Free Energy & System Stickiness
#3 on Free Energy Systems
After having lived in an off-grid no-wires house (and I say this in the past tense, because it is no longer our primary residence) the fact that houses like that aren’t available really gets to me.
That is a perfect example of the stickiness of the electric grid.
I can search zillow for my parameters, and they can include “open concept” and “fenced in backyard” but “no wires and no grid connection” doesn’t pull up many results. Yes, you might find the odd-Amish house for sale, or an off-grid inventor’s house, but if you need to be in a specific location: it’s just not an option. Nobody was interested in thinking outside the electric grid once the electric grid was installed.
Moreover, I’ve discovered through non-scientific conversational inquiry that most people have only the weakest grasp of the fact that “electricity” is only a subset of the general set “energy.”
Why is electricity so sticky?
It doesn’t have the best qualifications.
It is really good for:
electric light, LEDs, and other forms of artificial light
digital electronics
It’s not good for heating. It’s not good for moving things. (Again, speaking purely in terms of energy efficiency.)
As I’ve mentioned before, if you are sensitive, you will notice that food cooked on electricity is less-life-filled than food cooked on wood fire. Or that electric heat is not satisfying in the way that wood heat is.
Electric light:
Propane lamps create a light that is cold and unappealing.
Oil lamps create a pleasant light, but it’s too dim.
Same thing with candles.
I’m aware of the whole “LEDs are a conspiracy to control our minds” - but if you live off grid for even a minute, you really appreciate a lightbulb that emits as much light as a traditional incandescent 100 watt and uses 3-5 watts. It makes it possible to read without eyestrain in the winter.
Electric heating:
There has been endless marketing in certain political districts about the efficiency of heating with electricity (specifically, heat pumps.)
Heat pumps are marketed as more than 100% efficient. (Like what, they are overunity machines?) Here’s an example from Maine, a nice cold state which is providing incentives for low-income people to rip out their oil-fuel heating and replace it with heat pumps.
I fail to understand how a quasi-state agency can get away with calling a consumer device 400% efficient. Nobody has explained this and I’m not really sure what it means.
The other incentive offered is that electric heat is cheaper: but the cost all depends on the cost of electricity, which is correlated to the cost of natural gas and propane.
Now, state agencies might create marketing that doesn’t make sense, but the price of a substance in the market is a good indicator of how difficult it is to create or extract. That difficulty, in purely physical terms, tells you about the amount of energy required to make it.
This data has been muffled by extensive government subsidies in order to transition away from carbon-emitting sources of fuel, but it’s still there. A gallon of propane in Maine is $1.99 (December 2024.)
A gallon of propane is 91,452 BTUs.
A kilowatt hour of electricity is 3412 BTUs.
Thus, you need 27 kWh of electricity to equal a gallon of propane.
In Maine, in December 2024, electricity was 17 cents a kilowatt hour delivered (that’s at a commercial scale building. I’m pretty sure it’s more at a residence, but I don’t have a bill to look at. [edit: 23 cents at a residence])
Thus, to generate the same BTUs with 100% efficient electric heating devices, you will need to spend $4.58 on electricity at 17 cents per kWh.
Even if your propane heater is 80% efficient, it’s still cheaper than running electric heat. Where does the difference between these real prices and state agency prices come from? It would take FOIAing their data and methods. A project.
Wood is considered the cheapest form of heat in the northeast. A cord is approximately 13 million BTU and can be got (if you plan years ahead) for $250 or less. If you are buying seasoned and same year it will be $350 or $400.
But, wood requires a lot of labor that most people don’t want to do, or are not able to do.
Electricity for Moving Stuff:
Once you extract yourself from the grid-tie, electricity requires a battery, generally. It’s possible, and not ideal, to generate electricity directly from solar or wind, but devices don’t really like an intermittent supply, so the usefulness without a battery is questionable.
Rather than talk about the controversial automobile, let’s talk about the less controversial deep water well pump. A well pump pushes water from inside a well to the surface. In our case, the well is 440 feet, and the standing water level in the well is about 200 feet down.
Early on in lessons about off-gridding, we learned that the standard electric well-pump has a pretty significant draw upon starting, and is one of the reasons retro-fitting for off-grid requires such large batteries.
One of the ways to solve this is switching to air batteries. No, it’s not convenient, because it hasn’t been commercialized, but compressing tanks of air generally doesn’t directly require mining of rare earth minerals, etc.
How to compress the air? There’s the wishful system (small scale vertical wind turbines) and then there’s the simpler system (gasoline or electric powered air compressor. We have both.)
In Summary:
This post is to outline the stickiness of the electric grid. Once a house has electric devices installed, it’s extremely complicated and DIY to retrofit it. Without a religious/philosophical incentive (i.e. Amish) almost nobody is going to bother. It can be impossible to get financing for houses without electricity.
And doing it oneself requires a lot of time, experimentation, and willingness to live with broken systems. Broken systems that only you can fix because there might not be anyone to hire to fix them.
Bringing it back to the conspiracy - by putting up the electric grid, the incentive to come up with alternative energy systems was washed away. Do I think it was human nefarious?
Not exactly. I think humans are guided (beknownst to them or not) by other intelligences, and some of these are not aligned with the best interest of humanity. Surrounding the human species with alternating current* and de-incentivizing development of other types of energy systems is a good way to contain and control human spiritual development and evolution.
*Future posts on Tesla and alternating current.