Cam
and Michelle are partners in Aztext Press, which publishes books and
multimedia materials about renewable energy and sustainable living.
They operate their business from an off-grid home on the family’s
Sunflower Farm in rural eastern Ontario, Canada.
NL:
First of all, tell me about the off-grid home you’ve lived in for
the past decade or so.
Cam:
The home was built in 1888, and renovated by the previous owners.
It’s located on 150 acres surrounded by lakes and bush north of
Kingston, Ontario. We also have a guest house the previous owners
built, which houses our office, a garage and several extra bedrooms.
Ninety percent of our electricity comes from our solar panels, five
percent from the wind and five percent from our gasoline generator
that we run in months with little sun or wind, like November and
December.
Michelle:
Despite this being a century-old farmhouse and off the grid, we have all
of the conveniences of a modern home, including satellite Internet
and a satellite dish for our TV. In that sense, our home is a
wonderful blend of old, traditional styling with modern
sensibilities.
NL:
Why, how and when did you become interested in renewable energy?
Cam:
The house is about $150,000 from the nearest utility pole, so the
decision to go with renewable energy was an economic one! As our
family became more environmentally aware, it was a logical
progression to look at where our energy came from. We had already
reduced our garbage to one can every eight weeks for our family of
four, walked and cycled as much as possible, ate a vegetarian diet
from as many local sources as we could, and started looking at the
impact of electricity generation. Ontario’s power is still 25
percent coal that has horrible implications for greenhouse gases,
and the 50 percent of the electricity produced by nuclear power is
leaving a legacy of waste for future generations that we
fundamentally disagree with.
NL:
Was moving to the country a big step for you and your family?
Michelle:
Yes, it was an enormous step! Moving away from friends and family
and the support system that they provided was scary. We were home-
schooling our two daughters at that point and we left behind a
wonderful network of other homeschooling families. Also, we were
accustomed to being able to walk to a grocery store, the library and
other necessities. Now our nearest neighbor is four kilometers away
(and a long-distance phone call!). When we first moved here, our
closest grocery store was a half-hour drive away. (Luckily one has
opened up in our village, 13 kilometers away.)
Cam:
It was terrifying. We were moving three hours from the
customers who supported our electronic publishing business, to
a place that was powered by the sun and wind. Although we did
have six months to get the house prepared with a phone and
Internet system, it was still the craziest thing we’ve ever
done.
Michelle and I are a writing our first book, called
Off-the-Grid Without a Paddle. It was a huge leap of faith
and, like so many things, the risk exemplifies the reward.
NL: What were the adjustments to attitudes and behavior that
your family had to make to accommodate the renewable energy
systems?
Cam: Living off the grid is fantastic but
challenging. Not knowing anything about electricity when we moved
here was a huge opportunity to test our belief in “lifelong
learning,” which we had developed as we homeschooled our kids.
The steep learning curve was an excellent opportunity to put that
theory into practice! In terms of lifestyle changes, with the
system we inherited from the previous owners we came to the
realization that like everything on the planet, our
electricity supply was finite. Some days there wasn’t enough
electricity in the batteries to waste on powering the TV. So
we made sure that what electricity we did use, we used
efficiently.
Michelle: Luckily, we had been energy conscious
even in our old, on-grid home. We chose to be energy efficient
back then. And when you live off-the-grid, you must be energy
efficient!
NL: Besides utilizing solar and wind power, are
there other sustainable aspects to your lifestyle on Sunflower
Farm?
Cam: We have found that our activities more closely
mirror Nature and the weather. On sunny days we do laundry,
both because it means we’ll have lots of power for the washing
machine and to pump water, but also to dry everything on the
clothesline. While a lot of off-grid people use propane dryers,
we felt that using a non-renewable resource for an activity
that can be done with the sun and wind is wasteful, inefficient and wears
out your clothing more quickly too.
We have a huge vegetable garden in which we grow much of our own food, and we heat with
wood harvested on our property. It’s important to remember that
heating with wood is one of the few carbon neutral ways to
heat your home. The wood absorbed carbon dioxide as it grew and
it will release the same amount of CO2 and heat, whether it rots
on the forest floor or is burned in our woodstove.
The key is to
have an EPA Certified, highly efficient woodstove with either a
catalytic combustor or second oxygen burn cycle. If you burn
the wood correctly, your emissions should be close to a natural
gas furnace. The difference is: I can’t keep up with the
supply of dead trees on our property, but the country is running
out of natural gas.
Michelle: We drive a small, fuel-efficient
Honda Civic and have never had a larger vehicle, even while
raising two children. If we needed extra storage space for
camping or long trips, we used a box on the roof. And we eat a
vegetarian diet, which is more sustainable than a meat-based
one.
NL: Your lifestyle and your business seem nicely
aligned. How did that come about?
Cam: Michelle was a
teacher and I was a landscaper/ radio broadcaster/electronic
publishing salesman. We started our own electronic publishing
business 20 years ago, and have been really fortunate that the
book publishing, which was a sideline, has now become our full
time gig.
We always dreamed about making a living sharing our
passion for renewable energy. We stayed focused on it and
worked very hard, and it happened!
Michelle: When we moved to
this off-grid home, we looked for a book that could tell us
everything we needed to know about this lifestyle. No such book
existed and we were forced to do our own research. When we met
Bill Kemp, and found a person who not only lived off-the-grid
but also understood it all, we knew we had found the right person
to write the book that we hadn’t been able to find!
NL: And
so now your company publishes Bill Kemp’s books on sustainable
living, renewable energy and carbon- neutral transportation….
Cam: Yes, meeting Bill was incredibly serendipitous. I went to
Bill’s house with a friend to move some batteries that Bill
was getting rid of when he upgraded his system. After noticing a
vegetarian cookbook on their counter, I invited Bill and his
wife Lorraine back to our place for dinner and we became good
friends. Bill has an incredible grasp of the technical issues
related to renewable energy and energy efficiency, and he is able
to communicate it in a way that people get.
NL: Do you experience any problems
running a business off-grid, especially with the computers and
other equipment required by a publishing business?
Cam:
Absolutely none. We have always used laptops, which consume much
less energy than desktops, but the power our inverter produces
is of much higher quality than you get from your local utility.
Last summer, we upgraded our system to 24V for our new wind
turbine and added a new charge controller, which our batteries
just love. It doesn’t seem to matter how much we use the electric
kettle to make tea or the electric toaster to make toast, we
cannot use as much power as we produce right now. It’s amazing!
NL: Do you think we have reached a tipping point in terms of a
realization of the reality of climate change … that we all need
to make changes in our personal lives, such as you two have done,
to mitigate it?
Cam: Yes, there’s no question we’re at the
tipping point. There are a variety of studies released in various science magazines reporting that sea ice is
at the lowest levels ever, glaciers are melting, sea levels are
rising. All of the researchers are saying the same thing, that
we are correctly predicting the effect of increased CO2 levels,
but understating the magnitude.
NL: There seems to be a lot
of talk and not enough action right now. What do you think it
will take to move us to the next stage, where awareness turns
into large-scale action?
Cam: I started doing workshops on
solar energy years ago at homeschooling conferences. Then I
started doing them on weekends at community colleges. Five
years ago, I was lucky to get 10 people to attend. Last winter, I
had 130 people attend a workshop!
Things are happening. People are waking up. I think people are starting to realize that we are in
this together and, from a global perspective, we generate 10
times the CO2 of developing countries, so we’ve got to get
cracking.
Michelle: I think what is needed is a great deal of
political will. From what I’ve seen, most people aren’t willing to
make major steps on their own, especially when they’ve been
told for years that all it takes is small steps. Small steps are
important but major changes must be made.
It seems to me that people want to buy their way out of this: “What can I buy to
help the planet?” This is the wrong approach.
NL: Where do you think we are
headed in terms of the development of renewable energy in
North America? Do you think the future is in big solar and wind
or small-scale, individual systems? Will we have wind farms all
over the countryside or will each of us have a wind generator and
solar panels on our roof?
Cam: The Europeans are looking at
their power grid as an Internet-like system of distributed
generation, with lots of smaller producers pumping into the grid,
rather than massive, inefficient, centralized power stations
sending electricity long distances and wasting lots of it
along the way.
Here in Ontario, Canada, as hard as people have lobbied
to have efficiency and renewables taken more seriously, the
current government has decided to invest billions of our dollars
in nuclear energy, which basically bankrupted the system in
the first place. They did this while scrambling to keep up with
the applications from people who want to provide renewable
energy to the grid through the Standard Offer Contract. I think
if you gave the $40 billion that will be spent on nuclear
power to homeowners to purchase more efficient appliances and to
install their own green power systems, you would get a better
result. And we wouldn’t have 10,000 years worth of nuclear
waste to deal with. None of the $30 billion that the atomic waste
agency says it will cost us to dispose of the waste currently
stored on-site at nuclear plants is accounted for in your
electricity bill.
NL: Someone recently wrote me a tirade about
“enviro-Luddites,” suggesting that it was ridiculous to think
that the global warming problem could be solved by “people
moving to the country and sticking up a windmill.” He quoted Amory Lovins’ old statement that
the only good technology is no technology and said that
environmentalists are taking us back to the Stone Age. How
would you respond to that person? Is renewable energy
low-tech? And can it “solve” the global warming problem on its
own with other measures?
Cam: I’ll admit that I moved to the
country for that elusive “hippy gardening dream.” But the
reason I can live and work off the electricity grid is because of the
technology in my solar panels and my inverter, which converts
the energy so my household appliances can use it. I have a
satellite dish for television, a satellite dish for high-speed
Internet, which is essential to my business, and a “tellular”
phone system, which uses cell service to act like a real
phone. I have thousands of dollars in computers and hard drives,
and now thousands of dollars invested in cameras and software
for creating professional quality DVDs. I’m a Luddite at heart,
but my house looks like Mission Control in Houston. I would
suggest the letter writer watch our upcoming DVD on the steps
involved with evaluating your site and installing a wind turbine.
The mind boggles at the number of factors one has
to take into
consideration.
At a certain point, though, it’s not about
spending money to solve problems. We all just have to use less.
Our family of four uses five kilowatt hours (KwH) of
electricity a day, while the average family here uses 35
KwH, and I don’t think many people who stay here ever notice a
difference in the quality of their lifestyle. No, we don’t have
air conditioning. When it gets hot, I sleep on the back porch.
That’s a low tech solution.
NL: What do you think about biofuels? I am concerned that it’s not sustainable, in that
corn, etc. grown for energy will replace food crops.
Cam: I
would agree that biofuels and using food for fuel is a zero-sum
game. Our biodiesel book discusses using waste vegetable
matter as the feed stock, which again can be considered carbon
neutral.
Bill Kemp has developed a combined heat and power
system that would be considered a “bio-mass” system as well.
It takes the manure from a farming operation and heats it up in
an anaerobic digester, which kills the pathogens, making it
safe to spread on fields. The manure produces methane, which is
20 times more harmful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. This
methane is used by a generator, which produces electricity to
power the farm, and the excess is pumped back into the
electricity grid, where the farmer is paid 11 cents/kilowatt
hour under the Province’s Standard Offer Contract. They also
receive an additional 3.5 cents because it is “dispatchable,”
meaning it can be generated when the power grid needs it most.
The water that cools the engine is used on the farm for domestic
hot water. Many farmers will now make more money selling their
electricity than selling food.
This is the brilliance of Bill Kemp. He’s taken an
environmental problem – manure – and he’s solved that problem, solved the
environmental problem of methane, and is making money for some of the most
important members our society – farmers. That’s win/win/win! Bill is able to look at problems and engineer
solutions.
Now, if we start to look at switchgrass and other
crops that will grow on marginal lands and can be used for
heating, we may be able to help farmers more.
NL: In your
experience, do most people care about the environmental aspect of
renewable energy, conservation, and such, or are they mostly
concerned about the cost and future availability of energy … as
seems to be the motivation for alternatively fueled vehicles?
Cam: It doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve run out of the easy energy
and, now, rapidly increasing energy prices are going to force
everyone to look at using it more efficiently and to try to make
some of their own. According to the Canadian Gas Producers we
have about eight years of natural gas left, at current discovery
and use rates. Eight years!
How do you heat your house? And we
won’t be able to build the infrastructure to bring in LNG or
liquefied natural gas as quickly as we’ll need it. Under
NAFTA, we have to ship 50 percent of our gas to the U.S., even if
Canadians are freezing. So put on a sweater and log onto the
NRCAN website to get your EcoEnergy Audit done. It’s time you
made “energy efficiency” your mantra.
And in terms of driving,
the price of a barrel of oil has broken $100. It was $20 in
2001. The days of driving Hummers are rapidly drawing to a close.
For many people transit will become a necessity … or a bike or
Smart Car if they want to drive themselves.
NL: What would be
your first bit of advice to a suburban reader wanting to explore
the use of renewable energy for his or her home?
Cam: I would
suggest they read Bill Kemp’s book called Smart Power: an
urban guide to renewable energy and efficiency. Yes, I publish it,
and I want to make money to buy more solar panels. I will not
deny that. But in that book, Bill has developed a graph that
has become the industry standard in explaining how to approach
this topic. It shows that to get the fastest payback you have
to start with the simple, inexpensive steps like replacing
light
bulbs and turning off phantom loads. Then, as you
progress up the chart it shows how to replace your appliances
properly, then finally how the fastest payback on a renewable
energy system is a solar thermal system on your roof, to
preheat your domestic hot water. Cost on that would be between
$3,000 and $4,000 with a payback of about six years. I think with
the way energy prices are set to go, it will probably be
faster than that.
And finally, Bill writes about when you’re
ready to invest in some solar panels and a wind turbine, what the
payback is. Yes, there is a payback! Plus, you’ll
inflation-proof your family from energy price increases, while
you’re reducing your footprint on the planet. So many people
are obsessed with saving for their child’s post secondary
education. What better legacy to leave to your kids, than some
solar panels on your roof, with a 25-year warranty and no
effective end to their productivity, that will produce clean,
green energy for decades. The days of thinking and dreaming about
this are over. It’s time to “Go Solar!”
Learn More
The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H.
Kemp (Aztext, 2005)
$mart Power: An urban guide to renewable energy
and efficiency by William H. Kemp (Aztext, 2005)
Biodiesel: Basics and
Beyond by William H. Kemp (Aztext, 2006)
The Zero-Carbon Car: Building
the car the auto makers can’t get right by William H. Kemp (Aztext,
2007)
Grow Your Own Vegetables: Seven easy steps to your own backyard
produce department hosted by Cam Mather (Aztext, DVD)
Aztext
Publishing www.aztext.com
This article was published in 2008 in Natural Life Magazine.
