Showing posts with label biomass. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biomass. Show all posts

Tuesday, 28 May 2024

The Porcupine Saga, Part 9, When We Met Jack, Part 3

Allan Harper, evening, Wednesday, April 10, 2030

During supper Angie had warned the Porcupiners that they needed to have another meeting, and she was at the front of the room by the time Allan took a seat next to Erika. Jack sat down on the other side of Allan.

Angie cleared her throat and the conservations died down. "Well, here we all are again for another Tuesday night meeting, and it's only Wednesday. I suspect this will happen a lot for the first while. Several of the crews have reports to give, and there are decisions to be made. And on that note, I must say that I'm not up to facilitating and scribing at the same time. We need to keep track of decisions reached and action items assigned."

Gesturing with her clipboard and pen, Angie said, "Andrea, could you join me up here?"

"Sure thing, Angie," replied Andrea, and got up to join Angie at the front. Sitting down, she put pen to paper with a flourish and said, "OK, I'm ready, go for it."

"One small point before we go to the crew reports," said Angie. "I notice Jack has joined us. Does anybody have a problem with that?"

No one did. "What about him taking part in the discussion?"

Again, no one objected.

"OK," said Angie, "Jack, I have to tell you that if you get out of line, I'm going to jump on you a little harder than I would on the rest of these folks, since you don't have as much riding on what we decide."

"All I want to do is listen," said Jack.

"That'll work," said Angie, "Now, it's hard to say who should come first, so I'm going to just go with the order in which the crews approached me. Erika, that means the housing crew is up first."

Erica got up and made her way to the front. With a nod to Tom she said, "Well, I got picked to present what we've found and what we suggest doing about it. Most of what we have is questions—I hope we can answer them tonight."

"Go ahead," said Angie.

"Well, we think that first we need to decide what level of accommodations we are going to provide for people," said Erika. "At one extreme we could have people sleeping on mattresses in one of the pole barns, with essentially no privacy, shared washrooms and a shared kitchen and dining room. Our most basic needs would be met and it wouldn't tax our resources very much at all, since most everybody came with a mattress or two and some bedding.

"At the other extreme, we could commit to providing separate houses for everyone. I suspect that would take more resources than we have available."

"Sounds to me like when you say 'resources', you're talking about money, energy, materials and manpower," said Angie. "But I'd say the most basic resource we're considering here is privacy. I suspect we already have something of a consensus on that. Is anyone willing to accept the minimum privacy option?"

This question met with a chorus of noes from everybody except Tom.

He put up his hand and Angie nodded for him to go ahead. "When I started planning out this place, I was thinking of something pretty much like Erica's minimum privacy option, with the addition of privacy screens between each family's area on the floor of the second pole barn. I know it doesn't sound very pleasant, but I'm not sure that we can afford to spend a whole lot on accommodations this spring, when we should be concentrating on self sufficiency. Later on, sure, using our own materials, once we are set up to produce them, but not just yet."

"Can you stand to wait until we decide what level of accommodations we do want to go with, Tom?" asked Angie.

"Sure," said Tom, "better to know exactly what I'm disagreeing with, eh?"

"Exactly," said Angie, "so, given our common cultural background, it's not surprising we only have one person in favour of the minimum privacy option, and that for financial reasons. OK, now let's talk about the other extreme. Does anyone think we all really need separate houses?"

Again there was a chorus of noes, with just a few people who stayed silent. One of them, Nora MacGregor, put up her hand.

"I guess we really don't need separate houses, however small," said Nora, "Maybe just little apartments—I do value my privacy. Especially in the washroom. At the moment, upstairs in this house, six bedroom are sharing one bath. Takes a lot of co-ordination, and some of us older folks can't stand around waiting for long when we need to..."

"To go?" said Angie.

Nora nodded.

Erica, who was still standing at the front next to Angie, cleared her throat and spoke up, "Nora, I may have a solution for you. It's actually part of what I was going to present tonight anyway. I think we should switch over to composting toilets. The septic system here just won't cope with this many people for much longer, and we urgently need to recycle the nutrients in our waste back into the soil.

"I don't know if any of you are familiar with the sawdust toilet, often called a 'Jenkins toilet' after the guy that came up with the idea and tried to popularize it. It's just a wooden box with a bucket inside, a toilet seat on top and a container of sawdust or similar organic material nearby. You deposit your waste and then cover it with sawdust. When the bucket is full, it gets dumped on a compost pile. A year later it has composted down to nice rich black earth ready to be used on our gardens. And any disease organisms have had lots of time to die off.

"Subject to everyone's approval, of course, I think we need to pull out all our existing flush toilets and replace them with Jenkins toilets. And anyone who needs quick access can have a toilet in their bedroom. The smell is minimum, but ventilation can be arranged if it turns out to be a problem."

"Well, that's quite a heap of shit you've dumped in the middle of things here, Erica" said Wilf Janes with a chuckle. "But seriously, there's no doubt in my mind that we do need to do this, and it certainly answers some of Nora's concerns. I'm guessing we could even put a little cubicle in the corner of any bedroom that needs one of these."

"I don't know," said Nora. "It's really kind of a shocking idea."

"I've got a copy of Jenkin's book and a couple of others on the subject in our room upstairs if you want to read up," offered Erica. "And there are some websites you could look at too. Just Google 'humanure'."

Allan's own thoughts on the composting toilet issue were mixed. Like many people in modern western society, "feces" were something he felt should be flushed away behind one and never seen again. Not talked about, and certainly not handled. On the other hand, he'd seen the books Erika was talking about and understood the point about replenishing the soil—turning human waste into a valuable resource rather than something inconvenient to be gotten rid of. He had a hunch that, given a chance, Erika might be able to talk him around.

"I think we need to mull this over for a few days," said Angie. "Andrea, make a note that it should be on the agenda of next Tuesday's meeting. Those with serious doubts should approach Erika and get more information. For now, let's get back to the housing question. So, Erika, do you have a recommendation of where we should fall on the privacy spectrum?"

"Yes, actually," said Erica. "And it is kind of a default option, not much different from what we are doing now. We recommend that couples and single adults get private bedrooms with storage for their personal property. School age kids will share a pair of bunkrooms—4 bunks each, to start—one room for boys, one for girls. Currently, we've get 5 couples, 5 single adults, 2 school age boys and 3 school age girls. There are six bedrooms upstairs in this house and they are occupied by the couples and Jane's girls sharing one room. Some of you are sleeping on couches in the living room and here in the addition. It's a less than ideal situation."

"It is less than ideal," said Jane. "But I'm not sure your solution is an improvement, especially this bunkroom thing. You're talking about taking about taking our kids away from us at age four? What kind of a cult are we running here?"

"No kind at all," said Cindy. "I've got kids and I had as much input into this plan as Erika. The decision as to when to make the move would be up to the parents and the children. And 'away' isn't really the right word for it. The parents' rooms would be in the same building, on the same floor, as the bunkroom their kids would be in. Little different from the average family home."

"That sounds better," said Jane. "But I am guessing kids from different families will be sharing these bunkrooms?

"Initially, as it happens, no," said Cindy, "but eventually, yes."

"So, who's going to be in charge of the kids in the bunk rooms?" asked Jane.

"I don't think we've worked that out yet," said Cindy. "I'd like to say their parents. But I can see cases where disagreements between kids could lead to disagreements among parents. Hmmm... I think that leads to something we haven't addressed as yet, and we really should."

"What's that, Cindy?" asked Angie.

"Well, so far we've all been working really hard to get along," said Erika, "And with some success. But eventually we're going to end up with disagreements that people can't settle among themselves. I though Allan and Tom were pretty close to that yesterday. They sorted it out, but we need to have a mechanism for coping when we can't settle out our differences."

"I think you're talking about having some people trained as mediators," said Angie. "Enough so we can always find a reasonably neutral party to mediate a dispute. Yesterday we talked about facilitator training, which I must admit I haven't got around to arranging yet. But mediator training is similar and could probably be done by the same people. Andrea, make a note for me to get that set up ASAP."

Andrea did so and Angie went on, "Jane, you're OK with this?"

"Yeah," said Jane, "but I'll be keeping a close eye on how it works out."

"Good idea," said Angie. "Erika, where were you?"

"Just about to make a sketch of what we can do with this building," said Erika. "We need a few more bedrooms, the two bunkrooms and at least one more washroom. As we see it, we can have all that by putting in some partitions in the large rooms on the main floor of this house, " said Erika. She turned to the white board and made a quick sketch of the main floor of the house. "The living room could be divided into three rooms, the dining room into two, the kitchen into a bedroom and another bath and there is room in this addition for three bedrooms, two bunkrooms and a bath."

She added the partitions she had just suggested to the diagram. "This gives us 14 bedrooms, and we only need ten, so there is even room for the next few people who arrive. And the materials needed for this shouldn't be very expensive. For now we can still cook in the kitchen and since the weather is warming up, we can eat on the front and back porches."

"Maybe we could hold off on dividing up the dining room until we absolutely need to," said Jim. "That way we can eat inside and give the weather a chance to finish warming up. "

"I think you'll find we want a window in each of those bedrooms," said Don. "So that means we can only get one bedroom out of the living room, at the north end. What's left of the living room would do for a dining room in the short run, especially if we knock out the walls separating it from the hall and entrance way. So partition the dining room and addition first, then the living room and finally the kitchen, once we've got another kitchen set up."

"Actually, Don, that's a pretty good idea," said Erika, and adjusted her sketch to reflect Don's suggestion.

"I think there are a few more things we need to discuss," said Angie, "but first, how does everybody feel about just having rooms instead of houses or apartments?"

Allan was cool with it, but he expected to hear some push back. Surprisingly, everyone agreed with the idea.

"OK. So, at this point, the loose ends are replacing the kitchen, dining and meeting areas" said Angie. "Any ideas, Erika?"

"Yes indeed," said Erika. "Let me just add another sketch and then I'll explain what we are thinking about."

She took a moment to roughly outline the two pole barns, and then went on. "The kitchen here is really too small for this group, much less a significantly larger one. We'd recommend cleaning up both pole barns. Put the kitchen at the north end of the nearest barn, with processing and storage areas for the food we'll be producing, and a buffet counter to divide the kitchen from the dining area. Set up tables next to the kitchen for people to eat at. Maybe a stage for entertainment at the other end of the building, with chairs in front of it for the audience. That would work for these meetings, as well. In the other pole barn we can add more bedrooms as more people arrive, plus bathrooms, and also a 'maker space' with the tools and equipment we'll need to build all those things we aren't going to buy."

"That would seem to just about wrap it up," said Angie. "What do we think people?"

"Just a couple of things I'd like to add," said Karen. "First, if we set up a big kitchen in the pole barn and feed everyone from there, am I still going to get stuck doing all the cooking? I pretty much have so far. I mean, I don't mind cooking, and thanks to those who have helped, but as we get more people it's going to become a big deal. More than I can handle.

"Maybe we could take Tom's 'crew' idea and have several 'cooking crews' rotating through the kitchen or sharing the work some other way. Spread the work around and have more of a variety of food than I can provide. And maybe we can try to scare up some actual professional cooks when we are hunting for new people."

"Sounds good to me, Karen," said Angie. "People?"

This time there was unanimous agreement.

"You had a second point, Karen?" asked Angie.

"I do," answered Karen. "I know that some folks, like my husband Tom here, will want access to the kitchen for a snack now and then. Maybe not the whole kitchen, but at least a small area of it, set up with just enough supplies and equipment for those who feel the need to nosh. Or for people who have missed a meal."

A few chuckled at this but no one disagreed. Allan noticed his parents lean together and have a quick whispered discussion.

"When we first moved in here back in February, I claimed the master bedroom upstairs," said Karen. But we've been feeling more and more guilty about hogging the biggest room. If we get a family with a baby or children too small for the bunkrooms, that would be, of all the rooms we currently have, the best place for them. We think that's likely to happen soon, so we are offering to move to one of the new rooms, so the master bedroom can be readied for that use."

"The other thing is storage for personal property. So far, Tom's had us dump everything in heaps in the pole barns, but it's going to have to come out of there if we follow the current plan. The existing bedrooms have closets, and room for a chest of drawers or two. I'd suggest we add closets when we put those partitions in. There's room in the basement here to put in lockers for what won't fit in the bedrooms. When we start building more rooms out in the pole barn they should be big enough to include storage as well as sleeping space. And talking about storage space for personal property gives me the idea that we should really keep that property to a minimum. Something to be decided when we are actually doing the sorting, I guess."

"Well, what do we think of that, folks?" asked Angie."Speak up if you disagree with any of these ideas."

There seemed to be general agreement. "OK," said Angie. "You got that all down, Andrea?"

Andrea, who'd been writing furiously, stopped. "I think so."

"OK. Now Tom, let's get back to your original objections," said Angie. "Would you be satisfied if we agreed to put together a 'Finance Crew' to take a closer at what we can afford?

"I think we should do that in any case," said Tom. "And as long as I get a spot on that crew, I'll be happy. Perhaps we also need to morph today's Housing Crew into a 'Building Crew' to firm up their plans and cost them out. I still think we may have a bunch of new people show up with little warning— after all we are a 'refuge co-operative'—and we might have to do something like that minimum privacy option on a temporary basis. We should be sure to make whatever preparations are necessary to do that. Mattresses and bedding set aside, privacy screens built and so forth."

"Yeah, I think we can take that on," said Erika.

"Andrea, did you get Tom's suggestions down with all the others?" asked Angie.

"Sure did," said Andrea. "Just remember that Terry and I are still working on the new sign tomorrow and Jack has agreed to help us with getting a couple of big cedar posts out of the bush."

"OK, I think that just means you won't initially be on either the finance or building crew," said Angie. "We still have a couple of crew reports to hear, does anyone besides me think it might be time for a 15 minute break?"

Coming soon, Part 10 of the Porcupine Saga.


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
The Porcupine Saga

Maintaining the lists of links that I've been putting at the end of these posts in getting cumbersome, so I have decided to just include a link to the Porcupine section of the Site Map, which features links to all the episodes I've published thus far.

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Tuesday, 29 October 2019

Responding to Collapse, Part 14: adapting to life without the grid

Late October Sunset over Lake Huron

This is the last of 4 posts on coping with the decline and demise of the power grid that I promised in Part 11) of this Responding to Collapse series. Last time, with the help of Joe Clarkson, we looked at a typical off grid solar electric system. I would encourage anyone with sufficient financial resources to set up such a system. But even using the most durable equipment produced by BAU (business as usual), and with lots of spare parts in stock, such a system will eventually come to the point where no more use can be eked out of it using locally available "village" level technology and materials.

Before things come to that point, though, such a system can serve two very import uses:

1) allow us to use electrical power for things like lighting, refrigeration, pumping water, communication and entertainment, which will help reduce the initial shock of adapting to post grid life.

2) allow us to use what modern tools and power equipment we have on hand to facilitate the construction of low tech power systems that don't need things semiconductors or fossil fuels, which will be in short supply.

That second use is what I'll be talking about today.

The Context of Collapse

But first I'd like to review the context in which I believe all this will be happening—it has been a while since I've talked about that.

The majority of people in the "collapse sphere" here on the internet are expecting a hard, fast collapse sometime in the next few years. Many of them have been expecting it to happen next year for 15 or 20 years now and others have begun to chuckle at the long string of failed predictions. But my observation is that collapse started back in the 1970s when conventional oil production peaked in the continental United States. It has progressed since then and I expect it will continue, gradually and bumpily—unevenly (geographically), unsteadily (chronologically) and unequally (socially), until BAU can no longer provide us with the necessities of life.

One popular expectation among kollapsniks is that some trigger event will cause a financial crash and that will lead to a breakdown of supply chains that will leave almost everyone cold, hungry and in the dark. This sort of fast collapse makes for great stories with lots of conflict and drama, but in reality a planet is a big place. I can't imagine the degree of co-ordination it would take to make this happen fast and hard, all at once across the whole world. Especially when many of us will be working together to stop it from happening.

So yes, there will a financial crash or, most likely, several crashes over a period of years, but the damage will not be uniform across the whole system. And yes, in some areas, it will be serious enough that the supply chains supporting human life will start to fail. But not completely and not everywhere at once.

Initially governments will still have the wherewithal to mount relief efforts for the worst hit areas. Probably using the military to move fuel, water, food and medical supplies to affected areas, and to set up refugee camps for those who are forced to leave their homes. But as the economy crumbles it will have a weakening effect on governments and their resources will be stretched thin. Already we are seeing a tendency to blame people for whatever plight they find themselves in and to abandon them to their own devices, cutting back on expensive relief efforts. This will no doubt get worse, especially in right wing countries where the social contract is weak and the upper classes rule solely for their own benefit. That would include the USA, in my opinion.

Things will get pretty grim, especially in those camps. Indeed, I suspect that in areas where no help is forthcoming, the majority of people (maybe as many as 80 to 90 percent) aren't going to make it through. This is certainly nothing to cheer about, but I am afraid it is one of the harsh realities of collapse. Another unpleasant reality is that under such circumstances, there will be large numbers of desperate, hungry refugees walking out of the large population centres where food is no longer to be found.

Because collapse is happening unevenly, when you find yourself in difficult circumstances, you can usually find someplace else where things aren't so bad. I have been talking, throughout this series of posts, about doing just that—setting yourself up in a small remote town with local food and energy resources, far enough from large towns and cities so that the majority of refugees travelling on foot are unlikely to make it to your small town. That way, you'll be able to welcome those who do make it, rather than being swamped by them.

And I've been urging people to make their move while there is still time to build a network of acquaintances and friends who can help you cope with the gradual decline of BAU and adapt to its eventual demise. I am not suggesting that such places will be exempt from collapse, but rather that they have the local resources to adapt in ways that large population centres simply can't. A big part of that preparation will include being ready to switch over to subsistence farming when those supply chains finally let you down. And having sufficient food stored to see you through to your first harvest. All within walking distance of where you live.

That is really a subject for another day, but it does have a connection to the eventual demise of the power grid and our response to that demise. Bumpy collapse is hard on continent spanning structures like the grid and will be one of the causes of its demise, along with the faults built into capitalism. But a gradual bumpy collapse does give people a chance to wake up to what is going on.

Long before there is a massive die-off due to supply chain failure, there will be a period (perhaps it has already started) when things are going badly wrong in enough places that anyone who is paying attention will start to get pretty concerned. We saw this happen during and for the years before and after the Global Financial Crisis (approximately 2006 to 2012)—the idea of collapse gained quite a bit of credibility. But then things settled down and interest in collapse waned. I am now seeing interest starting to grow again and I expect this will continue. So finding people to work with on preparations may well become much easier than it is now.

During that period the resources of BAU will still be more or less available and those wise enough to do so will be able to set up some local structures which can step in to replace BAU when the need arises—community gardens and farms, food storage co-ops, energy co-ops and so forth.

I encourage you to pick a town with farmland, ground water and standing timber in good supply. It would also be useful if there are one or more good hydro power resources nearby. There is falling water in abundance here in southern Ontario. Many small towns were once mill towns and still have the remains of a dam and an abandoned mill or generating station which could be refurbished with much less effort than starting from scratch.

I am convinced that there is no need for collapse to take us all the way back to the stone age or even the middle ages. But I am also sure that material consumption and energy use must fall to a sustainable level that can be supported with local, renewable resources.

To stop a fall all the way back to the stone age, we will need to take advantage of some of the legacies of BAU.

BAU's Legacies

One hears a great deal about the negative legacies that BAU is leaving for future generations—climate change, resource depletion, environmental and social disruption—the list goes on. I don't disagree with any of that, but I'd like to point out that there will also be some positive legacies that many people who are thinking about collapse aren't taking into account.

  • The first of these, in my estimation, is the knowledge that mankind has accumulated up to this point, including the scientific method and the change in attitudes that came with the Enlightenment. Immersed as we are in that knowledge, it is hard to appreciate how difficult it was for people in the past to make the discoveries and developments they did, without knowing in advance what was even possible or how to accomplish it. We have an immense advantage over them, in that we know a great deal about the world around us and how things work.
  • Second, there are alive today many skilled and ingenious people, tradesmen and hobbyists, even engineers, who, after industrial civilization grinds to a halt, will be able to do a great deal with its remnants.
  • Thirdly there will be all those remnants, including:
    • durable equipment and tools that will continue working for years or decades after the factories of BAU have gone dark
    • large scale infrastructure such as roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, communications, power, water and sewage systems, factories, housing and other buildings
    • true, many of these will be left in pretty rough shape, but what can't be used as is will still have a great deal of value for the materials that can be salvaged from it
    • initially there will even be some fossil fuels left in local storage, plus materials and spare parts sitting on shelves ready for us to use

It is to be hoped that some of those skilled people will have set up off-grid power systems and things like tool libraries and workshops (maker spaces as they are called these days). We should encourage and support such efforts in every way we can, since they will be of great importance in facilitating the transition to long term, sustainable systems that can be operated, maintained and replaced when necessary with "village technology", local materials and local sources of energy.

Local energy sources

I think it's worth taking a look at what kinds of energy may be available locally and how can they be harnessed.

Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels will no longer be readily available except in the few areas where there are functional oil/gas wells or coal mines. Sure, thinking of climate change, it would be better to keep that carbon in the ground rather that returning more of it to the atmosphere. Still, I wouldn't discourage anyone from making use of such an energy source if it is close at hand, and you can get it out of the ground and convert it into usable forms. The amount of CO2 involved would be tiny compared to what's going into the atmosphere today.

Nuclear Energy

I live only a few miles from a nuclear plant, and I used to work in the switchyards there. The importance of a reliable tie to the grid was firmly impressed on me—without it, nuclear stations cannot operate safely. So nuclear plants will have to be shut down as the grid becomes unreliable. The employees of those plants, who live nearby, have a large incentive to see them shut down and mothballed safely. They will take this into their own hands, regardless of what company executives might want. And I am sure the employees will have the backing of the local community.

It is important to get that shutdown underway as quickly as possible while we still have the resources to do it. I expect spent fuel will be stored locally in dry flasks, which is considerably safer than leaving it in spent fuel ponds.

This leaves us with renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro, tidal, and biomas.

Solar Power

Converting solar energy into electricity takes some pretty high tech equipment. Photovoltaics (solar cells) will almost certainly be beyond our ability to produce locally. It is possible to use solar energy to create steam and drive turbines which power electrical generators. But this is really only slightly lower tech than semiconductor solar panels. And because solar energy is intermittent, we'd need some way of storing it, probably batteries. In the quantity needed, batteries are likely beyond village technology.

That leaves us to use heat from the sun directly for water or space heating, cooking, drying crops, or for process heat in cottage industry situations. And to find a way of doing this where the intermittency is not a problem. Glass is needed to make efficient solar collectors, and all but the simplest passive solar installations need electric motors and fans or pumps to move collected solar energy (hot air or water) to where you need it.

Wind Power

Wind power is also intermittent, and largely unpredictable as well, so either you need some way of storing the power or you need to use it in ways that can manage with an intermittent power source. Pumping water into storage containers at a higher level is one traditional example. Wind power has been used for grinding grain as well.

The towers, blades and gearing required as likely to be within the reach of village technology.

Hydro Power

Hydro power is slightly intermittent, but only on a seasonal basis and it is reasonably predictable. It can even be stored in head ponds to smooth out variations in load. It is doable with nineteenth century technology, and even simpler equipment if you use the mechanical power directly rather than generating electricity.

Tidal Power

There are a few location in the world where high tides can, with clever arrangements of dams, be used to drive water wheels or turbines. Tides are also intermittent, but quite predictable.

Biomass

Where I live, this would consist mainly of firewood, which can also be converted into wood gas or charcoal. It is useful for space heating, water heating, process heat, and can be both produced and used with very simple equipment. Of all these energy sources, biomass is the easiest to harness at the individual and family level, without setting up more complex community projects.

Wood gas can fuel internal combustion engines and firewood can fuel steam engines, both of which can power electrical generators. But this is only practical if there is wood left after vital uses like cooking and heating have been taken care of.

It is also vital to keep in mind that biomass is only a renewable resource if we use it at a rate slower than the rate at which it grows. Fortunately, forestry is a well established science and it can guide us in which trees to cut, how many of them, and how many and what type of new trees to plant.

Biogas

This is methane produced during anaerobic composting of manure and other organic materials. It can be useful in many ways, just like natural gas. But a lot of manure is needed to make useful quantities of biogas.

Muscle Power

For most of our history (and prehistory) energy mainly came from human or animal muscles. This has largely gone out of fashion in the industrial world, but I suspect that as collapse progresses, it will once again become the default where mechanical power is needed and nothing else is available.

Harnessing Local Energy Sources

There is a lot that can be done at the individual/family level to conserve energy, to make use of what's available locally, and to get by without electricity. But once you've decided to harness most of the energy sources above, a community effort will be required, especially if they are going to be used to generate electricity.

When talking about harnessing such energy resources, we must always consider whether the energy gathered will justify the energy and manhours used to build the equipment needed to gather it. Without the legacies I described above, I suspect the answer would more often than not be no, but with them, I think there is much that can be done. Remember that during the initial crisis of adapting to grid and supply chain break down in your area there will likely be some off-grid power systems to draw on.

At any rate, there is always the option of using these energy sources directly as heat or mechanical energy when we don't have electrical generating systems set up yet, or when they have failed beyond our capacity to repair. This also saves the inefficiencies involved in converting energy from one form to another, and the trouble of setting up distribution systems. Flour mills and saw mills are excellent examples.

Yes, at the start, the overpowering need will be for food, water and firewood, and a well organized community would divert available manpower to supplying those needs. But electrical equipment can actually make those tasks easier, replacing manhours with kilowatt hours, and doing some things, like lighting and refrigeration that no amount of manpower can do.

When the initial crisis has been overcome, there will be some spare manhours than can be spent on setting up a sustainable power system. I am terribly tempted to go into some specifics of what might be done, but it would have to get pretty technical and would make this post much longer than it should be.

Using Energy Wisely

In parts 11 and 12 of this series I included a list of important uses for electricity and alternatives to use during outages. But this time we're considering the permanent loss of the grid, and instead of coping temporarily with grid outages, we're talking about adapting to that permanent loss, either by generating our own power, by replacing it with other energy alternatives or practicing conservation—using less energy. We should be aware in advance that this will require some changes in the way we live.

Lights

Conservation is pretty simple here—we can do without lights at night, and set up workshops with windows to let in sunlight. But at higher latitudes, winter nights are long and much could be accomplished during them if we had artificial light.

Without electricity, you burn something to make light. Candle wax, kerosene, naphtha and propane are all based on fossil fuels and will not be available for long. Vegetable oil, animal fat, and alcohol will be locally available, but the source in each case is something that could also be used as food. If food is in short supply, lighting will have to suffer. This is one area where biogas could be quite useful.

My beloved mantle lamps will be hard to produce, as those mantles use salts of various elements that are not likely to be available locally to produce that bright white light.

If electricity is available, converting it to light is a bit of a challenge. We are in a sense spoiled by today's LED lights, which are highly efficient and long lasting. I've been reading recently that when they fail it is usually not the actual diode that fails, so I suspect ways will be found to refurbish them and keep them going for a long time. But the day will come when we have to go back to various sorts of arc lights and carbon filament incandescent bulbs.

Water

Here is Southern Ontario there is no shortage of good ground water, so I suspect wells with hand or wind driven pumps will be the thing. Friends in Australia and Hawaii tell me about their large outdoor water storage tanks. This looked odd to me and at first I wondered why we don't use such things here, but then I realized that they would freeze solid in the winter. In cold countries indoor cisterns are more practical and can be filled using rainwater, or well water pumped when the wind is blowing.

Electrically driven pumps will no doubt be used where power is available—they save a lot of hand pumping and are easy to control.

Sewage

There are many low tech ways of safely handling sewage. But we'll need to recover and use the plant nutrients and organic matter it contains, so I would think composting toilets will be very popular. I can recommend two books on the subject of composting human waste: The Humanure Handbook, by Joe Jenkins, and The Scoop on Poop, by Dan Chiras.

Food

Food is going to stop arriving regularly at the local supermarkets. To me, it seems that the necessary response would be to switch over to using locally grown food and growing much of it yourself, and to have enough food stored to last you through to the next harvest. There is a lot to say about this subject, but since it's not directly connected to electricity, I leave it for another post.

Cooking

Cooking is largely a matter of heating food, so we'll do it by burning biomass. Preferably in a nice indoor wood burning cookstove. I suspect the demand for those will go through the roof when it becomes more clear how things are going. Fortunately there are alternative that can be made by hand from local materials—mud/brick ovens, rocket stoves, etc. Google will lead you to all kinds of information on these.

Refrigeration

Where winter is sufficiently cold, the obvious solution is to use ice, harvested from frozen bodies of water, and to set up a well insulated icehouse to store that ice through the summer.

Ammonia based refrigeration uses heat as its power input, and should be within the reach of village level technology.

The kind of refrigeration we are all used to uses some variation of freon as its working fluid and electric motors to pump that fluid. I expect that once existing refrigeration equipment has worn out, freon will be too big a challenge to make locally and we will abandon the technology.

Heating

For space heating woodstoves are the obvious solution. As with cookstoves, I think at some point there will be a huge demand for heating stoves. Getting set up to heat with wood before you are forced to do so would be a good idea. If electricity is available, fans can be used to move air around the house and heat it more evenly.

Heating your house with wood takes a lot more wood than cooking. It you don't own a wood lot, you should find someone reliable who specializes in cutting, splitting and delivering firewood.

If you do own a woodlot, you'll likely be doing that for yourself. At some point gasoline won't be available to power chainsaws and you'll have to fall back on more traditional methods. Here is a series of posts on this subject by Category 5, another Canadian kollapsnik and blogger.

C5 Gets Wood:

Cooling

I covered this in some detail in part 12 of this series, here.

Communications

A small community which is generating its own electricity should be able to get its landline telephone system working again. Setting up a local broadcast radio station also sounds like a good project to foster community solidarity. And ham radio may be one of the few ways of finding out what is going on in the world. When modern solid state equipment wears out, vacuum tubes should be doable with village technology.

Transportation

Fossil fuel powered vehicles will no doubt be used until supplies of those fuels run out. It would be good to ration those fuels and see that they get used for the most critical purposes for as long as possible. It may be possible to convert some internal combustion engines to using wood gas to extend their usefulness.

Bikes are actually pretty high tech, and will eventually wear out beyond local repair, especially those rubber tires.

Horses and other draught animals will become extremely valuable, and we should do what we can in advance to encourage and support horse breeders.

Water transportation, using lakes, rivers, canals and powered by sail or muscles will grow in importance.

But walking will probably be the default mode of transporation, especially within the local area. And most of us will try to avoid having to make long trips.

Cottage Industry

I'm adding a new category here, because without the factories that now make all the goods we use, we will have to return to making them for ourselves. With modern knowledge, tools, equipment and electrical power, there is a great deal than can be done using local and salvaged materials. Acquiring the skills needed is something all of us should be working at. Pick an area that interests you and learn everything you can about it.

I bake bread and know a fair bit about growing grain and milling it. I make cheese and I know how to milk a cow. I weave wicker baskets and harvest willow that grows locally. As well as being an electrician, I am fairly good at carpentry, plumbing and drywall. These skills and a great many others will be needed and can be learned with some effort, if necessary from books and the internet while it lasts, but ideal from people who already know them.

Many years ago I started working on a degree in electrical engineering, but soon dropped out and apprenticed as an electrician instead. So the electrical parts of what I've been talking about here seem fairly straight forward to me. But I've been thinking recently that a degree in chemical engineering would be damn handy, or at least the equivalent knowledge, with a focus on low tech, small scale applications.

In Conclusion

Back in Part 10 of this series I said, "It seems to me that supplies of electrical power, diesel fuel and money will be at the heart of many of the troubles that lie ahead, so I'll concentrate on those areas." I think we've finally reached the end of the discussion on electrical power. Next time I'll talk about diesel fuel and the supply chains that rely on it.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

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