The best way to keep the power from going out is to make your own.
That's the line taken by home-power enthusiasts who tout mostly solar power -- along with a bit of wind and even less hydroelectric -- as the ultimate way to avoid grid-induced power shortages, while also reducing pollution and preventing global warming.
The rub is that such systems can cost up to $60,000 for a typical home, perhaps the key reason that home-power systems remain niche products.
Typical home-power customers are "environmentally interested, and they definitely have to be somewhat upwardly mobile," said Michael Miller, who sells power systems nationwide from his business in Cazadero, California. "They're interested in protecting their future, and backing up their present."
The high cost of everything from photovoltaic cells to batteries is likely to keep such home-power systems from becoming widely used any time soon, notwithstanding events such as last week's massive power failure in the Northeast and Midwest, said professor Lester Lave of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
But the underlying notion -- that power generation and transmission should be more widely distributed, like the design of the Internet -- is one that has huge promise in fixing some key problems with the electrical grid, said Lave, co-director of Carnegie-Mellon's Electricity Center.
"It's certainly true that the system is aged and creaking, and that's what the blackout is telling us," Lave said. "We've done a fair amount of work here on distributed generation as a means of achieving energy security -- such as deterring a terrorist attack -- and efficiency. We're optimistic about its ability to solve many of these problems and make the system much more reliable and secure."
Home power -- usually through renewable energy sources such as solar and wind -- is typically the preserve of hippies and survivalists, said Richard Perez, publisher of Home Power Magazine, based in Ashland, Oregon.
But interest in the topic spikes predictably in the wake of any disturbance in the electrical grid. Perez said that about 6,000 people over the past weekend downloaded PDF versions of his magazine, compared with the 40,000 to 50,000 who normally do that over a two-month period.
Perez said he has lived off the grid since 1970, when he chose to live in the mountains two hours outside Ashland. The cost of stringing wires was prohibitive at $280,000. He started installing solar systems in his house in 1977, and since then has invested $30,000 in an array of panels, inverters (which convert direct current power to the alternating current used in most households) and batteries.
Perez noted proudly that his setup provides enough juice for five computers with large displays, two laser scanners, a washer and dryer, a garden irrigation system and home heating in winter.
"There are no power outages unless you take the system down to work on it, and it's higher-quality power," Perez said. "I get lower total harmonic distortion than the grid can deliver, because when you're on the grid, everyone else is on it. Your neighbor can use a power tool and bend the electricity out of shape."
Adoption of such systems has sped nationally not only because of scares such as the 2000-2001 California crisis, but also because of law and incentives, Perez said. California, for instance, pays as much as half the cost of installing home solar and wind systems. It is also among the 38 states that require utilities to effectively buy power back from electricity-producing homes.
But if today's electrical grid -- reliant on a relatively small number of large plants and a transmission system with a few critical failure points -- is at one extreme, then home-power generation is at the other, said Lave and Joel Swisher of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado think tank with an emphasis on energy issues.
The electrical grid helps smooth out the supply and demand for power efficiently, Lave and Swisher pointed out.
"In a large city, when you're on, I'm off, and you're aggregating enough customers," Lave said, "whereas a single customer's demand is really up and down."
A flatter system of generating and transmitting electricity is possible by using small generators, which are typically powered through low-polluting natural gas. These generators can be located in the basements of buildings and provide enough electricity for that building and other structures, as well as waste heat that can be used for heating, hot water and even air conditioning.
Such small generators now account for as much as 30 percent of all power generation in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Lave said.
Both Lave and Swisher agreed that alternative sources of energy, such as solar and wind, hold promise -- someday. But more widespread use of solar, which now accounts for less than 1 percent of the nation's energy supply, will have to wait until the cost comes down. Batteries in particular need to become more efficient and have less environmental impact.
In the meantime, antiquated regulations and entrenched interests, such as electric utilities, are some of the key obstacles to an electrical grid that looks more like the Internet, Swisher said.
"There's a pretty attractive endpoint there, and the challenge is in getting it moving in that direction," Swisher said. "What happened last week is a wake-up call, and if it's a wake-up call for the right thing, that would be very helpful."
