It’s just that his three-bedroom house near Honolulu is in a place with America’s highest electricity rates — 38 cents a kilowatt-hour compared with the 13-cent national average. Fed up, Greene put solar panels on his roof and batteries in the garage to store the excess juice. He told his utility to come get his power meter.

“I enjoy being off the grid,” Greene said. “It’s an independence thing. It’s cool to say you don’t have an electric bill.”

Even better, Greene calculates he’s spent about $58,000 on a system that will pay for itself in six to eight years — factoring in that he now mostly avoids gas stations by charging his hybrid Toyota Prius from the rooftop solar system.

Greene remains something of an outlier. While there are no official U.S. government estimates of how many Americans live off the power grid, the Snowmass, Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute says anecdotal evidence suggests it’s much less than one percent of the nation’s utility customers. About 147 million people get their power from the grid, according to data from the American PublicPower Association.

Off the Grid

“Over time, many U.S. customers could partially or completely eliminate their usage of the power grid,” Morgan Stanley analysts Stephen Byrd and Timothy Radcliff wrote in a July report.

Greene’s liberation is possible because it’s a propitious moment in the rooftop solar revolution. The technology is moving into do-it-yourself territory and prices have plunged 64 percent since 2010, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. You can now buy solar panels at Ikea.

“It is no longer a sign of a hippie to have solar panels, it’s the sign of a savvy homeowner,” said the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Leia Guccione.

While the cost of solar-tied home storage batteries remains uneconomical in states with low powerprices, such as Louisiana and West Virginia, that also may change. One barometer is that the price of batteries powering electric vehicles has dropped by a third since 2011 and may slide another 45 percent by 2022, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Expensive Electricity

The situation in Hawaii, where Hawaiian Electric Co., the state’s major utility, burns fuel oil to generate the nation’s most expensive electricity, makes it ripe for defectors. Mom-and-pop solar companies have already begun to do for some consumers what Greene has done for himself.

High-cost power states like California and New York may, within a decade, also see a surge in home solar-battery installations like Greene’s that give consumers the ability to cut the cord, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which studies energy efficiency.

Companies such as SolarCity Corp. and SunPower Corp. are already undercutting the notion that utilities are the only game in town, with solar-and-battery packages that make them de facto powercompanies.

Parker Ranch

Homeowners aren’t the only ones seeking to sever ties with the grid. On the big island of Hawaii, the 130,000-acre Parker Ranch is considering a plan to bypass its utility by building a microgrid with wind farms and hydroelectric plants for its operations and the nearby town. “We can beat the utility’s rates,” said Neil “Dutch” Kuyper, chief executive officer of the ranch.

Hawaiian Electric is aware of this dynamic. The utility said it hopes to cut rates by 20 percent over the next 15 years by increasing its deployment of renewable energy to 65 percent of its power mix.

As for Dave Greene, his passion for solar has never been about saving the planet. He’s a lifelong tinkerer who remembers as a kid putting together electronic kits with solar-cells he bought at Radio Shack. Later, he built turbo-charged cars and raced them on remote streets around Honolulu until an engine blew up and he refocused on less hazardous hobbies.

Greene honed his electrical skills in the U.S. Army, where he trained intelligence officers in powergeneration and equipment repair. When he bought his first condominium in suburban Honolulu in 1989, he installed solar panels on a backyard shed and hooked them to golf cart batteries to see how much power he could generate.