[Cob] why do people want to be off grid?

[Chandra Glick]

As a note. What is practical for off-grid varies with your location. Amanda 
mentions that water power is the cheapest. But it isn't where I live. I live 
in Kansas. Wind is the way to go here. even if I had access to moving water, 
it would be so shallow and move so slowly that it would generate negligable 
electricity. PV is also a decent option here. When I get my home built, I 
plan on going with a combo of wind and PV with either a large battery bank 
or a grid link for those rare times when neither is available.
  You really need to know your site and know what renewable resources are 
available there. If you're really lucky you might even be able to tap into 
geothermal...  Good luck in finding your power source.
    Chandra

----Original Message Follows----
<heavily shipped>  Since their place is down a hundred or
so feet on a NORTH-facing slope, PV was not an option.  and they have less
in the way of breeze than I do.  They've got the river, but it floods a lot
in the winter.

For $10,000 you can have a pretty good-sized PV (photo-voltaics) system.  If
you've got plenty of wind (I have wind chimes that remain silent 6 months of
the year, only sound off occasionally the rest of the time) WIND power might
well be cheaper--and the tower will probably cost more than the unit on top.
   The cheapest is WATER power, which is inexpensive enough sometimes to put
in even if you only use it four or five months out of the year.
......................
Jill asks,

Okay, so what are the options for energy sources? Living without electricity
is not an option for me. What about solar? Generators? Apparently getting
on-the-grid requires a lot of changes to my building process...so what now?

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