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I read that about TVA rolling blackouts over the Christmas holidays and, as an Alabamian, I could scarcely believe it. I don't know about EPA restrictions done against TVA, but the rest of Alabama (Alabama Power) had the problem of the EPA forcing them to close some coal plants and replace them with "clean burning" natural gas fueled power in the Obama days. Now Brandon is making natural gas expensive too, which makes both our natural gas bills and our power bills go up.

Here's how I handled it. It won't work for everybody, but it might for you since you live in a similar climate. As soon as Brandon signed his EO's to limit natural gas production I started doing the math on producing my own power with solar and had the Phase I of my project installed in May of 2021. After owning it half a year I liked it enough to do Phase Ia, which was convert my two natural gas appliances to electric. In May of 2022 I had the data of how will my solar produced each day of each month, and it had provided 58.5% of all the power we needed for the year, within the range I predicted (50% to 60%).

So I implemented Phase II, which is what I wanted all along but didn't want to go all in until I tested it with a smaller project. I doubled my solar (now 20kW) and inverter capacity (now 18kW continuous power), tripled by battery storage (now 92kWh), and, since it was time to replace my wife's old crossover car anyway, bought a crossover EV. Owned the EV since June (11 months) and the solar upgrade was completed at the end of August (8 and a half months ago). I predicted it would produce 80% to 90% of all the power we need across the year (higher in the spring summer and fall, lower in the winter). To date it's produced 75.8% of all the power we need, with the summer months left to go to see how well it performs to finish the year (since the Aug 31 upgrade). I now predict it'll be a little over 80% for the year. (In my initial calculation I didn't anticipate my wife and I putting 24K miles on the EV in the first 11 months of owning it LOL. That obviously created a large power demand than I expected.) No natural gas bills. Almost no gasoline at the pump (we don't drive our ICE pickup nearly as much as we do the EV car). And over the past 12 months our power bills averaged $99.88 (expecting it to go down a little after the summer months of upgraded solar becomes part of the 12 month average). And none of those lowered power bills are from selling power to the grid (I don't do that, but now I'm recently applying for the power sell program because I found a way to do it without making my system shut down automatically if the grid power goes down.)

None of that solar or EV saves the world from some fake warmageddon. Nor should they be forced onto people (my system wouldn't work as well for most people). But in some use cases like ours it allows our family to be almost energy independent and gives us the kind of energy security as a family that we had as as a nation when Trump made our country practically energy independent. When the grid goes down, no problem, my system operates like a whole-house generator anyway. As energy costs go up, eh, bummer but not a show stopper since we buy only 20% of our power anyway.