GRASS VALLEY, Ore. -- Tim and Keely Jefferies haven't paid an electric bill for a year, and there isn't a power line for miles around their mobile home among the prickly sagebrush of eastern Oregon's badlands.
Yet the couple and their two children still watch Mariners games by the hour on their big-screen television, read the newspaper under track lighting, blow dry their hair and even play Nintendo.In a state with a history of dusty pioneers crossing the continent to carve lives out of the wilderness, the Jefferies get power the old fashioned way -- they make their own.
"It's homesteading, 1990s style," said Jefferies, a ruddy faced wheat farmer and former rodeo rider who spent months building a series of solar panels and a twin-bladed windmill.
The Jefferies are among an estimated 180,000 homeowners nationwide who live "off the grid," where it's too far and too costly for the power companies to hook them up.
Setting up shop with solar panels, windmills and even mini-hydroelectric dams, residents of the wide-open Western states of California, Washington, Colorado and Oregon are leaders in the trend to forge a way past the last power pole.
"Property off the grid is substantially better," said Richard Perez, publisher of Home Power Magazine, an Oregon-based journal on do-it-yourself power. "It has never been logged or messed over, and it's substantially cheaper. And that has fueled a massive movement to the back country."
While people living off the grid have traditionally powered up with propane or diesel generators, more and more are turning to renewable energy. Perez estimated that the number of homes powered by alternative energy is growing by up to 25 percent a year.
The trend was spurred by federal grants during the energy crisis of the early 1980s and is encouraged in Oregon by tax credits for renewable energy.
Oregon lawmakers have considered a bill that would boost the tax credits and another that would allow people to sell their power back to the grid, as is done in California and Washington.
Contrary to stereotypes, it is not religious freaks, survivalists and hippies who are heading for the hills and hitching up to homemade power. Nowadays, an off-the-grid home is more likely to house a rancher, a retiree or a telecommuting executive.
When a three-car pileup killed six people on the rural highway in front of Jefferies' old home, he decided he'd pack it up for his 1,100 acres of range land to be farther away from the hustle-bustle.
The only problem was, it was also far away from the nearest power line. Hooking up cost $60,000.
At that point, people start looking for alternatives, said Christopher Dymond, an energy analyst with the Oregon Department of Energy.
"If you have to go two miles off the grid, why not put that money to solar power and never have to worry about power again," he said.
That's what Jefferies did, setting up his solar panels and a windmill to the tune of only $12,000.
East of the Cascade Mountains it makes good sense. The region gets an average of 290 sunny days a year -- more than Florida. Permanently pointing south, the Jefferies' solar panels soak up enough sun for 80 percent of their electricity needs, and his whirling windmill fills in the rest. There is even a separate solar panel to power the electrified fence corralling his horses.
But things are different in rain-soaked western Oregon, where a network of rushing rivers vein a wrinkled landscape of steep mountains. There, people emulate in miniature the giant dams that generate megawatts on the Columbia River.
A trickling stream that cascades through a carpet of ferns in the Coast Range is Hans Radtke's power plant. The freelance economist and former professor moved to the forest in 1982 just to get away from it all.
He diverts part of the stream through a 1,200-foot plastic tube that feeds a small turbine inside a shack that looks like an outhouse.
Despite its dilapidated appearance, the gizmo generates enough to power the Radtkes' entire three-bedroom home. Hans' wife, Karin, relaxes to the philharmonic beamed in from Berlin on their satellite television, and Hans works upstairs in an office fully equipped with two computers, a fax and a copy machine.
"If you really don't know Hans, you'd think he was a mad scientist if you saw this setup here," she said. "The first time the light bulb lit up, it was like a miracle."
Still, life off the grid isn't always miraculous. While the average house in the city can receive up to 30 kilowatts an hour, the Radtkes manage 7 kilowatts, and the Jefferies squeeze out just 3.
That can really cramp their style -- for the Radtkes when the water's low in the summer and for the Jefferies when it's cloudy in the winter.
The Radtkes had to order a specially made, low-wattage Japanese washing machine and can't use the clothes dryer, hair dryer or microwave in the summer because they would overload the system.
"In August and September, we're down to just a couple light bulbs," said Radtke, who added that using a backup generator is "wimping out."
It's this kind of independent spirit that pushes these power pioneers to endure the hardships.
"There were doubting neighbors all around us," said Jefferies, who slurped down a bowl of elk soup and flipped through the pages of the family scrapbook.
One of the photographs shows him passed out on his La-Z-Boy the day his family finally flicked on the power switch after months of work.
"Some guys would come out here and say, 'Well, you're going to move as soon as you can, aren't you?' " he said. "But if I can do it by myself, I'll struggle and do it."