Nick Rosen
Nick Rosen began his career in journalism as a member of the Undercurrents collective. He wrote How to Live Off Grid (2008), and this year launched Vivum Publishing, dedicated to fiction and nonfiction which advances the cause of environmental justice, and exposes the injustices of the current energy grid.
Vivium Publishing's first book, How We Went Off Grid by Matthew and Charis Watkinson, explains how to gain planning permission to live in a zero-carbon home with a market garden.
Two magical things happen when you move from the grid-connected life to an off-grid existence. The first is that you become instantly attuned to the natural world. You centre yourself around the daylight hours, because your batteries, if you have any, must be preserved for the essentials. The rain, sun and wind directly affect your daily routine. The many varieties of rain, each with their own atmospheres, become your friends. The rain and the wind clean you and your surroundings. The sun and the rain nourish you and your crops.
The second change is that you are confronted by the need to run your own power station, and manage your own water supply and waste. You literally have to deal with your own shit.
These changes are, for want of a better word, electrifying. They are liberating. You feel in control of your own life.
“Find your place on the earth,” says American poet Gary Snyder, “Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” In the on-grid world, that place is very hard to find. Everything from planning laws to electricity regulations to your neighbours’ views about acceptable behaviour, are pitched against anyone who wants to live the lowest of low-impact lifestyles.
So the primary rule of living off-grid is not to do it on your own, but as part of a community. By community, I don’t mean a commune. I have nothing against communes, but I wouldn’t want to live in one myself because it makes decision-making difficult and long-winded. Instead, I recommend a collection of separate households in the same patch of land, or the same area, where people pool skills and share resources as far as it’s practical to do so, or a more dispersed community brought together because of a local council with looser planning laws than most.
These are such strange times. Everybody knows our ‘advanced’ economies are speeding us towards collapse and social breakdown. It’s perfectly obvious we must cut global energy consumption by 75% – and since at least 2 billion of the world’s poorest are using hardly any energy, the advanced economies are going to have to cut consumption by perhaps 90%. And that is simply not happening.
There is a rising interest in off-grid techniques for saving energy, and learning how to bypass the utility companies. Until very recently, those companies were entirely focussed on selling us more electricity. But today, we are in the paradoxical situation of expecting those same utility companies to sell us less of what they make. Their business models are not fit for that purpose.
The giant Swiss bank UBS is forecasting that $160 trillion will be spent between now and 2050 “decarbonising” the energy grid. That is $160 trillion of our money – in taxes and energy bills – being handed to the same companies that caused the problem of high prices and pollution in the first place. That, says UBS, will sort out the grid. Nothing to see here, millennials. Technological solutions will be found.
Actually, the solutions are not being found, and don’t look like they will emerge any time soon. Mini-nuclear? 2030 at the earliest. Hydrogen? Still too dangerous. Carbon capture? Negligible difference at huge cost. Solar reflectors in outer space? We’ve seen that movie, and we know how it ends.
No wonder many millennials see issues of mental health as more important than the warming planet. The disconnect between society’s addiction to energy consumption and the reality of global warming is literally maddening. Governments have failed us; NGOs have failed us; the COP27 process has failed us.
So where does that leave us? Well, we just have to do this ourselves – make our own goals, carry out our own adaptation – and do so in a way that makes economic sense as well as climate sense. We need a system change that offers us a zero-carbon existence while maintaining some sort of continuity between the present and the future. And we have one: bypassing the grid. It is the grid which gave us our addiction to power, which nourished and sustained the rise of amoral, corporate capitalism. Dismantling the grid would change everything.
Power is the harnessing of energy. It’s no coincidence that the same noun applies to the exertion of political control or influence over others. Look at the way politicians quail before the energy companies. Electrical power IS political power. And the grid is all about one thing: the centralisation of power. That is why it was built in the first place, and why utility companies have managed to retain their oligopoly despite terrible service and sky-high prices. That is why there are regulations to stop you selling your surplus solar power to your neighbour, and instead sell it to the utility companies at a much lower price than you pay them for it. And now they want to fleece the planet of another $160 trillion.
We have it in our power to stop this happening, because there really is a better system: local, community-owned energy. This really could change the paradigm. And it’s easily achievable, one community at a time. The decentralisation of power means power to the people.
So let’s get together and start off-grid community owned, off-grid power companies.
Everywhere.
Now.
CALL TO ACTION:
You can sign up to help start a renewable power co-operative in your area – just go to www.off-grid.com and place yourself on the map. Wherever you are in the world, Off-Grid will inform you when 50 people in your area have signed up – then you can get together take back control of your energy supply.
Nick Rosen began his career in journalism as a member of the Undercurrents collective. He wrote How to Live Off Grid (2008), and this year launched Vivum Publishing, dedicated to fiction and nonfiction which advances the cause of environmental justice, and exposes the injustices of the current energy grid.
The press’ first book, How We Went Off Grid by Matthew and Charis Watkinson, explains how to gain planning permission to live in a zero-carbon home with a market garden.