“Living off the grid” with renewable energy: soon can be reality for many of us

Here's a good piece off the CNBC website – timely since we're having solar panels put on our roof.

As the technology behind renewable energy evolves—and improves—more consumers will opt to cut ties with utility companies and become their own power source.

Much like how people abandoned land lines for mobile devices, consumers will likely begin to adopt new ways of powering their homes instead of being completely reliant on utility companies, said James Wrathall, an attorney in the the energy finance group at Sullivan & Worcester.

"I think consumers are gaining power in the equation and they are seeing these availabilities of this technology and they are seeing the benefit economically and they are going to demand it and they are going to get it," Wrathall said.

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While potentially great for consumers, this change could spell trouble for electric utilities, according to a report by the research firm Morningstar published earlier this year.

"Distributed generation (DG) could be the end of utilities as we know them today," Morningstar said in the report. "Utilities' centralized network monopolies break down when customers become self-sufficient competitors."

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While improvements in distributed generation will make it easier for people to leverage microgrids in the near-term, advancements in solar and battery technologies will help drive the power shift even further, …

"The improvement of batteries will be fundamental to a revolution that will make any kind of living off the grid not just possible, but easy," Cascio said.

In fact, they are key to the transition.

"Batteries, really energy storage, is fundamentally necessary. It would be like the Internet without servers. It's fine to generate power, but inherently to live off a micro grid or to be off the grid you have to find a way to store power in the equation," Wrathall said.

A Company mentioned in this article – Solar City – is the one we are working with.