You need to check gas, electricity cost and reliability and communication now when you buy a home.
Posted by John T. Reed on
I am currently working on my new book working title: Your Principal Residence is the Only Real Estate Investment You’ll Ever Need.
It is my 21st real estate investment book. It has two subjects I have not had to address before: the skyrocketing cost of electricity and the greatly increased lack of reliability of grid electricity and grid telecommunications.
Environmentalists driving up cost and driving down reliability
Environmentalists used to love natural gas as a “transitional” fuel to their true love wind and solar. But Obama told them to hate natural gas, too, and they promptly have. They are, by various means, driving up the cost of burning fossil fuels to heat your home or water and to generate electricity to punish you for not joining all wind and solar “religion.”
Wind and solar still too expensive and unreliable
Wind and solar power are also very expensive because they do not make economic sense. That fact is now being suppressed by the Democrat media.
The reliability of the power and communications grid has diminished due to closing nuclear and fossil fuel power plants before wind and solar and batteries are ready to supply the power previously supplied by nukes and fossil fuels. The reason is more of appliances are now tied to grid electric power like tankless hot water heaters and landline phones.
Landline phones no longer work during power outages
It used to be that landline telephone service had its own separate low voltage power to power ringer on phones and when the electric power went out. the landline phones still worked. But that has changed in many if not most places and it appears that all landline phones sill soon be dependent upon the grid electricity.
Cell phones no longer work during power outages
Cell phones also stop working when grid power goes out. So you need to consider using natural gas more in your home for oven and range, clothes dryer, hot water, and even refrigerator (The Amish make and sell refrigerators that work on natural gas).
Multi-fuel and multi communication means
So my new book has extensive discussion of having multiple energy sources and non-grid ways to heat your home and water and cool your home or key parts of it and how to be able to call 911 during power outages.
PLB and satphones
To call for help when the electricity goes out, you need a personal emergency beacon (PLB) and/or satellite phones. Those both work off satellites and your home location needs to be satellitable.
Satellite phones do not work at all houses
Geosynchronous satellites require the ability to aim your satellite device low toward the south. Hills, mountains, and trees can prevent that. Low earth orbit satellites are generally adversely affected only by trees and nearby buildings.
Check out the house on these issues
When you look at a possible home to buy now, you need to see how many bars your cell phone gets there, what free WIFI, if any, it gets, whether your satellite phone works there, what free antenna TV it can get, whether you can get high speed broadband cable at that house. You need to make sure it has grid natural gas and no ban on new gas hook-ups to that grid gas pipe.
Join the new “Green religion” or else
You must believe in the new “Green religion” whether you like it or not
Technology advances are part of the reason for these new concerns when you buy a house. But the main thing is this new green “religion” that like some existing religions requires that you go back to living as people did centuries ago.
We have religious freedom in the US, supposedly, but not from the green religion. Americans talk vaguely about pilgrims coming to America because they wanted to avoid religious persecution. Actually, to be specific, they were upset about King James II and VII who tried to push Catholicism on them.
Today, the green “religion” is being imposed on everyone and the fact that it is a religion and imposition of it is violating the First Amendment is not realized and not admitted to. Its adherents claim greenness is fact and science based and that since it has no supreme being, it is not a religion.
The definition of religion I have in mind is a belief in faith in spite of absence of fact or science to support that belief.
Modern nuclear power plants are safe
Generally, modern nuclear power is about as clean as can be. Hostility to it seems to be based on a vague notion that such power plants can explode like an atomic bomb. They can’t. Or that they melt down and kill people like the fictional move China Syndrome or vague memories of Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, or Chernobyl.
Modern plants cannot melt down. Even Three-Mile Island and Fukushima hurt no one and no one who who was there will suffer for it in the future.
Chernobyl is irrelevant ancient history
Chernobyl was predicted to cause 40,000 deaths. In fact, 15 or so children downwind got fatal thyroid cancer from the fallout. Also some workers at Chernobyl went on suicide missions inside the plant to shut it down and died. Chernobyl was obsolete before it was built. Modern nuclear power plants cannot malfunction like Chernobyl.
Natural gas is super clean
Natural gas is extremely clean burning. Indeed, the US got out of the Paris CO2 Accord under Trump yet we lowered our carbon emissions more than every nation IN the Paris Accord because fracking allowed us to substitute natural gas for most coal and #2 heating oil power plants which are less clean.
Anyway, nowadays, when you buy a home, you need to check out its ability to burn natural gas and survive power outages and your ability to summon emergency help there during an electric power outage.
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