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Cutting the cord —

I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan

What started as an experiment has turned into a habit I hope will inspire others.

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I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan
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Aurich Lawson | Getty Image

On May 22, 2022, I began an experiment. I unplugged everything in my apartment, with the goal of drawing zero power from the electric grid for one month. I had no idea how I would make it past a few days.

Nevertheless, I opened the main circuit, disconnecting my apartment from the grid and committing myself to solving what problems arose as they came. As I type these words in January, I’m in my eighth month. My Con-Ed bills continue to show zero kilowatt-hours.

Ars Technica readers undoubtedly want to know about my equipment. We’ll get there, but first let me share my history, motivation, and constraints.

Why would I do this?

Today, more than half the world lives in cities. I've always thought that living "off the grid" meant living "off in the woods," where you can live simply and set up an alternate power source. But I’m a professional in Manhattan and need to earn a living. I have to meet the expectations of professional service from my clients and from New York University, where I teach leadership and entrepreneurship. Before this experiment, I didn’t believe my lifestyle would let me disconnect from the grid for a day, let alone longer.

But that sort of thinking was in tension with my work. Over the years, I have helped leaders in business, politics, and other fields learn to lead on sustainability. These leaders can then change their organizations’ and constituencies’ cultures and practices to embrace sustainability. Even though corporate and policy choices matter more than those of any individual, I was still curious to see if I could make my own practices more sustainable. Personal responsibility matters to me, so polluting less motivates me; it's a small thing, but one I can control, even if it's important to make policy and political changes, too.

And I wanted to see how easy (or difficult) this might be for other city dwellers—both to help with sustainability and with utility bills. The Wright brothers didn’t need to make a 747 or a global network of airports to show that controlled powered flight had potential. Showing success once created the mindset shift that led to a process of continual improvement among innovators, who did the rest. So who knows? Perhaps my story will inspire a few innovators (maybe even you!).

In addition to the obvious benefits that reduced power consumption brings, there’s also the issue of grid resilience. If everyone could stand a few days without grid power, we could build grids that aren't made for 99.9 percent uptime but for 95 percent or lower uptime (with dedicated power for essential services like hospitals, police, and subways). At some level of local resilience, we could power cities exclusively with solar and wind despite their intermittency, with much lower battery needs.

Unplugging gradually

I started my personal sustainability drive almost accidentally, when I challenged myself to avoid packaged food for a week. I expected deprivation and sacrifice from avoiding Manhattan’s abundant food options. If I’m honest, part of me hoped to find the challenge untenable so I could say the cure was worse than the disease and give up.

But constraints breed creativity. I learned to cook from scratch, which led to more of what I valued in food: flavor, variety, convenience, nutrition, and socializing, while lowering costs and pollution.

The unexpectedly rewarding results motivated me to keep going. I avoided flying for a year and experimented with unplugging my fridge. By May 2022, when I decided to disconnect completely, I hadn’t filled a load of trash since 2019, hadn’t flown since 2016, had unplugged my fridge for eight months, and had electric bills consistently under $2 (not counting fixed connection charges of about $18).

Promoted Comments

Having been involved with designing and installing a few successful "off-grid" systems, I might offer the following advice:

The point of a reliable electric grid is to relieve individuals of the need to worry about where their energy comes from. Macroeconomically speaking, it is much better — like, 250 times better — to have a staff of 2,000 people working full-time to ensure 99.99% reliability of grid power than it is to have 10,000,000 people each devoting 5% of their daily work output to obtaining and managing energy for themselves.

Places whose electric grid reliability falls below about 98% inevitably see a significant loss of economic activity, and therefore of individual and overall wealth, as a result. It's hard to run a grocery store when your freezers die and all your merchandise goes bad once every 50 days. It's expensive to run a hospital if you need extra staff to constantly replace thousands of UPS batteries that keep getting worn out from overuse and thousands of medical equipment power supplies that burn out from repeated brownouts. It's wasteful of resources, and really bad for air quality, if 20,000 buildings each need to maintain their own diesel or propane generator to fill in during power outages.

To go off-grid, you must either accept a dramatic change in lifestyle and sacrifice many of the conveniences that save time and effort in the modern age (as this article's author did, and as we do at my parents' northern cottage during summertime when we want to get away from the office).
Or you personally spend the time, money, and effort to build, operate, and maintain a system that can supply the energy for your own personal needs without a grid connection. When I design such systems for cruising sailors, we do a realistic calculation of all the energy they want to use in a week, then have the discussion of "Yes, you can have all that stuff, but here's how much more battery, how much more solar array area, etc. you need to support it, and here's what those parts weigh and cost." Sometimes they'll say yeah, you can put the 11 kWh battery bank in, we'll find the room. Sometimes they'll get sticker shock and decide to back off, ditch the big-screen TV, etc. and change their lifestyle to fit their budget. And sometimes they'll try to make it all work with high demand and low cost and weight, then get all pissed off two years later when the system isn't meeting their needs and they've burned out the batteries from cycling down to 20% every day.

If you go that route, you take full responsibility for every aspect of it. Most people prefer to pay their electric bill and let someone else be responsible for keeping the system working.

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