By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
I couldn’t sleep last night. A short but fierce burst of rain woke me up and then…well, there was no getting back to sleep. After tossing and turning for a couple of hours, I finally gave up and went downstairs. And found myself researching whole-house battery systems. Because, why not? We’re going to be building ourselves a garage soon, something I haven’t had since roughly 2003, and lately we’ve been thinking about resilience.
Central Electric works awfully hard to keep our power on, and most of the time they do a remarkably good job of it. But storms happen. Trees fall. Roads wash. Ice accumulates. Rural electrical lines travel a lot of miles through a lot of woods, and sometimes nature wins for a while. It is simply one of those realities we live with here. And if there are ways to make our own little corner of the world less dependent on everything around us working perfectly all the time, that seems worth thinking about.
The more I researched and thought, though, the less I found myself thinking about outages and the more I started thinking about garages. The old one up in Oil City, the one we just finished taking down, was built sometime in the 1930s. I doubt anyone involved was thinking about batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, bidirectional charging, or anything else I found myself reading about in the wee hours of the morning. They were probably thinking about keeping a vehicle out of the weather. Maybe storing some tools. Maybe simply getting the thing built before winter.
And yet that garage lasted nearly a century. People patched it, repurposed it, and kept finding ways to make it useful until, finally, age, weather, and gravity won. Last week I found myself wondering whether the people who built it thought about character, or permanence, or whether anyone would care about their work eighty or ninety years later. This week, I’m wondering about the other end of that question.
If we are going to build something new, what should we give it the ability to become?
I don’t know exactly what kind of battery system we’ll end up with, or whether we’ll install one right away. The technology is changing quickly enough that whatever I researched at 4:17 this morning may be old news by the time we’re ready. But I like the idea of building in possibilities. Maybe the garage eventually helps power the house during an outage. Maybe it supports solar. Maybe one day the vehicle parked inside it can send electricity back the other way. Maybe something comes along that none of us has thought of yet.
Over the last month we’ve been carefully saving brick and stone from one garage. Maybe, a hundred years from now, someone will be dismantling an antique battery cabinet and muttering, “Can you believe they used to store electricity like this?”
With any luck, the garage itself will still be standing. It’s going to be ICF, after all.
Roots & Renewal is where the Pellere Foundation shares the people, projects and occasional mud behind our work. Read along here, check out the podcast on YouTube or Spotify, or find us at pellere.org.
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