We just went through the giant December wind storm outside of Seattle that took down a substantial amount of the electrical infrastructure in the area. We were pretty much at the epicenter of the storm damage and were without power for 9 days. Almost every power pole along the nearest major road was knocked down. After three days, a repair crew broke our phone line which was out for another 4 days. Some neighborhoods lost their cell-phone towers as well. Our cell phones don't work at our house even in the best of times so we were without power or communication and most of the roads were totally blocked for extended periods of time by repair crews.

Our small group of houses is on a community well backed up by a 16kw propane powered generator (which I own). I take any surplus power to run things in my house. This works well for an outage that lasts a day or so but once you go past a week this sort of system just isn't feasible. The propane generator consumes something like 1.2 gallons an hour and we only have a 100 gallon tank over there. We spent over $600 dollars running the generator over 9 days and had to call the propane company out 3 times (with some urgency) to keep the tank filled.

(BTW: our house is on a 250 gal. propane tank and our neighbor has a 500 gal. tank thus so much for the speculation about small propane tanks stated somewhere above.)

The first thing you discover in the case of a severe outage is how vulnerable the entire system is. Stores mostly closed with some grocery stores staying open and running generators. The frozen and dairy sections had to be taped off since all the food was spoiled. Gas stations were down except for a very limited number running generators - it took hours in line to get gas. Any store that was open had huge lines snaking down the aisles. It took a long time to get back to normal even after power was restored because stores had to clear their ruined inventory before they could restock.

You also start to find out other things about what happens when you go off the grid for a sustained period of time. Our septic system has to pump uphill to the drain field and the pump doesn't have an electrical breakout so it can be generator powered (this will soon be corrected). We had to have the tank pumped as a stop-gap to avoid overflowing the tank. Another $600 dollars.

I also burned through 2 backup UPS systems that really didn't like the power fluctuations running on the generator. Another few hundred dollars.

When things get this bad you realize that gas or propane generators are extremely short-term solutions. Some people around here have 30kw whole-house generators that run on natural gas. I wonder what their gas bill looked like last month.

Two of the other neighbors in our cluster of houses went out and got gasoline generators (you should have seen those lines). One got a Honda 6500kw generator which eventually was getting about 12+ hours on 5 gallons of gas which is fairly reasonable (but only after the break-in period).

After the outage I started assessing how to improve things. I quickly came to the conclusion that internal combustion-based backup systems are really not very robust even in the short term. In a really bad outage/crisis you can't rely on gasoline being available or on propane delivery.

Thus even ignoring what is right for the planet, in practical terms what you want for power backup is the absolute most efficient system. We can burn wood for heat but you still need a few amenities like lights to read by (and the septic sump pump, grrrr!). We could probably survive fairly comfortably for a sustained period of time on about 1000 watts (and running the well generator just enough to get by). Thus a smaller version of the system described in the article would be really interesting. In fact, even without the solar component, having the hydrogen storage and fuel cell would be very useful as a backup power system. The efficiency vs any internal combustion-based backup system would provide a huge benefit.

I think it's pretty clear that we are in for a period of rapid climate change which will result in major storms in areas that are not prepared for them and this will result in continual damage to the electricity infrastructure (e.g. look at the storms in Europe now). Just from a purely pragmatic position we have to move to a more distributed and redundant energy system or we're going to be sitting around in the dark a lot in the coming years. And I can tell you from recent personal experience that after a few days the novelty wears quickly as other elements of the infrastructure (food, water, etc) start to fall apart.

Right now people just look at the bottom line with a solar system like this and ask why would they pay all this upfront capital cost. But talk to them again after a couple of weeks in the cold and dark. It will be a very different story then, I assure you.

It is terribly ironic that someone from MIT would claim that the brain operating continuously was a longstanding and obvious overriding assumption. MIT (historically their AI lab, and more recently their Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department and their Linguistics Department) is where much of the fervor and argumentation for the mind being a finite state automaton came from. Personally, I couldn't agree more that neurophysiological data make it obvious that the brain functions essentially continuously, but if you read a contemporary cognitive psychology textbook you'll see a very different "information-processing approach" as the dominant perspective.