There are lots of reasons why being off-grid makes sense. Here are some thoughts to help you make that decision.

What if there is no choice?

The first and most obvious is that you may not have a choice or even if you do have a choice, the initial investment for a grid connection may be more than for a system to allow you to be off-grid. Where I currently live extending the grid would have cost about $17,000. My PV solar system cost $12,000. Easy choice.

Back in the late 1970s in the US I was in a situation where regulations would have required me to buy a wider easement into my property in order to run in a grid connection. Unfortunately, the cost of PV solar was huge then. If you had investigated PV solar in the past—even a year ago—check today's prices. They have been falling very rapidly.

Reliability is another consideration. When I lived in Estelí during the latter days of Nicaragua's neo-liberal period, the electric grid was very unreliable. I added some solar panels and batteries just to fill in. While, on paper, the power I produced did not cost less than grid power, it solved the reliability problem.

To put that in perspective, multiple outages a week, sometimes lasting 12 hours, was the norm. In my 2.5 years off-grid, we have had one 20 minute outage. It was pre-planned to add some equipment to the system and could have been avoided if it had mattered. If you live in an area with frequent thunderstorms, hurricanes or other extreme weather, grid outages can be fairly common.

Return on Investment

This is the pedestrian calculation. How long before the system pays for itself? The first thing you need to tell me is what electric rates will be in the future. For anyone who thinks they will go down, when you were paying $.25/gallon for gasoline, did you really think you would be paying over $4 in your lifetime?

To me, a better way to look at this is what it will cost me now so that I don't have to care in the future. If I have the money in my pocket, I would rather invest it today so that I have no worries in the future. To me, it's sustainability just like buying some land now so you can grow your own food.

For those who just must have numbers, let's do some. A system which will produce about 5000 watt hours/day will cost about $2000-3000 at today's prices. That's 1825KWh/year. At $.10/KWh, the payout is 11 to 16 years. At $.50/KWh, that 2 to 3 years. Bottom line is that today the numbers don't look bad and continue to look better.

Living green

The argument that the energy cost of producing the equipment is more than you get out is, to me, bogus. Yes, there is energy needed to produce the PV cells, the batteries and such but grid power doesn't come without up-front energy either.

ROI calculations don't work here. You don't see the military costs needed to keep the oil flowing or who is going to stand guard for 25,000 or more likely 250,000 years on a retired nuclear power plant figured into the real cost of grid electricity. I fact you probably don't even see the cost of concrete poles, copper wire and such.

Expecting PV panels to last 30 years or more is not unreasonable. While good lead-acid deep cycle batteries may only last 10-15 years, most of the material can be recycled. If PV panels cost $1 per peak watt (close today, should be there in six months) and you get six peak hours per day, that means 65,000 watts per $1. While you might have been able to buy 65KWh of electricity of $1 in the 1960s, that sure isn't the going price today. So suggesting that more energy goes into making PV panels than they produce just does not compute. In addition, the main ingredient in PV solar is silicon. Clearly sand is not on the critical resource list these days.

Does being off-grid make sense? For me it did. Hopefully these ideas will help you evaluate your own situation.