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Hello All,

It's been a while, sorry. Life is being busy as always.
My wife recently got a book from the library called "How to live off-grid" by Nick Rosen. I read some of it and thought I share some of the points made by the author here on the forum.

In 2005 there were 180,000 off-grid homes in the US. A year later this had risen to 235,000 (estimates).
He estimates 25,000 homes in the UK are off-grid, not including camper vans and boats.

In the UK the first water companies behaved so appallingly that councils we granted the right to take them over around 100 years ago. But of course after much investment into the grid by governments (i.e. tax payers) they were privatised again over the last decades. The national water grid as we know it is only about 30 years old. There were more localised grids before that.

In the UK most homes are connected to a national gas grid, which only started being built about 50 years ago. Yet everyone is so used to it that it is being taken for granted. An enormous infrastructure has been built for distributing natural gas which will become redundant once gas has run out in the North Sea or the Russians turn off the tap.
The electricity grid was mainly advanced from the 1930s. Before then local electricity supplies existed and there was huge opposition to the advancing electricity pylons across the country. But a massive PR campaign called anyone opposed to it anti-progress and backward.

While we coped perfectly well without a fridge 50 years ago, nowadays there are no more daily deliveries of fresh produce by local butchers, bakers or greengrocers. Everything now depends on the big supermarkets who themselves depend on the grid. In a more localised economy there was no need for massive distribution networks and most food was made from fresh local ingredients.

Planning permission for building on one's land has only been required since 1947. Before then, poor people had started buying tiny parcels of land and building small shed-like structures on them so that they too could live in the country instead of the city. But the upper classed disliked how this ruined the landscape they were used to. In the 50 years prior, house prices had changed very little. Now that one couldn't built houses as easily, there was suddenly scarcity in the market and prices rose tenfold over the following 50 years. This meant a further decline in the rural population.
Most of the countryside is now inhabited by well-off people. Country homes tend to be large and expensive and get bought by those receiving massive city bonuses, not by people who work the land. Planning permission is still the main hurdle to a low-impact and off-grid life, as you can't even permanently life in a yurt or tipi on your own land without permission! And that's difficult to get in a natural setting, If you want to build a massive housing development or power station, well, that's a different matter.

The author lists the following reasons to go off-grid.
Better for the environment
Avoid health risks of modern society
Life-style change to a simpler but happier life (down-shifting)
Survivalism (prepare for breakdown of the grid through natural disasters, geopolitics, economic collapse, wars, climate change etc)

I agree with all of them to an extent but the last point is becoming increasingly concerning. It is quite an eye-opener how quickly we have collectively become used to centralised supply of everything, as if it had always been this way.