The lunatic fringe of the eco-tard movement thinks it is becoming fashionable.

Being "off the grid" is under-rated. . .

I was reminded of it again over the weekend while reading a piece in the LA Times about the Post Ranch Inn . . .

What caught me, in particular, in reading the piece was how the Post Ranch Inn is going solar and "off the grid", and how that was presented as a good thing, not just something you might do as a nutter in rural Montana. It seems being "off the grid" has crossed over from being something done at the fringes to something laudable and desirable.

It's just ignorance and fuzzy thinking, but it may be true that it is increasingly fashionable. More's the pity. The late Marty Bender was quite clear about this, as noted in this old post.

a mature understanding of the power grid is necessary. Society is necessarily networked and power is one part of that. The completion of the system is analogous to internetworking in that the old broadcast model is inferior to a distributed production/consumption model, where each node can be both a producer and consumer. As the late Marty Bender notes, paraphrasing, the purpose of the renewable energy technologies is to reduce dependence on fossil fuels but not dependence on local energy systems. The very idea of energy autarchy is not only uncivic, it is a fantasy that this could be done except by a small number of free-riders that take advantage of the world's systems without contributing their proper share. Those who argue for becoming energy hermits in effect argue for harming the world to achieve what in the last analysis is a spurious objective. It isn't regression to a pre-grid reality, metaphorical catagenesis, that provides resilience, it is distributed production as well as consumption. This doesn't eliminate failure, it isn't fail safe, but it is what some call fail-soft: the scope and scale of failure is distributed too, a checkerboard effect rather than the blue screen of death.