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What is an Energy Independent Home?

Energy Independent Homes generate their own electricity without fuel.

The sun is harsh on homes. Its power is measured in kilowatts. Your power bill is measured in kilowatt-hours! Kilowatt-hours from the sun overheat your house in the summer when they could be running your air conditioner. Why pay a supplier a premium to fight against what's already being supplied?

The average US home gets hit with more than 4x the energy it uses, so why not convert that into the electricity you've been buying? A fully energy independent home has no more demand on the power company.

Our continuing goal is to reshape the entire energy industry into something that is truly customer-first.

Who Is Energy Independent Homes

Everyone uses electricity, but most people are still energy dependent. That means someone other than you controls your family's access to electricity. The model requires them to set all the terms; customer consent is irrelevant. Power is a necessity, not a luxury, so you'll pay (or do) whatever they say.

In response, there is a large movement of Energy Independent Homes, people doing everything they can to personally take control of this for themselves and their families. They take control as much as they can and share what they learned with the people in their lives.

By providing them with visualization tools, research, experts, contractors, info, quotes, or whatever helps, we empower the whole community. What results is a nationwide movement away from dependency. We call this movement Energy Independent Homes.

A Constellation of Collaborators

We get things done by aggregating the services of carefully curated companies, which we tactically weave into one collective result: Energy Independent Homes. Because we insist on certain essential guarantees and standards, we limit our reach only to contractors who ensure those guarantees and standards.

When
Power Isn't PowerWhen Power Isn't Power

When your power company opened, little more than 100 years ago, the offering was not just electricity, it was power. Days ended when the light was gone, but now light began and ended at will. Windy days or heat waves were out of our hands, but wind and cooling were now at will.

Electric companies were offering the power to set your own terms, a way to get far ahead, and with it they built the 20th century. Sure electric companies sold electricity, but what people were buying was unprecedented power. It was the true definition of utility.

Electricity is no longer what it was when it was handed down to us. Once the way to get ahead, it's now become the very base requirement of not falling behind, entry level access to society. Power companies that once evoked a sense of freedom and utility now increasingly evoke a sense of futility, as we're cornered by bills that only go up and are never able to be paid off.

This model can't give us what it gave our grandparents. But Energy Independent Homes can, if we learn when to say no. The most obvious time to say no is when it becomes more affordable than what you're currently doing month-to-month. Our community provides access to experts who examine all the variables, making it easy to see whether the time is right for your home.

Give me liberty, or give me
futility bills.

Patrick Henry, 1775
slightly paraphrased

In the US, independence is sort of our thing. But without a constitution it wouldn't last. To ensure your energy independence lasts, we only connect homeowners with contractors who offer their customers a rare set of written guarantees and standards. This map highlights where those standards and guarantees are available: where we're able to help.

A Declaration of Independence for your home.

Visualizing Your Power Bill

This Is About Power

utility (n): noun [ yoo-til-ih-tee ]; State of being beneficial, profitable, or advantageous
futility (n): noun [ few-til-ih-tee ]; State of being unprofitable, ineffective, or pointless

A futility bill is something you can never pay off: like renting. It goes on forever increasing faster than your income, and more often. All homeowners have already eliminated their worst futility bill, by leaving their landlord behind. That's how your power bill became your new worst futility bill.

A power plant smokestacks on blue sky, producing large clouds of money (ghosts of various USD denominations), representing money paid to the plant via customer power bills, converted to consumable fuel and burned, to produce a fleeting moment of electricity in a neverending cycle of futility. The money is blowing away with the wind.

The money that would make you energy independent has been going up in smoke.

How To Become Independent

It starts with a quote. You're already somewhat familiar with how this works. It's not unlikely that the amount you've been paying into the wind every month is already enough to make you energy independent.

Energy Independent Homes exists to help you see the path from dependent to independent. We reserve a community of committed experts to help anyone find their way to energy independence. They draw from our constellation of contractors and financiers to match your terms, give you quotes, connect you with incentives, and help you get it all done when the timing is right for you.

Scheduling time with an expert is free because it is sponsored by those who came before you, who now own energy independent homes. Remote meetings happen right here on our website, allowing us to cover over 3 million square miles of the US. It allows us to share what we're talking about, so you can see it just like we're sitting together at the kitchen table.

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How It All Works

How Demand Works

Buying electricity without knowing what kilowatt-hours are is like shopping for a house without knowing what square-footage is. You might think a good deal is terrible, or think a bad deal is great, only to end up with something way too small for your family. Good decisions begin when you understand your demand.

Like most of us, you probably can't cut your electrical demand in half. Your energy demand is not really negotiable. Most can't even cut it 10% without beginning to lose family essentials. Your demand doesn't really change much when prices go up, even if they double. Honestly, you'll pay whatever ransom the power company sends you.

This sort of Inelastic Demand works out pretty well for the supplier, your power company–a literal monopoly. That's why you should be the supplier. Inelastic Demand only pairs well with one thing. Energy Independent Homes.

How Supply Works

The power company is where you've been getting your supply. They supply it by buying fuel, burning it, generating electricity from it, and billing you one kilowatt-hour at a time at an increasing rate. This supply model looks exactly like renting, because you're paying off someone else's power plant–and even when you finish paying off all their debts, the bill keeps coming, forever. Even if it's a non-profit, as long as the power plant is dependent on fuel, the bills can never end.

Energy independent homes are power plants that don't consume fuel. A fully energy independent home, supplies its entire demand. The sun powers the house during the day, and stores excess power, either in the grid or in batteries, for later use when the sun's not out. This supply model looks like owning a home, because you're paying off something you own, and it keeps working long after your last payment. A home that makes its own power is more valuable, adding equity that benefits you.

Ideally, it is up to you how much you depend on the power company. But the ideal is still out of reach for some, because your power company may deny you the right to become fully energy independent. They get to say how much solar you're allowed to get, if any. That's like having to get your landlord's approval when buying your first house–and he even gets a say on how big it can be. If you don't like that, read our petition and consider signing.

Solar Size v/s Supply

The average US home gets hit with more than 4x the energy it uses. The energy you buy from the power company is already hitting the roof, unused. Solar panels convert that into the electricity. The more panels you have, the more you supply.

Despite this, the number of solar panels (measured in kilowatts) doesn't answer whether you have enough supply to cover your home's demand, measured in kilowatt-hours. The first one, kilowatts (kW), is just code for taking the number of solar panels you have and multiplying by the kilowatts each panel can put out. If each panel can do 0.4kW, times 25 panels, that equals 10kW. That's a nice number and all, but it doesn't tell you how many hours it will make 10kW. You need kW-hours to meet your kW-hour demand.

To illustrate, we'll show what happens when we put the exact same 10kW solar system on a pair of neighbor's roofs in two different places.

Arizona: On your neighbor's south facing roof, the 10kW system makes 20,700kW-hours every year. On your east facing roof the same 10kW only makes 17,200kW-hours. That's in sunny Arizona, but what about Maine?

Maine: On your neighbor's south facing roof, the 10kW system makes 13,300kW-hours every year. On your east facing roof the same 10kW only makes 10,400kW-hours.

This demonstrates why kilowatts is the least important number you need to know, and why kilowatt-hours is the most important. One speaks of size, the other speaks of supply.

Solar Supply

Using solar to supply what your home needs in the present works well, until the sun goes down. Most homeowners solve this by adding enough extra solar panels to generate power for the nighttime hours too, as part of their nighttime supply strategy. They have the right amount of power at the wrong time.

The first option is to store your excess power in batteries, so that they become your nighttime supply.

The second option is to store your excess power in the grid, via an agreement with the power company, where they give your power back at night. Even though you depend on your power company at night, they depended on you during the day. So if they offer a fair deal, it nets out like you made solar power all night.

The third option is to intentionally have a smaller solar system, just enough to supply your daytime demand, relying on the power company for nighttime supply.

Battery Supply

Batteries store kilowatt-hours. If you have enough to cover your entire nighttime demand, you'll be fully energy independent year round. You'd still keep a connection to the grid as a backup to your backup, but a setup like that would make you completely sovereign from the power company. You'd be the last to know about power outages, rate increases, etc.

Somewhere between a solar-only setup and a sovereign system that uses batteries to be completely energy independent, there's a very reasonable middle ground. Some of these have just enough battery to keep the freezer, lights, and outlets on. Others have enough storage to run everything but the air conditioner. Many optimize for backup scenarios, others use them to tactically knock out specific supply problems with the power company.

Power Company Supply

When you produce electricity, you enter into a two-way relationship with the power company. Chances are, you will export some electricity to them. When that happens, your house automatically trades or sells this extra power to the grid, where the power company immediately sells it to your neighbors at full price. But the power company owns the grid and isn't always fair.

If the price they pay you for electricity is the same as the price they sell it to you, that's a fair trade that we can use to run your house on the sun all night. Even though you'd depend on the power company at night, it would function almost like a free battery. But if your power company buys power from you for less than they sell it to you, that's not so fair, and we wouldn't rely on their system for night supply.

How The Money Works

Energy independent homes feature their own solar power plant. Solar plants don't pay for the electricity they make, they only pay to build the power plant itself. Investors line up to provide the money to build them because it's such a sure and steady return on investment.

Energy independent homes work the same way. Investors front all the money and receive montly payments in return. Every payment reduces the balance, till there is no balance, and no more payments.

Most homeowners set things up so that they own the solar, however others want the investors to own the solar and just sell the power to them at a specific fixed rate. Some prefer to be their own investors, trading their quick returns for maximum long-term returns and no payment at all.