Two truths from a PG&E outage: resilience and BLAH BLAH BLAH
Two long-standing truths were yet again revealed to me today by a local PG&E outage:
Solar + storage => resiliency (+ cost savings + reduced carbon emissions)
BLAH BLAH BLAH is often what husbands hear when their wives talk
For those who have been following my posts over the last few months, you’ll know that we’ve added insulation, solar, storage and heat pumps to our home, and also replaced our old gas-powered car with an EV. Well, the final final step in this journey– getting the battery properly programmed and integrated with the solar inverters– was just completed Monday (the technician was away on extended holiday until this week).
I’ve been talking to my husband for years about doing these home energy upgrades, and even as we were going through all the installation work, he was skeptical when I touted the eventual benefits (long term savings on our utility & fuel bills, resiliency during blackouts, etc). Clearly, he agreed to this only to keep the marital peace given my insistence on doing it– not because he thought there was a compelling case for the project.
His skepticism has vanished in the 27 hours since our system became fully functional. Why? Because he saw the data on the monitoring app with his own eyes. It showed everything I had said many times, but that had been BLAH BLAH BLAH until he saw the data and graphs himself.
What did he observe from the energy monitoring app?
“Wow, our solar panels are generating 1.8kW even though it’s raining right now”
“Huh, the dryer really does use a lot of power” (maybe now he’ll start consolidating loads like I’ve been asking him for years– yes I have been known to nag on occasion ha ha)
And the kicker this morning (when he was home and I was not): “Our house is running on backup power. I wouldn’t have even noticed except I got a notification that the car was no longer charging, and I checked the app and saw that there is a grid outage right now.”
While the economic savings are more abstract to him (particularly since I pay the monthly utility bills), the fact that the lights and internet were on when the rest of the neighborhood blacked out for a couple hours was visceral.
My conclusions from our first 27 hours of having a functioning home solar + storage energy system.
Resiliency matters. If it made an impression during a brief, nuisance outage– think about how important it can be during an extended blackout, particularly to someone dependent on medical equipment.
We need to make these proven, cost-effective upgrades far more accessible– logistically and financially– to everyone (see my prior blog on the topic).
My husband will continue to have “selective hearing” whenever I talk about something he’s not intrinsically interested in. No amount of money or resiliency can fix that. (I love you hon!)