The Silvies Valley Ranch, a rural, eco-friendly luxury resort in eastern Oregon that has home microgrids, is slowly moving forward. It is one of several projects throughout the US responding to growing demand from US homeowners seeking residential microgrids for resilience and sustainability.
Either planned or already in place at Silvies Valley Ranch are homes, ranging in size from 2,000 square feet to 6,000 square feet, that come with their own solar off-grid microgrid along with a Humless Universal System, which is a battery system. It also includes a propane genset for when batteries run low or the weather is bad.
The ranch chose solar microgrids because they’re less expensive than bringing grid electricity to the remote, mountainous region — and more sustainable. The systems include 4.2 kW to 7 kW of solar plus 20 kWh to 40 kWh of energy storage, said Eric Lobdell, vice president of sales and product development for Humless, the company providing the equipment for the microgrids.
The COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain challenges and labor shortages have slowed development of the ranch, but the project is inching forward, with eight to 10 new homes operating off-grid now and three to five expected to be completed this summer, said Lobdell. The ranch’s goal is to build 600 homes of three different sizes.
The former dude ranch boasts a green lifestyle. For example, residents and visitors are prohibited from driving gas-powered cars. Instead they have to park their cars and drive golf carts.
People see grid as fragile
Meanwhile, Humless, like other residential microgrid developers, is seeing demand for home microgrids increase in response to climate-change-related storms, drought and fires that spark grid outages.
“We’re seeing more requests for power security and emergency power backup for homes than ever before,” said Lobdell. “The population has woken up to the fact that grids can be old and fragile. As people have more power outages, they suddenly realize emergency backup is important.”
Humless has a number of potential residential neighborhood microgrid projects in the works. They include a 200- to 400-home neighborhood in the mountains of Utah, 60 homes outside of Lake Powell, Utah, and another neighborhood in northern California, he said. His customers tend to be located in areas like Texas and California that are experiencing outages because of heat, hurricanes and wildfires. In addition, people living in remote areas, including areas of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, are seeking resilience.
The neighborhood microgrids not only provide resilience; they allow neighbors to share power, said Lobdell.
“Some homes may not get enough sun or have shade from a cliff. They won’t produce as much solar. We might plug in a centralized system that feeds all the homes,” Lobdell said. That system can allow homes to share power. For example, if residents are on vacation, they might share extra energy with their neighbors. And if one resident uses more power than others, that homeowner would have to pay more, he said.
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