Ornoth

My expectations for solar power were set by the dim liquid crystal watches and calculators of the 1970s, which wouldn’t work at all unless they were in direct sunlight.

For decades, advocates have talked about solar panels getting cheaper and more efficient, but I always dismissed it as marketing-speak, until a recent purchase changed my mind.

Some background… Life in Austin has come with an occasional brief loss of electrical power during stormy weather. And since our house is at the very end of a small electrical line that runs up a wooded creek, downed limbs and squirrels chewing through cables have produced a daylong outage once every year or two. And although it was before we arrived, the locals still remember the trauma of Snowmageddon, when the regional power grid was down for several days.

With that as backdrop, last Thanksgiving I pulled the trigger on something I’d long considered: a small, portable battery and solar panel.

Lemme diverge by saying that this is not a sponsored post. Orny don’t do that shit, period. I’m not a money-grubbing millennial influencer; I’m a Boomer with a modicum of integrity and self-respect. That said…

The storage unit is about the size of a car battery, and the solar panel (when folded in half) is about the size and weight of a box fan (but thinner). Specifically, I got a Jackery 300W battery and a 100W panel. It’s got two standard 110V outlets, two USB-A and one USB-C ports, and a 12V DC (car cigarette lighter) plug. While it listed for $499, I was pleased to get it for $299 on a Black Friday sale. Although there are many manufacturers, I chose Jackery because of a DC Rainmaker recommendation and my own personal satisfaction with one of their lipstick-case sized mini power banks.

I got this much-larger-but-still-modest unit because I wanted something simple and portable that could get us through a minor outage. It isn’t gonna run major appliances, but it will easily handle phones and lights. It’ll charge laptops and run our fiber optic internet & wifi modem, though it won’t last long with heavy usage. Jackery makes units with vastly more capacity, but I got this to fulfill our basic needs, and as a proof of concept rather than a complete power backup system.

In practice, it’s been a low-key eye-opener. Setting the panel up in the backyard for a couple hours yields enough power to run the dozens of devices I use that are smaller than a laptop for a couple weeks.

While I hadn’t expected it, I found myself using it daily. Why would I pay the electric company to charge my electronics, when I could do it at zero cost, with power I harvested from my own backyard? Suddenly, I saw how quickly a solar power generator would pay for itself, since “free” is a much better deal than “cheap”. So when I need to power anything, my first thought now is to use the power bank, rather than plugging into a wall socket. That was an unexpected mind-shift.

The other benefit that I (perhaps stupidly) hadn’t foreseen will play out during an extended power outage. Say my battery happens to have 60% charge when the electricity goes out. Sure, that’ll be enough power to last a little while, but it’ll run out of juice during an extended outage. But wait… Remember that it’s charged by sunlight, so – even without power – we can just charge it right back up to full, so long as there’s at least partial sun. It’s not just a storage device; with the accompanying solar panel, it’s an inexhaustible power generator, which can produce additional power now matter how long the electrical grid might be down. And unlike most home backup generators, it doesn’t require gasoline to run, doesn’t emit toxic exhaust fumes, and is completely silent.

So yeah, this very small and modest proof of concept has unexpectedly turned me into a solar convert. Whether at an individual level or scaled up to regional power-generation, solar power is inexhaustible and can be harvested at essentially zero cost, save for an initial investment in equipment that is quickly recouped. Whether you’re a multi-state power producer or just one cheap schmuck living alone, the economics of solar power are now surprisingly compelling, as advocated in this (lengthy!) Technology Connections video. Which is pretty shocking to someone who remembers those feeble solar watches and calculators from 50 years ago.

A quick post about my most recent read: David Byrne’s “Bicycle Diaries”. Yes, that David Byrne. It’s really more about his observations based on various cities he visited than it is about cycling, so it’s not surprising that the two bits I want to share from it have absolutely nothing to do with the bike.

In his section on Berlin, he talks about the Stasi, the East German secret police:

The combination of psychological and Orwellian horror is hellish and weirdly seductive. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threats, or economic incentives. It seems it’s something that many national security agencies do from time to time. (“If you see something, say something.”) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, and after a while no one knows who’s informing on whom.

The quoted phrase rings loudly in any Bostonian’s ears, because the MBTA transit police have been drumming those exact words (authored by the Department of Homeland Security) into our heads for more than eight years, encouraging us (as described here) to be on the lookout for anyone carrying a backpack, holding an aerosol can, or “acting in a rehearsed manner”.

Orwell’s rep as a visionary becomes that much more impressive when you realize that he was only off by 17 years.

The other interesting bit was a quote from Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, which goes like this:

In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy. A sidewalk is a symbol of equality… If democracy is to prevail, public good must prevail over private interests.

His perspective in that last sentence is profoundly interesting for those of us in 21th Century America, torn as we are between the American dream of freedom to acquire and amass unlimited wealth and the protests of the Occupy movement, which make it abundantly clear that the American dream is inaccessible to most, and has resulted in an unsustainable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite minority.

Just some thoughts, sadly having nothing to do with cycling whatsoever.