Off-grid and out of touch

As many superheroes will tell you, I have no choice but to follow the code of conduct.

The Avenger handbook that was passed down to me when I was a wee lad says it’s my duty to protect the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the energy efficient.

But how can I, a mere superhero, begin to understand the plight?

I took a cue from Mia Farrow’s hunger strike that just ended (less than successfully). I enacted a strike of my own and decided to blog about it.

I freed myself from the confines of the electric grid, the phone company, and the water company to show you how to do minimalism, superhero style. Problem is, it ain’t as easy as I thought.

Left in the dark 

See, I figured clean technology had come a long way since the last time I went camping. You have lithium ion batteries powering laptops, new desalination techniques, and a dream house in Troy, Michigan, completely powered by solar and totally off the grid.

My real estate agent found out that the $900,000 house could be had for a steal. But only when I landed (yes, my arms were tired), did I find that the pipes were frozen and the solar panels weren't hooked up, so I couldn’t recharge my laptop to share the news with you, dear readers. You can only imagine the shade of super-red I turned when the local newspaper photographer turned up to document my sorrow.

He was kind enough to direct me to the local fair trade coffee house, where I could find an outlet and WiFi to broadcast my super-rant. My laser-beam eyes beamed my thoughts at the keyboard for a solid 10 minutes. I decided to reward myself with a quick peek at my e-mail.

What a waste

What atrocity did I find? My nemesis Dora the Explorer forwarded every single one of the 6.2 trillion spam messages sent last year around the world to my hotmail account. Now, every superhero needs a way to get his prescription drugs on the cheap because the union’s health care plan is a bit lacking, so I wasn’t too angry. That is until I found out that the spam consumed 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, totaling $3.6 billion.

I can’t afford that electricity bill on my freelancer’s salary, so my off-grid and off-the-radar experiment had to continue.

What better way to power a house than a generator, right? Well, I signed up with an up-and-coming biofuel company to supply the biodiesel. Get this—it’s made from algae! Any company with $70 million in investor backing and a contract for $92 million with a Spanish cement maker has to be good, right?

Is there any biofuel out there?

I waited all week for my shipment from GreenFuel Technologies so that I could once again power up my laptop and send this rant out to you, dear readers. But the scheduled delivery on Wednesday didn’t come, and the lack of power even caused me to missed the season finale of Lost and Grey’s Anatomy. Talk about an angry superhero.

I headed back to the trusty coffee house to fire off an angry e-mail to my salesgal. Turns out Simon Upfill-Brown, the CEO tapped to turn the company around last year, closed the doors for good on Wednesday. Can I get a refund?

My next step was to find another source of biofuel. I tried my friends at White Energy to see how much ethanol I could get on short notice. Talk about security—the company’s in the top 10 ethanol producers in the U.S. with $500 million in revenue in 2008. A company that big could never go under. Just look at VeraSun… Alas, the two had more in common than I realized. White Energy also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week.

A flood ... of lawsuits

Going off the electric grid just wasn’t in the cards, so I decided that water efficiency was just as admirable.

Rather than use what’s pumped from my local water district, I decided to sneak my daily supply out of the largest desalination plant in the Western world. I read somewhere that it was supposed to begin construction this year down in Southern California. Alas, a bevy of lawsuits stalled those plans, and developer Poseidon Resources still has a fight ahead of it.

So, dear readers, this superhero knows when he’s been foiled.

Out of gas

I jumped in my fuel cell-powered car and headed for some R&R in South Carolina, where a state-of-the-art hydrogen highway is in the works. Turns out, President Obama and I agree on many things, but hydrogen isn’t one of them.

His administration plans to cut the research funds for hydrogen-powered cars, which means the state’s new hydrogen fueling stations could be out of luck. 

I guess it was a bad time to take a road trip.

See something happening in the industry that we should know about? Companies going belly-up? Other scuttlebutt? As always, your friendly Avenger welcomes industry tips.

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