the resulting durability of a distributed grid. Preach the doctrine of energy independence. Show the benefits of mixing multiple methods of generation for brining down costs as well as hazards. Small modular reactors for primary generation, home-scale solar/battery combinations for long-term savings, natural gas for rapidly available on-demand power during peak periods.
Add in new technology to replace components with better options as they become viable.
The problem is small modular reactors are not only expensive but with the amount of solar on grids currently their is not any room for 24/7 generation.
As is brought out here... the biggest problem with nuclear is SCALE. Controversy and overregulation (not necessary safety stuff, but things actively designed to hinder new construction) have made them artificially expensive. If we scaled up production of fissile materials, savings would be realized. Too many people are afraid of nuclear power for either outdated or overhyped reasons.
@@catprogNo room for base load? That seems baseless.
@@man_at_the_end_of_time Look up the duck curve. Due to solar their is a very low demand during the day and that is your limit for additional baseload 24/7 generation.
As a fellow soldier, I have to say your videos really helped me relax before sleep at night in Iraq last year when all the one way UASs were dropping. Thanks for your service both as a soldier and a science communicator
I love this channel so much
If the salt batter takes off I can see that becoming big as this would be a good way to use the salt we get from distilling ocean water.
Many homes on the plains had wind generators and storage batteries. IMO grid connected solar farms in the south west U.S. would be better. In the north when days are short is when we need power the most.
I've seen reports pointing to the $20 per kWh range for iron-air batteries, and if they pull that off they'll be an excellent choice for all kinds of stationary storage solutions.
I have heard that they can only be discharged at 1% (It may be a diffrent chemistry though.) Which means that you need 10Kwh of batteries to power the same amount as 1Kwh of a 10 hour battery. or 100 times a 1 hour battery.
I would love to go off the grid so no one can find me or bother (tip: build a fence on your property like to strengthen the legal “cartilage” of your private property).
I imagine that if I could open portals like Dr. Strange/Dr. Fate/Sonic The Hedgehog I would live in a state with no state income tax, shop in states with no sales tax, and gas my car in an alaskan locality with no sales tax on top of having the lowest gas tax!
Portal powers are the dream. I might have some contractors build me a sealed dome on Mars and portal there most of the time.
@swamphawk6227 Corrections: *bother me *property line (YT won’t let me edit for some reason).
I like to imagine using tiny portals just big enough for a signal to pass through so I can live on the Moon/Mars/further still and still have access to all my old streaming services accounts & etc.
I also like to imagine using Forerunner ftl or Borg Transwarp corridor to make the trip to Earth from Proxima Centauri (2.55060729 minutes using Forerunner ftl) or the KOI-5889 system (slightly over 50.6 hours using Forerunner ftl or less than 5 minutes using Borg Transwarp corridor) at least for the holidays & family get togethers.
Then you would have to teach any kids you may have, not have any legal solutions to any civil dispute, and have no emergency service upon which to preserve the life you have built. Anyone could come and take what was yours with no more reprisal than what you could personally deliver. It would be a very paranoid existence.
@@geislar7682 Not to mention no public property or anything like that maintained
@geislar7682 I’m already paranoid.
I have heard it said that most people's personal groups are no larger than 150 people, family, friends, and acquaintances, and they are most comfortable in a town of between 5 to 10 thousand.
Dunbar's Number. Read his book on it, and/or the TEDTalk.
I live off grid in the UK, rural, we have to drive for 20 minutes to take kids to school or go shopping. I lived in london for 20 years and I had enough, I hate cities. Over crowded, expensive, polluted, unfriendly. Now I live in a nice modest house and I fitted solar, wind, we dug a well and installed an RO filter for it. I have absolutely 0 bills for the house except the local taxes everyone pays. When the cost of energy in europe skyrocketed, we were thankfully unaffected. This year, we're planting corn in the field and I hope to get some chickens. It's not for everyone, younger me hated it because I grew up in the countryside and then moved to london and stayed after education. Now I wouldn't give up being off-grid for anything. Thankfully I can work remotely and starlink made that possible (there's no fibre here)
An interesting related topic is present day tech supporting “Producerism” as distinct from traditional off grid strategies; understanding your nexus between off grid and space colonization. Producerism seeks to use technology to create multiple income or avoided cost strategies to empower the middle class. An ancillary benefit is some robustness and protection against supply chain disruptions. It also builds local economies.
I Want an RTG! Please Uncle Isaac, can i have an RTG for Christmas?
I have been waiting for years for you to do this episode
It would be awesome to have bi-directional diesel fuel cells. Sure, the round-trip efficiency would be bad, but think of the low cost per kWh stored. You could store enough energy for a whole winter!
i am hoping you review eavor loop's geothermal project, heard about it for the first time today.
21:07
Another option for storing energy is the hot water tank. Heat the water when you have a surplus and use it when needed.
I'm going to guess it's better for long term storage to lift water rather than heat it.
@@isaacarthurSFIA More making the hot water to use later then converting it later to something else.
Would desalination via freezing be easier/cheaper than via boiling?
Osmosis filtering seems to be what the industrial scale is leading towards, and maybe some solar based greenhouse style smaller output bigger footprint but cheaper ones.
How bout a video on desalination, or just getting water anywhere and everywhere?
Nickel-Iron batteries were invented by Edison. They have cycle lives which make Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries seem flimsy. Their big disadvantage is very low energy density, low voltage, and very high weight. However, none of those is that big a deal stationary use.
Low voltage is not that big a deal:
3 nickle-iron batttries in series = 3.6V
-
According to wikipedia though:
You get
-6.6Wh/ $US for Nickle-Iron.
-8.7Wh/ $US for Lithium Ion
-
The big thing I cannot find is how long it takes to discharge.
I know pure iron batteries take 100 hours to discharge which means you need 10 times the amount of them to provide the same amount of power.
A solar powered pump or a windmill like my grandparents had, a cast iron wood stove for cooking, hot water and heat and keroscene or LED lights are about all that is really needed. To heat with electricity is prohibitively expensive and heat pumps are not a good option up here in minnesota. We do like our showers, clothes washers, dish washers, wide screen tvs and vacuum cleaners though which necessitates adding a lot of complexity.
No. Heat pumps, even converting the heat energy from your wood stove to electrocity, heat pumps are more effcient, they heat up better then the direct heat.
I know it sounds like ot breaks physics, but thats because a heat pump is more or less as close to a maxwells demon as you can get.
Heating with an electric heat pump I is 100% the cheapest method. Barring wood fires, but that takes notable work.
@@thekaxmax And wood fires also cause smoke
Arthursday! My one day a week on the grid
(Hee, though in your woodland scenario, it occurs to me that if the people there are logging to any extent , they may as well do some of the cutting in the shape of a road: makes moving and potentially processing that wood a lot easier. (I happen to tend a few acres of woodlot, the paths through there are pretty important for daily tasks and certainly if you were harvesting or having someone harvest some of the timber. Even just to build all that stuff, getting it there is likely to be a lot easier with at least some form of road.
Another option for battery storage is sodium-sulfur batteries. They would allow us to reduce the use of our limited supplies of lithium for stationary uses where we don't get all that much benefit from the higher energy density we can get out of lithium batter chemistries.
Fear of immortality only ever shows a lack of imagination.
In a slightly less optimistic Future of the grid would be less of a choice and more of a necessity, as it is currently for many people in less fortunate parts of the world.
Here we have raintanks instead of a well.
How do you keep it clean of bird poop bugs and mold?
@@HyenaEmpyema Their is a mesh on top to stop the big things coming in. Our main tank by accident also has a first flush diverter. (basically the first bit of rain does not go into the tank)
I live completely off grid. Solar panels and Lithium batteries have DROPPED in price by 30-50% in the last four years. Meanwhile local electric company has raised rates 8-12% every other year. Solar power has no moving parts and should last decades.
Dropped or government subsidized?
@@dansmith1661
The answer is both, in no small part because governments and energy companies the world over are pushing a decent sum to attempting to crack better panel and battery configurations.
Li-ion wins out at the moment because of the current inertia behind it. Doesn't mean alternatives don't exist, or that nobody's looking into them. It's just "the easiest" right now.
Great stuff as usual.
miniature nuclear reactors the size of water heaters
I used to dream of living off the grid. It never happened - too much city life and expensive real estate here in old Europe - but I've never stopped imagining what it would be like. These days, I'm more thinking of having an AI assistant that's not connected to the network of some super-corporation, because why would I ever trust a corporate AI?
As an aside, I wonder if these dreams of personal independence are a particularly western idea, or something universal to human beings. In any case, nice to see an episode dedicated to it.
Actual independence where nobody is around? That's a Purely AMERICAN idea. No sane Asian would do that since community is what kept them alive during times of crisis. You just bought into American propaganda...
Sweet great way to wake up.
ARTHURSDAY
My home in Minneapolis Nordeast was a Grain Mill cookie-cutter, but a wonderful house, STILL has _some_ knob and tube (now replaced). House foundation laid 1894.
"Universal" utilities are rarely evenly-distributed in space and time.
Universal "Internet" is the most recent entitlement, but I think it is correct.
If I can own even a military-restricted desktop Atomically-Precise Fabricator (APF) or access to an APM (Atomically-precise Manufacturing utility) then I would feel rather autarchic but it would not increase my belligerence.
You forgot Kid Energy. Generators attached to exercise equipment can kill two birds with one stone. Put a screen on an exercise bike and call it a Fully Immersive Virtual Video Game and they will beg you to power the house. 😅😂
😎🤖
Um. About 20-50W out, before generation and transmission losses. That won't run a house, that'll run a 3-spot phone charger.
Note that a gym tried this, and found a gym full of hard-riding gym junkies wasn't enough for the gym's lights. Let alone the fridges and other power-hogs.🎉
@@thekaxmax Skill issue.
Bad people know that roads go to some sort of wealth.
It will be made illegal by then to be off grid.
TY SFIA
I'm trying to do some sci fi, and I'm having trouble trying to imagine what sympathetic aliens would be like. I did a search, and I saw that you don't have a video on sympathetic aliens! the best I can imagine is something like the relationship between aphids and ants, or maybe how some dolphins would defend a human from a shark, but i'm very curious to know what you think. Can you do a video on sympathetic aliens?
Bless the Isaac family
Please reconsider the post consciousness episode next. It seemed so interesting and the poll was so close.
I deiced to do both the runner ups already, its scheduled for April or May I think
"Why don't we put our power lines in the ground where they belong?"
"Because they break all the time, and it's way cheaper to fix them in the air."
"Why do they break all they time?"
🤦♀️
underground power lines also break all the time as freeze thaw cycles are not good for them.
Cool topic!
Happy Arthursday
Edit: 10 likes
THUNDERSTORM GENERATOR
I see all this talk about self-reliant options as purely transitory, belonging to a period roughly started off with Edison et al. All this chaos re. fossil fuels/solar/wind/geothermal/space-based/batteries/nuclear should end as soon as economical, small fusion power modules become available. Thereafter I don't foresee the energy landscape changing for quite a long time.
Another banger
Anyone know whats goong on in the sky in New Jersey this week?
When I was a kid, we had city water or irrigation water.
Can something like that be done with electricity? Some rooms powered by the grid and others by the generator? There are variations. Think of the red emergency power outlets in hospitals.
A lot of companies make "smart load panels" now that dynamically switch outlets between grid power & batteries, or turn on an auto-start generator. I don't have one of those, but we do have solar + batteries, and the inverter has a 60A "critical loads sub-panel" that keeps our fridge and furnace running during outages. It beats indoor camping.
Been off grid multiple times, hopefully this one will stick, 😜
@Isaac Arthur, what do you think about this possible global crisis of mysterious Drones ?
Dude WTF?!? This entire time I thought you were British 😂 I have no idea why!!!? 😂 [*yes I knew about the speech thing, subscriber for years] 🇺🇲
With innovation and efficiency improvements, your McMansion will soon run on 500 watts.
Off-grid is either a luxury lifestyle or absolute destitution.
I clicked as soon as I saw this!
I just like the pretty pictures.
The fact that a lot of people wouldn’t survive without electricity is a terrible thing, yes the past was hard but more knew how to sustain themselves
They sustain themselves by having some of them die when the worst happens. Less mouths to feed, more resources for themselves...
Uncle Ted!
or not, as not live in a city. without the need of the massive workforce for factories, he cities are not the best way to live. especially not the skyscraper style ones. so it could easily be reversed within the next few decades and more and more people will live in a strange, advanced rural way.
Cities have advantages beyond manufacturing. They are one of humanity’s oldest inventions. More people might go suburban/rural, but cities are safe for quite a while.
@@highlorddarkstar cities as we think now is quite new idea, what ancient people called cities were mostly not even town, but slightly bigger villages today, and the actual cities were also just a large stretch of town with individual houses and their own little everything that a village house would have today. so not really safe. and not much benefit today, actually mostly only negatives.
@@thorin1045 historical cities in antiquity had apartment buildings, fast food, street food, and lots of things we consider modern. Cities allow for certain efficiencies, which couldn’t be provided outside of cities historically. Today, we can tolerate the inefficiency required for suburban and rural amenities, but that doesn’t mean that the cost isn’t there. Cities drive specialization. Every town can support a doctor, but you need a centralized network to support a pediatric oncologist. That may be changing with remote medicine technology, but you still have a center to be remote from.
My neighbour won't let me store their sewage anymore.
Wind and solar are highly over-rated.
Hello from Toledo Ohio. A fellow NE Ohioan
Uh no? Isn't Toledo in the NW corner? Ashtabula would've been the NE corner.
Interdependency sucks!
Autonomy by A.I. ?...
Autonomous Intelligence
I question the long term desire of civilizations to clump together in cities.
My wife and I are building off grid. For a time it will be a vacation home. But eventually we’ll retire there. There will be nothing more technologically advanced than a propane refrigerator. We’ll die younger than we have to and we’re fine with that.
Why will you die younger?
@ old people on there own in the middle of nowhere with wood heating and no electricity. Medical services hours away. Die young is meant relatively. Doesn’t mean we’ll die at 50. But younger than we would have had f we had grocery stores, pharmacies, and doctors near by.
@Fred-rv2tu you'd be surprised. My country's backwoods are full of 80+ year olds living like that. And that's with their understanding of healthy life habits. If you were somewhat intentional about it and were diligent about not neglecting health issues as they occur there is no reason why you wouldn't reach 90+. Sure, emergency services are good for accidents, but dying of that is more bad luck than inherent con if rural life.
The desire for independence is a, not necessarily uniquely, but very American impulse. I'm not sure that it is anywhere near as common outside the U.S.
Wouldn't it be easier to just use nuclear waste in a pool, with a pool around it like a heat exchanger so the useable water isn't radioactive but it melts the Arctic ice into drinkable water for 100 years with no servicing required except for dumping more snow into the outer bowl?
Huh.
Well that viewership is *_thoroughly_* disappointing to me!
For reasons you've already described, in-situ-resources-utilization and it's affliated manufacturing and developmental implications are like... top five in my interests in technologies of this century. I feel like I'd even be studying something adjacent to it if I were doing a Ph.D, and it's an _obvious _*_game-changer_* for all colonization let alone simply space colonization. Even though this episode was far more grounded than many, I still didn't forsee this "dip". 😓
🥰
Isaac Arthur made me love Thursdays the way I used to when it meant new episodes of friends and Seinfeld ❤
I would rather live off the grid