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Here's the scenario: centralized electric power becomes less reliable as increasingly costly liquid fuel disrupts preventive maintenance programs for power distribution. Our BFEO houses have been either equipped with rooftop photovoltaic panels, or they have been made for simple retrofitting.

Now for an excursion. If I install PV panels in pre-BFEO days, I will do so to offset the power I draw from the centralized system, or to sell power to the system if I am not using all that I generate. More on this later, as I believe it will be cost-effective in only a few more years.

But post-BFEO, I am going to want to power essential loads in my house with power that I can generate (or power that I have stored in batteries). (Another excursion: I'm not crazy about batteries. I wonder if and when there will be a practical hydrogen storage system; perhaps a chemical salt to which hydrogen could be attached and disattached. I sure don't want to handle hydrogen gas in my home. The hydrogen, of course, would be used to generate electric power in a fuel cell)

OK, back to today's question. What are our essential electric loads in a BFEO home? I put the refrigerator at the top of the list, and I would like to be able to power my computer. Some essential lights, of course. What else? A related question is, "How are we going to heat the house?" Making hot water, for instance, will not do us much good if we cannot power the pump to move the hot water through the heating system.

Speaking of heating, a heat pump would seem to be impractical in the BFEO home, but I sure do like ground source, boosted by solar hot water, in pre-BFEO times. OTOH, the ground source heat pump could run when we have central electric power - which is likely to be most of the time. I want to be able to get along for a few days on self-generated or stored electric power. Not forever.

So my list is the refrigerator, maybe 50 watts of lights (high efficiency fluorescents), whatever load my computer draws, my hot water circulation pump. Speaking of pumps, I also want to be able to treat rainwater captured on my roof for drinking, so I need a pump for the cistern and a point-of-use disinfection device - say an ultraviolet unit. These are available today.

Another related question is, "How are we going to cook?" Electric stoves would seem to be impractical during the central power system outage - they would rapidly exhaust the power we could store from a home PV system. But natural gas might be costly and prone to disruption, too.

Back to the question of electric loads during the power outage. Do we wire the house with two distribution systems, and then turn the nonessential system off when the power goes down? Or do we shed loads with a controller, and is such a controller available today?

One final excursion. When we discuss renewable electric energy, we need to factor in significantly lower power demands than we see in modern American homes. We've all seen the "good news" assertions of new wind energy projects: "Enough electricity to power 5000 homes!" That's good, for now, but we need to move toward that same amount of electric power serving the needs of 25,000 homes. Just as we need to move toward using 1/10 the liquid fuel we use today to move around, I think we need to aim at 1/5 the electric power.