for those of us not in the bay area, it's good to think now about what to do if the power grid goes out for hours, days, or even weeks. these kinds of systemic cascading failures will be increasingly common as climate change begins to get into gear this decade.
the infrastructure almost everywhere wasn't designed for rapid changes in climate and increasingly severe storms. much of it is already pushed past the end of its expected lifespan. if you can, gather materials to ride out power, water, and supply chain disruptions and get more than you'll need so you can share
@substack I think we'll see increasingly products quietly designed for this.
A lot of it will be in home battery storage, which is already taking off and is needed to deal with the duck curve problem too.
There are a couple of grid tie inverters that can kinda, sorta power one outlet when the grid is down and the sun it shining.
The Enphase IQ8 microinverter promises to take that a lot further.
@substack a fridge plugged into an IQ8 with a single 300w solar panel should be able to keep food cold on sunny days.
Fill the freezer with water for thermal mass and it will probably keep sufficiently cool overight with no power.
Add 2 more solar panels and IQ8's and it will run on cloudy days too.
That's a much simplified version of my offgrid fridge0.branchable.com needing none of its special components of software.
@joeyh 3 x 300w solar panels is bigger than our biggest system here ;)