OTG style off the grid solar energy pioneersQuestPoint

Trend setting California is again leading the nation; this time in the development of solar power. But California isn’t alone and it’s not just power companies and automobile manufactures finding religion in going green. Many of the incentive plans being put forward by companies are a result of federal stimulus dollars packaged with state and local programs. These prgrams are making going solar a viable alternative for homeowners. Modeled after German FITs (Feed in Tariffs) which even though Germany isn’t known for sunny weather, it has become a global leader in the use of and manufacturing of solar panels. PG & E recently joined forces with solar finance company SunRun to provide money for PG & E customers to go solar. This comes at an interesting time as PG & E has been dealing with some controversy about its’ Smart Meters and the loss of Proposition 16, a largely PG & E sponsored bill designed to limit consumer choice for energy.

The energy business has indeed been turned on its head. People are realizing there are options and they are not just “consumers” to be prayed upon. There really is a choice. See The Solar Bill of Rights Video. One niche within alternative energy is the world of the OTG’s as I like to call them. OTG? Sounds like a gang with whom you don’t want to mess with uh?Anyway it stands for Off the Grid. Here are some of their stories:

Green living: Off the grid families pioneer sustainable energy lifestyles

Once on the fringe, about 750,000 off the grid American households pioneer green living by tapping sustainable energy from the wind, sun, and earth.

By Kari Lydersen, / Contributor
posted August 7, 2010 at 2:34 pm EDT – Asheville, N.C. —

Living “off the grid” can conjure fantasies of Swiss Family Robinson-style ingenuity in paradise. Or, for those with less love of roughing it, it can simply remind them of the hardscrabble self-reliance throughout much of the developing world, where millions cook over fires, bathe in streams, and consider the glow of a bare light bulb a luxury.

In the United States, off-the-grid living – without relying on government entities or utility companies to provide electricity, heat, gas, and water – often is associated with gritting it out on the survivalist fringe.

But an increasing range of Americans are leading a snug, even smug, lifestyle totally or mostly unhitched from public utilities. Using nature – the sun, wind, water, and the earth itself – they cheaply warm and cool their homes and power everything from a blender to a giant flat-screen TV to a raging hot tub. And with the constant concern about global warming and messy dependence on fossil fuels, it’s natural that growing numbers of Americans – “the foot soldiers” of energy independence, as one expert calls them – would begin taking steps to untether themselves from the grid.

For Wayah Hall, going off the grid in a cabin 26 miles from downtown Asheville, N.C., was a way to live in harmony with nature and avoid reliance on electricity that comes from the region’s coal-burning power plant that pumps smog into the famous Blue Ridge Mountains haze.

Mr. Hall, an outdoor-skills instructor, and his wife, Alicia Bliss Hall, a natural healer, live in a kind of off-the-grid neighborhood with another young couple: Jason Brake, a professional muralist, and his wife, Diana Styffeler, a mountain bike excursion leader. Their two cabins, nestled in temperate rain forest, are powered with electricity that comes exclusively from solar panels mounted on a wagon that they wheel around the property to catch the best rays. Their water comes from a swiftly flowing stream; wood-burning stoves heat the cabins and even an outdoor hot tub; and indoor, waterless composting toilets built decoratively out of tree stumps mean they don’t need a sewer system. They’re installing a hydropower system in the stream that will add to the solar power.

Their existence appears quite rustic – and the “sustainable” lifestyle depends a whole lot on them to sustain it with such work as wood chopping and wagon pulling. But they say they have all the creature comforts they need, and – if February’s record snowstorm is any gauge – some their neighbors need, too. When public power outages left on-the-grid neighbors in dark and chilly homes, a dozen of them congregated in the Halls’ self-sufficient glow: a lighted cabin, where they cozied up to the wood stove, recharged their cellphones, and even enjoyed a soak in the hot tub.”We didn’t even realize the power had gone out until our friends started coming over looking for refuge,” says Ms. Hall. Read on

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Gigantic, Very Green and on Tap for Marin

Anders Swahn stays busy running a solar energy startup. In his spare time he plans his new home, a clean-technology marvel said to be carbon neutral with solar panels, geothermal heating and gray-water recycling. It would be built to last for 200 years and measure up to Marin County’s green building standards.

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