27: Home Power
Interview with Ian Woofenden, Senior Editor, October 2008
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
The topic of this program is Home Power, a bi-monthly magazine about small-scale renewable energy production. Articles address in detail how to design, build, and install small scale wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems. My guest is Ian Woofenden, one of two Senior Editors at Home Power.
Steve: Ian, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Ian: Thank you.
Steve: Home Power began in 1987. Please tell us the story of how the magazine got started, and what its mission is.
Ian: Richard and Karen Perez started Home Power. They had moved off grid in the 1970’s, and lived with candles and kerosene, but wanted electricity for their Grateful Dead tapes and lighting. Richard was a technical person and started looking into photovoltaics when it was just emerging on the market. He started a business helping his off grid neighbors get solar electricity, and then realized there was a real need for a publication for the beginning industry.
Steve: So the mission was to reach people who were interested primarily in living off the grid at that time?
Ian: At that time, that was the market. The way our mission is stated now is to change the way the world makes and uses electricity. That certainly became a growing focus for the Perezes and the rest of the magazine crew as the market shifted from off grid users to more on grid users.
Steve: How did you become involved with Home Energy?
Ian: Um, with Home Power magazine?
Steve: Yes, I’m sorry, that’s what I meant to say.
Ian: There is another publication out there called Home Energy.
Steve: Sorry about that.
Ian: A good publication, as well. I moved off grid in the early 1980’s, and was on the original free mailing list for Home Power, so I’m a charter subscriber. It’s always been my favorite magazine. In the mid 1990’s I became interested in working in the industry. I went to Solar Energy International workshops, and I met the Perezes and was hired as one of the early editors.
Steve: That was in the mid-1990’s, you said?
Ian: Actually I was hired in 1998, so 10 years ago.
Steve: At that time you had a background of living off grid yourself, and had built a fair amount of expertise, correct?
Ian: Yes, I’ve been living off grid since 1981, to be exact, and had already started coordinating workshops on renewable energy technologies.
Steve: For listeners who may be unfamiliar with the magazine, can you briefly discuss the types of systems addressed in Home Power?
Ian: We focus on renewable energy technologies. We’re dealing with solar energy systems, both solar electric and solar hot water, wind electric, small hydroelectric systems. We deal with natural home building and building science, looking at insulation and building envelope issues. We deal with alternative transportation issues, and a few odds and ends on parallel topics such as methane systems and that sort of thing. So renewable energy is our focus, and practical information on home scale systems is what we report on.
Steve: What are some of the advantages to homeowners of producing their own power?
Ian: Many, and it really depends on their motivations, what they see as advantages. I would say the primary motivations are environmental, reliability, cost, and then there’s the whole class of people who just think it’s cool. So the advantages on the environmental end are that this is clean energy. With any other energy source we’re dealing with a fuel that has a limited availability, and also has an impact on the environment. When you’re talking about renewables, as Richard Perez likes to say, “free fuel delivered daily.” The sun rises every morning and causes the cycle that gives us winds and hydroelectric potential. We can tap that. From a dependability basis, some people like the dependability or the independence of renewable energy. Most of us aren’t capable of running own nuke or coal plant, but we can actually invest in these technologies and implement them on the home scale and take care of our own needs right on site. And then again, there’s this whole class of people who like tinkering with the technology, which is where Home Power’s roots are. But I’d say today our main audience is people who are going to purchase a system and have it installed. I would say the primary motivations these days are environmental, reliability and then cost. Cost is a tough one, because we’re competing with a very heavily subsidized energy system. But more and more as energy prices rise and as incentive programs appear and as the technology itself becomes more mass market and therefore less expensive, the cost motivation and benefit is coming more clearly into the picture.
Steve: I understand that the systems can be both tied to the grid or off grid. I’d to like to ask a question about living off grid. If someone chooses to do that, what sacrifices or tradeoffs do they have to make?
Ian: Big ones. I’m a good person to ask, since I’ve lived off grid since the 1980’s and I speak to people on the topic very frequently. There’s a little terminology confusion. Some people say “Hey, I want to go off grid.” What they really mean is they want to use renewable energy technologies. As a consultant, and as an editor and as an author, I will never advise, or almost never advise someone to go off grid if the grid is easily available, because the grid is a very useful tool. You asked about sacrifices. What you sacrifice when you go off grid is the capacity of the grid, so you can always plug in whatever you want. To try to replace that instant access to whatever level of energy you want, you need to have batteries and a generator. Batteries and generators are the most problematic parts of these systems. They’re costly, they’re high maintenance, and they reduce the efficiency as well as the environmental friendliness of these systems. As an almost 30 year user of batteries and generators, I tell our readers and my private clients, if you can avoid those two things by connecting to the grid, do it.
Steve: So in most cases it’s easier to use renewable energy at the home level to supplement what one gets from the grid?
Ian: Well it’s easier to use it in parallel with the grid. I would say the only drawback of renewable resources is that they are variable. If we only want to use electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, everything’s hunky-dory. But when it’s overcast and/or calm, or the creek dries up and we want to use energy, we need some backup. This variability can be across the whole year in the case of a seasonal hydro stream, or the fact that it’s cloudier in the winter. But it’s also a daily variability, and we typically want lights at night, and the sun always shines in the day, never at night. So off grid you need to bridge that variability by putting batteries in the system, and you need to cover the backup by having a generator. On grid, you can use the grid itself conceptually as a big battery. Forty some states have net metering laws that require utilities to accept our renewable energy and credit us for every kilowatt hour. So if a renewable energy system is creating more than it’s using during the day, that surplus is sold back to the grid, conceptually spinning your meter backwards, and you create a credit that you can use that night or that winter if you build up a surplus over the summer. It’s avoiding the two most difficult parts of off grid systems, and allowing you to in the short term share your surplus energy with the grid, and over the longer term use that credit up. So it’s not necessarily just supplemental, you can install a system that makes all of the energy you use, but it doesn’t make it at exactly the time you’re using it.
Steve: Ian, in the current (Oct./Nov. 2008) issue of Home Power, you make the point that “the true value of renewable energy cannot be measured by dollars alone.” To properly value renewable energy, what factors should we consider?
Ian: That’s a very good question, and I think it’s very individual. I think unfortunately energy has been singled out as a commodity that we look at primarily in financial terms. Part of my point in my editorial you’re referring to is that we look at hardly anything else in solely that way. We don’t look at our clothing that way, and think “What’s the financial return of my clothing?” We don’t look at our transportation, our furniture, our entertainment, our food that way. We have a wide variety of different values for different people. If we look at the issue of food only from the standpoint of the economics, we wouldn’t worry about taste, and we would perhaps worry not so much about health, although if we looked long term we would think about health. We wouldn’t think about appearance, we’d just look at cost—just give me the cheapest food that will support me. We don’t look at most things that way. When we get to financial return, there are only two things I think of that we measure only with that measure, and that’s financial investments, and even those we have other values. We want socially acceptable investments. The other is our homes, which we look at how they increase in value, but obviously there are many other values we hold for homes. I think in energy in a way is an anomaly, and it’s unfortunate. I’m not sure how we got here, that we don’t question where it comes from and what its real cost to society is, and its real impact.
Steve: Let’s extend this with the issue of wind power on larger scales. I’m in upstate New York, and here and in many other places there’s talk of wind farms. They tend to be very controversial. I know wind power is an area of expertise for you. What’s your take on the opposition to wind farms, what would you have to say to those folks?
Ian: Good question. First of all, I have to say that Home Power covers the home scale renewable energy, and we only occasionally touch on utility scale, but as individuals on our crew, we all support large-scale renewables, because we realize that we need it on all scales. In answer to your question I’ll quote Tom Gray, who works for the American Wind Energy Association, or I’ll paraphrase him. A beautiful thought he had, he said when people object to wind farms, they typically compare them to nothing. Nothing has no impact, so it’s real easy to talk about the negative points of wind farms when we compare them to nothing. But if we compare them to what we’re trying to replace with them, how many people on Nantucket want a coal-fired plant, how many people want a nuclear plant there? So we need to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Everything we do here has an impact. There’s no free energy that has no impact. The point with renewables is we have much less impact. From a conceptual business standpoint, what other energy technology can you have that has a capital cost, a maintenance cost, but no fuel cost? If we were living in a marketplace that really was a level playing field, I’d think we’d find renewables would be a slam dunk, and people would more readily make the real comparison if we put it right in front of them. Some people object to wind turbines on the ridges in the Adirondacks, but where is their electricity coming from? They’re ripping off the ridges in Appalachia to make coal power, and putting it outside of their viewscape. So as soon as we start comparing apples to apples, large scale wind starts looking very good.
Steve: Let’s bring the focus back to the home level, and the do-it-yourself factor. You mentioned already in the beginning days of the magazine, it was primarily geared toward the do-it-yourselfer. Do you have a sense today what the mix of readers is between those who are wanting to install systems themselves versus the readership that are folks who install systems as a business?
Ian: I have some figures in front of us from our operations director. They don’t exactly address that, but 60% are urban/suburban, 90% of our readers connect to the utility grid, 63% have a gross household income over $70,000, 68% have undergraduate degrees, 28% postgraduate degrees. There’s some stereotyping here, but my read from both these statistics and my contact with our readers is a very large majority of our readers are probably not going to install their own systems these days. That’s a huge switch from the early days of the magazine, when most of the readers were going to install their own systems.
Steve: What’s changed over the years to make that shift?
Ian: Several things. I would say the cost of the systems has come down, therefore it’s more affordable for people for these to be done professionally. I would say the size of the systems and the complexity has actually gone up in general. Because they’re more affordable we’re putting in larger systems. If you had a little cabin in the woods in the 1980’s, you could buy one little module and one little battery and a few little lights, and that was something a hobbyist could handle. When you’re putting a $40,000 system on the roof of your house, maybe you’re not so excited about taking the responsibility for learning how to design and specify and install that system well.
Steve: Is it a good growth area for jobs?
Ian: Absolutely, definitely. The industry in general is growing at the rate of 30+ percent a year. I suspect if we look at recent figures over the last 18 months, the rate would be even higher.
Steve: What are some of the more exciting developments in small scale energy production? What’s going on right now with the technology or other things besides technology that are exciting?
Ian: You know, my answer to that question may not be satisfactory to you, but I think what’s most exciting to me is people’s acceptance of the technology, and people’s understanding of it. I’ve been around this for two or three decades, and we hear a lot of hype over the years about what’s coming next. But the reality is there hasn’t been huge change, there’s been gradual improvement. There haven’t been any dramatic breakthroughs, I would say. What I’m most excited about is people understand that this technology works, specifically about photovoltaics, that it’s an incredible technology. It’s hard to really make an analogy to or compare to. I tried to make an analogy in the editorial you referred to. With photovoltaics we have the merging of two things that we don’t see anywhere else in our life. One is something that’s very long lasting, a product with a 25 year warranty, a 40-50 year life. That’s amazing in itself. We’re hard pressed to find something else to point to to compare that to. The other is it’s something that’s productive. Most everything else we buy takes maintenance and is essentially a financial loss, where as all the renewable energy technologies are productive. So you put these two things together and you have something pretty amazing. So I get a little impatient, skeptical when I hear about new developments, because what we have, I’d say the general public is just starting to see how remarkable it is, how exciting it is, what we have specifically in photovoltaics. Other things I would say are positive and exciting are the way systems are being integrated and simplified. When I first started, my home system looked like a hodge-podge of gray and green and red and black boxes on the wall hooked up in my case with a rat’s nest of wires. Now we can buy a system that’s prewired, we can install it very quickly, it’s professional and safe and code compliant. Especially with the batteryless systems with grid tie, they’re extremely simple. Our participants in the workshops I coordinate are routinely surprised at how simple it is, how advanced the technology is, and how much the companies involved are pulling their products together into packages.
Steve: Well Ian that was a fine answer. I’d like to shift focus a little bit nowand ask a couple of questions about running the magazine itself. A lot of magazines I observe as a librarian either get gobbled by big publishers or they split up into a whole bunch of little niche titles, like in your case it might be one just for solar, just for wind, just for professionals. But Home Power has been really very stable that way. Has it been a challenge to stay the course?
Ian: I think it has been a little bit of a challenge, but there’s something different about this magazine in that there is a real mission that starts right at the ownership, right at the Perezes. Their whole purpose in life in the last 30 years has been promoting renewable energy. They’re not in it for the money. It’s been successful for them, but that’s not their motivation. They’re in it to promote something they’re passionate about. And that’s really true of everyone who works for the magazine. Many of us could make more money in other places in the publishing industry, but we’re passionate about what we do and excited to work with something we’re passionate about. There’s been chatter over the years about larger companies making offers to buy the magazine, and that has been resisted at every turn. That would not be compatible with our mission. We’ve seen other magazines take on our topic area and water it down. That’s not something any of us want to see happen. As far as the niches, I don’t know if you’re aware that we just actually did just bring out a second title, which is a big step for us.
Steve: I wasn’t aware of that.
Ian: Solar Professional has its debut issue, you can go to solarprofessional.com. It is a trade magazine, free to the trade, supported solely by advertising. This is a big step for us, and I think it’s a great step for the industry, and it’s a good step for Home Power, because we’ve had this struggle over the years between our various audiences. We’ve talked about off grid and on grid, but we’ve also had this group who are professionals in the industry who use Home Power as a source of information, and we try to serve them. Then we have this large group of people who are not professionals, who are homeowners. A very large percentage of our readership picks up Home Power off the newsstand, a single issue here and there. That’s a very different audience from the professional installers. It’s great for us editorially, that now we can focus more directly. It is separate editorial crews and one can focus on that installer market and the other on the homeowner.
Steve: What about the title? Have there been temptations over the years to change the title to better reflect the full scope of the magazine?
Ian: It’s been discussed, let’s say. The avenues we’ve taken to address the concerns have been to add more cover text, to define our mission more, so you’ll see at the top “solar, wind, water, design, build.” So use of other elements on the cover has been our answer to the concerns that “Home Power” perhaps doesn’t say everything we want to say.
Steve: Well I’d like to thank you on behalf of all librarians for having that point of view, because we dislike title changes for a number of reasons. It confuses people. The advertising in Home Power is closely linked to the topics. Do you have a policy for what kind of ads you’ll take, or this there just a natural synergy between the readership and the advertisers?
Ian: I think it’s the latter. We don’t rule out an advertisement if it’s not exactly on topic. But we’re a small niche market. At times we’d like to woo some larger advertisers. We’d like to see a Toyota Prius ad in our magazine. But it’s difficult for a company of that size to justify advertising in a very small publication like ours, relatively small. I’m not on the advertising side, so I can’t give you a definitive answer, but I would say there’s a natural synergy and the people who are served by advertising in our magazine are the people who stick with us.
Steve: Like most magazines, Home Power has an extensive web site filled with useful information. How has having a web site changed the business of having a magazine?
Ian: I have a great quote here from our operations director, Scott Russell. I’ll actually read you the whole paragraph here: “Home Power’s paid circulation still overwhelmingly dominated by print editions. As such, the web site has been designed as a research archive for our readers. Home Power articles frequently reference previously published material and the web site’s article search and filtering functionality enables readers to easily locate and download those items. Our content has excellent shelf life, and the web site provides that shelf space so our readers don’t have to.” I think Scott says it there. They’re compatible, they’re synergistic, and they’re able to support each other. Most people still read the print edition, primarily, although we have a certain number of readers who say “I don’t want paper, I just want to do it all electronically.” Our online membership allows you to have both at a reasonable price and reference that 20+ year history of articles, many of which are still very relevant. Another little statistic Scott tossed out here is 84% of our readership keeps every copy indefinitely for reference. I know I’m looking at 20+ years on my shelf here in my office. It’s surprising how many people who are our readers over the years have that sort of collection. It isn’t just librarians who like to keep things.
Steve: Right. I’ve found that to be a typical characteristic of magazines that have a lot of how-to information.
Ian: Um-hm.
Steve: A while back I interviewed the editor of WoodenBoat magazine, and then there’s Fine Woodworking, and magazines like that. Those types with the how-to information really do have very long shelf lives. So Ian, is there anything else you’d like my listeners to know about Home Power we haven’t discussed?
Ian: I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t say “homepower.com” at least 17 times in our conversation (laughs). But, no. I’d like to say that this is a magazine that’s driven by passion from the ownership all the way down to the editorial crew and the rest of our crew. We’re excited about what we do, we’re excited about sharing, and we live with these technologies. We’re not writing about these technologies as outsiders, and indeed that goes down to our authors. Many of our articles are written by the end users themselves, or the installers, not paid reporters who are writing about a topic they don’t fully get. It comes through in the passion of the writers in the same way as the passion of our editors and staff writers. We’re excited about the technology we’re promoting and we’re excited about making it more accessible to people and become more predominant in society so we can all use less nonrenewable energy and have a cleaner environment and a more reliable energy structure.
Steve: Well Ian, thank you very much for being my guest.
Ian: My pleasure.
Steve: Subscriptions to Home Power are $24.95 a year. To subscribe, go to http://www.homepower.com. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.