The recent excitement about homes and businesses someday soon operating off the grid—courtesy of rapidly improving solar panels and the potential of Elon Musk’s batteries—isn’t exactly a new phenomenon: In the late 1970s and early ‘80s I attended a high school completely off the grid. It was nobody’s idea of a hippie commune—it was a Catholic high school in Peoria, Illinois. Its self-sufficient oil-powered power plant was an experiment borne of the idealism and fanciful impracticality of the committee in charge of constructing the school a decade earlier.
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