An early adopter of renewable energy shows off his self-powered home » Yale Climate Connections

Losing power can be a minor inconvenience, a life-threatening event, or something in between. For Scott Sklar, it’s an opportunity to invite his neighbors over to charge their phones, store their medications in his fridge, and warm up on a chilly night. Sklar’s home runs entirely on renewables and has battery storage, so he has power even when the grid goes down in his Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood.

Sklar’s passion for renewable energy started decades ago, as a young staffer on Capitol Hill, and then as director of the Solar Energy Industries Association, the national trade group of the solar industry. He says he was able to start turning his property into a self-sustaining energy hub in the 1970s and ‘80s because of his work and connections in the field. But he says now the technology has developed enough that anyone can do it. 

And even though Sklar led the solar industry group for more than a decade, he doesn’t advocate only for solar. Instead, he says a mix of technologies is a better approach, especially when coupled with energy storage.  Today, Sklar focuses on educating others about the potential of clean energy as a renewable energy consultant and as the sustainable energy director of George Washington University’s Environment & Energy Management Institute.

Yale Climate Connections talked to Sklar about his career, how it led him to where he is today, why he’s a firm believer in combining renewable technologies to increase resiliency, and about the times he welcomes his neighbors into his well-lit and warm home when there’s a power outage.  

Yale Climate Connections: Where did your concern and passion for sustainability and energy efficiency come from?

Scott Sklar: I started working for the senior senator from New York in the U.S. Senate in the 1970s. And in the ‘70s, the oil embargo hit and created hours long lines at gasoline stations. It was the first time the United States of America had an energy shortage, and they did not have energy staff on the Hill at the time, except on a few committees. And so a whole group of us were brought in and schooled up quickly, and I immediately got wooed by this high-value energy efficiency blend of renewables and energy storage and helped cofound the bipartisan solar caucus.

YCC: Can you talk about how long you’ve owned your home and what was it like when you first bought it?

Sklar: I bought this Sears-kit bungalow house in Arlington, Virginia, about 10 minutes from downtown D.C. when it was just this little isolated bedroom community. And I said, “We have a lot of power outages. I have a flooding basement. Maybe I’ll do a tiny solar battery system for the sump pumps.” So I did, and I didn’t have a flooding basement. 

And then I said, “Why don’t I put in a solar water heater?” And since I’m working for the solar industry I could get help with both equipment and design. So I did that as well in 1985. 

And then a couple of years later, I said, “Well, we have a couple of power outages a year because of the tree canopy. Let me do a little larger project for my refrigerator, a couple of lights, a small TV.” And I did that. And then about two years later, I added a little more, and then I just went crazy and did the whole house. 

When I added an addition to the house, I put in a blended system with lots of different kinds of solar electric panels (solar thermal, solar electric, PV), and I put in a huge battery bank, and then a geothermal direct exchange heat pump. I had the most energy-efficient house you could get and then put in all these renewables on top of it. It is 100% self-powered.

And then a few years later, I built a small two-story office building behind my house. It has solar electric roofing shingles, a small wind turbine, a web-enabled battery bank, a permeable exchange membrane hydrogen fuel cell to help in the hottest days of the summer to make sure I could meet the load.

And then at the end of 2022, I got a Nissan SL EV and added to my solar on my roof, so [the car is] 100% powered off my house.

So I have zero-emission transportation, zero-emission house, zero-emission office building, and I do weekly tours here every single week, mostly engineers and architects, some media, some international visitors, and of course a lot of students and professors from the region.

YCC: It’s really cool that you’re generating all of the electricity you need, but just to clarify, you are still grid-tied, correct?

Sklar: Well, I’m grid-tied in that the lines attach, but I don’t use any electrons from the grid or send any electrons to the grid. But when I was toying with the idea of just detaching, I found out they will not give me homeowner’s insurance if I don’t have a grid connection. So I still have that to keep my homeowner’s insurance, but I don’t really use it.

YCC: Could you talk a little bit more about wind power and how that works with your solar power?

Sklar: I’m a big advocate of all renewables. I’m not a big advocate of promoting one over the other. So I have a combination of solar and wind because I can downsize the battery banks and use the solar by the day and the wind at night. And by the way, during the day when it’s stormy, it’s usually windy. And it’s an absolutely much more solid approach than solar only, particularly if you have energy storage. 

So my office building has a marine wind turbine. It’s not that huge, and it mostly blows from 8 at night to 4 in the morning, five to six days a week. It’s a very low noise, does not kill birds or bats. So it’s an elegant solution. I know there’s a lot of pushback on wind, but on the smaller side, it is actually an elegant and comfortable technology that fits naturally in living situations if done correctly.

YCC: Let’s talk a little bit more about those tours. What are some of the responses that you hear from people when they come through?

Sklar: Well, when the engineers and architects ask me about something, I always start the response by saying, “This is what I don’t like about it.” And they’re stunned that I start that way, but then I end by saying, “But this is why it’s better than what you’re doing.” 

And I do that on purpose because I don’t want the engineers and architects to feel that I don’t understand the warts. Every technology has warts, but it’s still way better than what they do, and it’s better for their customer, and it’s better for preserving the functionality of the building, resiliency, and reliability. And since I’m not just an educator or an advocate – I’m a practitioner – they respect that. 

For the students and professors, I’m getting them into the nitty-gritty – the application side, the end-use side, the financial side of the applications, not just the intellectual side of climate change. The students are just thrilled to see working technologies and learn about them — and see so many together.

And lastly, for the media and international visitors, I really try to show that there are lots of very practical options. In most cases, they’ve never seen all these options working together, which makes what I’m doing so unique. 

YCC: As you said, you’ve been in the industry a long time and you have the network and the knowledge to do all of this. But is this replicable for the average consumer?

Sklar: Now it is, yes. When I was doing it, I was running the solar trade group and had a lot of both industry and [government] entities helping me through this because we didn’t have a big industry base or knowledge base. Now we do.

The first thing [I tell people to] do is pick companies that have experience – you don’t want to be a guinea pig – you want them to be pretty knowledgeable. And if you have a unique situation in your home, or you want a unique look or approach in your home, reach out to the local trade group or efficiency group in your area that has different members – from universities, technical schools, and industry – so that you have a bunch of knowledgeable people that can team up and help you to do it.

The good news is the technology is here and the experience is here. It’s sort of like cell phones. When I started, it was a bag phone the size of a wine bottle with a 20-pound battery bank on my shoulder, then a flip phone, and now we have these blended computer iPhones with apps that do all these things for us. It couldn’t have started without the early adopters and two or three steps we took to get there. And that’s where we are now – we’re at the point where this can explode – but people will have to be willing to make the jump. 

YCC: Could you also talk a little bit about your energy demonstration van? 

Sklar: After my daughter grew up, I turned the family van into a demo van that has two 500-watt photovoltaic panels and a 150-watt wind turbine mounted on it. They charge a lithium-ion phosphate battery bank in the back of the van, and it powers a DVD player and a giant all-weather video screen I hang on each side of [the van]. And I bring that van to the 11 area universities around Washington, D.C., during their science, technology, environmental fairs. 

There’s a board full of meters so they can see what’s coming off of the solar or the wind in real-time, and students can plug their cell phones into it to get charged off the solar and wind and the battery bank while they’re watching renewable energy efficiency videos on the screen. The kids in the neighborhood call it the “Back to the Future” van. But the point really is to expose educators, students, and the public to aggregated, elegant integration of clean energy technologies.

YCC: Are there any last words you’d like to share?

Sklar: When we have a power outage I [might] have 30 cell phones being charged on my dining room table and 18 bags of medicines in my refrigerator, and on a very hot or cold night, my neighbors sitting in my house. And I make my neighbors that don’t like all this solar and wind stuff stand up and tell everybody why they hate it. And of course, they’re laughing because they’re drinking my single malt scotch and benefiting from the lighting and the air conditioning or the heating. 

So the point is, now that we’re in a climate-change-revved world – where we’re seeing more outages for longer durations, higher heat, higher cold, higher winds, higher flooding, and ocean surges – energy resiliency is going to be a must – it’s not going to be a luxury. 

It doesn’t have to be the whole home. It could be what I started with – refrigerator, Wi-Fi, a couple of lights, a TV, a window air conditioner – so you can live through a three-day or three-week outage and be sort of OK. And when everything’s fine, you’re just saving energy, and the icing on the cake is you have lower greenhouse gas emissions. There’s nothing wrong with this story from any way you look at it.