Looks like you got lucky on that one.

I had a solar powered and wind powered home in the Michigan Upper peninsula. where we average 30 FEET of snow in the winter.

It is absolutely doable. You cant be a bran dead sloth like the typical american though. you have to do some maintenance. About 20 hours a years worth.

Then the windmills will be turning like hell. Because when the sun is not shining the wind is blowing.

Many people have lived off grid with DC for most of their needs for decades. This is not new in any way.

Just like most really rich guys. Trying like hell to clean his dark soul from what he did to get that rich.

Carnegie was a horrible horrible human being, he tried to buy his soul back with all the "giving back".

Having consistent power to refrigerate vaccines and medicines, and sterilize needles is critical to curing diseases worldwide.

Moving to a more decentralized approach of clean power generation allows areas with major health problems from disease to leapfrog past other countries. And because they're not that useful in warfare, if done on a mass produced level and inexpensively, it makes it easy enough to maintain (just train people to fix them and install them, and set them on resupply and maintenance runs, with text messages for "out of supplies" or "power running low" or "diagnostic error code physical problem") using burst relay communications.

Same goes for water. The Gates Foundation has demonstrated they could mass produce clean water supplies from ... basically sewage (human wastes). They just need power supplies to run those. If you roll out solar worldwide in mass quantities you drop the cost to maintain and install low enough. And you can use such devices to charge phones that use low energy communications. Most diseases in poor nations involve lack of clean drinking water. If you can't get clean drinking water locally but you can get it free from one of these devices, you'll use that. Nobody wants their babies to die.

Doesn't matter if it won't charge your phone at night when it needs power to run the fridges, so long as you make it modular.

Very good idea.

Most modern data centers run on DC nowadays. The efficiency losses from AC and the cooling and bulk of AC transformers for systems that are literally DC mean we can save from 10-25 percent of our total power usage by running DC. It takes a lot of power to cool down the excess heat from AC transformers.

Pretty much every day I get sales agents trying to sell me on converting our data centers to DC. There's a lot of money in that.

But that's a data center. A kitchen and household appliances tends to be more work than it's worth. But if you're in a remote area and all your power inputs are DC (solar, for example), then it might make some sense.

AC just gets transformed. Look at your store bought computer, it has two switches. One is for 110V AC or 220V AC. The other is for AC or DC. The internal circuits all run 6V or 12V DC. If you bypass the transformer, you can run direct DC, provided it's at 6V DC or 12V DC.

Even the plug for your iPhone works that way. It's why it's so big.

In the event of a major quake that takes down your electric grid power, you just have to turn all your key appliances to DC, add up the resistance, make sure the physical wires don't connect to anything AC, and plug your solar panels into the circuit. Hook up some batteries, or use the DC input for your electric car, to balance the load and you can run without a grid. It's not that difficult. We used to wire S100 bus computers from direct DC, we only added AC later.

The major problem with DC is sending it long distances. That doesn't work so well.

(yes, this is overly simplified, but let's not get into that)

You know what they say: Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

60 Hz more so than 50.

Partner with Microsoft? Sure. Burn it to the ground so Microsoft had to buy Nokia, then make a massive write-off just so they'd have a phone in the market? Probably not the plan. He executed the "We have to get off our current platform NOW NOW NOW and go Microsoft" so well people only heard the first part. But I assume they were hoping for quite a few more converts.

I've looked at an off grid cabin for weekend vacations. A few portable propane cylinders would cover the fridge (assuming a pound/liter of LP gas a day), and it would also cover a water heater.

Solar wouldn't be cheap, but for a few thousand, I could place a number of solar panels, have them feed in via 1-2 decent MPPT controllers into a set of AGM batteries (so watering the batteries isn't an issue), then have a decent PSW inverter coming off for use. Because lead-acid batteries destroy themselves if they go under 50% SoC, take the expected ampere-hours you plan to use, and double it, at the least. This would easily handle almost anything but heating/cooling and the well pump (which can use 1500-2000 watts each.)

The trick with the well pump and an off-grid cabin, would be to run a generator so the pump can move water into an above ground storage tank 250-2500 gallons, then from there, a much smaller pump that runs from 12 volts can pump water from the tank into the cabin.

Of course, come Texas summers, that is what a generator is for on a weekend basis. I can get 8-20 hours of use from three gallons of gasoline in a 3000 watt Yamaha inverter generator, and for a small cabin, a 10k BTU A/C is more than enough to cool it down, assuming some semblance of insulation [1]. As an added bonus, with a converter (rectifier), it is a way to help keep the batteries topped off if the panels can't keep up with use.

Disclaimer: This is a vacation cabin. For a real house, it would cost over $40,000 for a solar panel setup that can handle the amp draw of the well pump and the A/C.

Of course, there are other items like waste water (I like using a cassette toilet and having cartridges on hand, since those can be dumped down the commode safely and legally once back home, and gray water can be filtered and recycled in a settling tank so it doesn't destroy the ground around it.)

[1]: Ironic thing is that if solar panels are mounted with air space between them and the rest of the roof, they function as shade, doing a decent job at keeping the place cooler, even though the panels are likely at around 150 degrees (66 degrees C) on a hot day.