Ben Roberts

Together with solar energy, the system provides the bulk of the electricity used by Ben and Brandi Roberts.
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Four years ago the nesting instinct hit Ben and Brandi Roberts and they began building a home a few miles from Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada.
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Ben, who is a program manager for the National Park Service, wanted a home that would utilize renewable energy sources.The site the Roberts family chose is blessed with both wind and sun much of the time and is unobstructed by trees.Ben first wanted to produce electricity with photovoltaic panels and to "intertie" to the local utility grid for supplemental electricity.In such systems, excess electricity is fed into the grid and credited to a homeowner's account, or used--as alternative-energy boosters say--to turn the meter backward.

Then the Robertses got the $10,000 bid to connect to the powerline a quarter-mile from their house, and that didn't include poles or trenching."After that we took a long hard look at going completely off the grid, and decided to go for it," says Ben.
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"Since we would have spent over $10,000 on hooking up to the grid anyway, I assume that the system cost us an additional $5000 plus our labor," says Ben Roberts.