It's a small room, maybe eight by ten, with its own little mini-split head on the wall to keep the batteries comfortable. On one wall, the steel rack with the twelve battery modules, each one with a little row of green lights. On the other, the two inverters, gray boxes about the size of carry-on suitcases, with their screens glowing. Between them, the main panel, the DC disconnects, the generator transfer equipment, all labeled in my own label-maker printing, because the code requires it and because I'm the kind of person who owns a label maker.
Lamont stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly in a circle.
"Good Lord," he said.
"That's about what my sister said."
I pulled up the monitoring software on the tablet I keep mounted by the door. The inverters log everything: solar production, battery state of charge, every watt the house uses, in five-minute intervals, going back to the day I commissioned the system. I pulled up the graph for the week of the May storm and showed him the line of my house load, and the line of solar production, and the battery charge dipping overnight and climbing back up in the morning, without a single interruption.
"There's no grid line on this graph," I said, "because there's no grid. If I were pulling power from anywhere else, from the clubhouse, from a streetlight, from Ozzie's dryer outlet, it would have to come in through a wire, and it would show up somewhere I could see it, and a whole lot of other places too."
Then I pulled up the last six months and showed him the mower. You can see it plain as day if you know what to look for: a block of about eleven hundred watts that shows up on the house load once or twice a week, usually around noon, lasting two to three hours. I charge it at midday on purpose, when the panels are making more than the house can use, because otherwise that power just goes to waste. You could see the same block the day before every mow, all summer long, regular as a heartbeat. Coming out of my batteries. Off my roof.
"And the extension cords?"
"The day of the storm. I ran power to Ozzie for his insulin and to the Arreolas for their baby. From my house to theirs. Not from anybody to me." I showed him the graph for that day, the house load almost twice its normal size, with two long flat shelves where Ozzie's fridge and the Arreolas' fridge and fans had been running. "Ines Arreola will tell you. Ozzie will tell you. Half the street was in my garage charging their phones."
Lamont was quiet for a long while, looking at the graph. Then he took out his own phone, slowly, and his reading glasses.
"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't," he said. "Glenda's the only one with the login to the co-op's online account for the Association. She set it up years ago. The bills come to the management company, and I see the totals, but I've never seen the detail. When I asked her for the detail in June, she said the co-op didn't provide it."
"That's not true," I said. "Not for Blanco Ridge. They put smart meters on everything in 2019. Every meter records usage every fifteen minutes. Any account holder can download a year of it from the portal. Or call member services and ask for an interval data report, and they'll email it to you."