As our small group stood around the living room and kitchen of the ‘all-electric’ Habitat-built home on Ranger Park Drive, Jon Kenney, ‘Energy Management Program Architect’ for La Plata Electric Association (LPEA), discussed the most obvious element of a typical all-electric home:
Solar panels on the roof.
This new house, a modular home built by Albuquerque-based Clayton Homes and installed and finished by Habitat for Humanity of Archuleta County, was not necessarily designed to be ‘all-electric’ — so it worked well as an experiment when Mr. Kenney and LPEA were looking for a test home for the future of southwest Colorado’s electric industry.
A growing electric industry, as Colorado and the rest of the world make an effort to transition away from fossil fuels.
Mr. Kenney referred to the 21 solar panels on the roof. Solar is part of the solution to an ‘all-electric’ society, but it also poses certain problems.
“Habitat, you did roof-top solar — so LPEA did not do that part. But we did support that, with a battery storage system here. Typically in our service area, solar systems over-produce. Our usage happens in the mornings and evenings. So you’re constantly pulling from the grid during those times, and in the middle of the day when the sun is high and you’re producing from your solar panels, not a lot of people are using power. They’re at work, they’re gone; they’re out of the territory where the panels are. So we have this problem. What do we do with all this production in the middle of the day?
“Well, now we can put batteries in the home and that middle-of-the-day over-production can just get stored in the battery. So now, instead of pulling from the grid in the morning and evening, you can just pull from your battery.” The batteries selected for the Ranger Park home came from Enphase, a company based in northern California. From the company’s website:
Enphase has shipped approximately 68 million microinverters, and approximately 3.5 million Enphase-based systems have been deployed in more than 145 countries, helping millions of people gain access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy while creating good jobs and a more carbon-free future for everyone.
The batteries in the new Habitat home are connected to a “combiner” which ties together the LPEA grid, the solar panels, the batteries, and the various electrical appliances inside the house, to ensure that electricity is going where it’s needed, when it’s needed. (If you’d like to learn more about selling Enphase systems, the company runs webinars on a continuing basis — including one today at 11am MT called, “How to sell Enphase Energy Systems with the IQ Battery 5P”/a>.)
The combiner has a certain type of intelligence, and can tell if the grid has gone down — something that happens occasionally in Pagosa Springs, especially during winter storms — and can automatically start powering the home off the batteries.
“Within milliseconds, I understand,” Mr. Kenney told us. “So it’s going to be able to talk to the grid and know what’s happening there.”
“There’s a ton of stuff, I mean, when you think about it… you can’t simply push power back into the grid. Power has qualities to it, right? We need 60 Hertz out of it; we need a certain voltage out of it. That’s really what this system is doing, and why it’s $14,000. Because it’s super intelligent, and it really needs to be ‘in spec’ what it’s pushing back.”
That’s just the battery system. $14,000 doesn’t include the solar panels. Mr. Kenney suspects the price for these battery systems will fall, as they become more popular, and as new technologies develop.
“These batteries are lithium-iron-phosphate, a new chemistry. They run colder; they’re safer. I’ve yet to hear of a single instance of a home battery system causing a fire in a home…”
Fortunately for early adopters of the all-electric lifestyle, the federal government and the Colorado government have rebates for certain alternative energy investments. You can learn more about those rebates and credits here.
The all-electric character of the Ranger Park home goes beyond solar panels and a battery system. The home includes a heat-pump system that blows air through the existing ducting in the modular house — warm air in the winter, and cool air in the summer. During the winter, the heat-pump extracts warmth from the air outside the home — even during very cold temperatures. In the summer, the pump extracts warmth from the air inside the home and deposits it outside.
The water heater runs on a separate heat-pump system.
In the kitchen, the electric stove top works on a induction system, where the stove surface itself never becomes hot; only the actual pan or pot gets heated, thus saving on energy. (With a typical gas stove, most of the heat actually gets wasted heating the air around the cook pot, we were told.) Pots and pans must contain iron or steel in order to work properly on an induction stove. The kitchen will also remain free of combustion gases.
The electric convection oven works in a normal fashion.
“The future of these homes is that everything is going to be connected under a single ecosystem, so whether it’s powered window blinds, the lighting, everything will be working in conjunction with one another to drive up efficiency and make the home more comfortable.
“That’s where things are going…”
A number of sponsors contributed to the three homes built by Habitat Archuleta this year, including Hutch & Sons Construction, Jet Transport, Concrete Connection, Quiller Electric, San Juan RediMix, Harmony Mechanical, Todd Lundy HVAC, All American Plumbing, Murrey Land Surveying, Alpha Engineering, Mountain Man Disaster Mitigation, Bearfoot Garage Doors, Dobson Solar, Archuleta County, Habitat Colorado, Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation (PAWSD), Pagosa Lakes Property Owners Association (PLPOA), the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board, and the Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation.
If you want to learn more about ‘all-electric homes’ check out this website.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.