Fossil Abstinence: Imagine a Solar Future

Sixty years and still delivering: Our electric stove, lathe, drill press and our well, with a jet at the bottom. Our freezer, refrigerator, sewing machine, microwave, and tractor are going strong after 30 years. Only our freezer, drill press and sewing machine have not needed attention. I upgraded the elements and controls on the stove, replaced the well pump, back flushed the jet, and fixed the lathe, refrigerator, microwave and tractor but a few dollars in parts have kept them running like new. As I develop new solar equipment I like to keep in mind these proven items and try to avoid shortcomings of others not in this list: vehicles, engines driven equipment and entertainment equipment that don’t last long or have other regrets.

When my grandparents were young, they walked, biked and rode in horse drawn carriages, streetcars and trains to get around. Indoor plumbing, central heat, electric lights and cars were rare. My parents saw these become ordinary and I remember my mom being very happy to leave our rental with an outhouse and move into her own home with two indoor toilets (that still flush 60 years later). Three generations experienced the wonderful transition from animal and manual labor to engines and electric motors doing most hard work. My baby boom generation expects clothes driers and dishwashers, microwave ovens and computers, and we fly across continents and oceans without a second thought. Two generations from now, petroleum and coal that provide our transportation and electricity will be gone or their use restricted. Although we are well aware this is happening, we’re not focusing on the tools we’ll need for living well without burning fossil fuels. We burn fossils like there will b no reckoning and subsidize solar equipment that has no future. Big Energy does not want solar equipment that is as easy to use as the underground deposits of stored solar energy. But future energy systems should become even easier to use, universally available, less expensive and certainly less damaging than what fossil purveyors now sell us. And run well when they are 60 years old.

The only available renewable energy equipment that can compete, without subsidies, in our fossil fueled infrastructure that I’m aware of, and then only for those without access to a utility grid, are PV panels and related equipment. Even though current PV is inefficient, it’s better than running a generator that is noisy, requires trip after trip for fuel, needs lots of attention and wears out quickly. If our national budget had a surplus, creating real jobs making and installing inefficient solar equipment where a grid is available might make some sense. But there are better things to do with the money we have to borrow from our future.

Passive solar overhangs that let sunshine in during cool months and shade in summer make sense as do incorporating thermal mass so space warms up slowly and stays comfortable for a long time. Windows and skylights provide light and fresh air. Smartly designed buildings are very comfortable with minimal conditioning equipment. Since many of us live in homes and work in buildings that were built without considering energy, it’s up to us to minimize the energy we have to purchase for comfort and light. Proper insulation (ceiling, walls and foundation), managing infiltration, adding skylights and overhangs, improving windows and doors, incorporating thermal mass and wearing appropriate clothing all help conserve energy, fossil or renewable. Investing in passive techniques that harness natural energy flows year after year without attention is better than paying for any kind of energy.

Supplementing a clothes drier with a clothesline, seeing how few minutes the hot water heater can be turned on (we have ours on for 10 minutes for showers on weekdays, and only a few minutes on weekends if a load of laundry requires warm water). From burning 1,000 gallons of fuel oil per year it now takes us three years to burn 250 gallons. We’re working on getting that number to zero. My brother, who lives nearby, cut his natural gas use by half through adding ceiling insulation, high performance windows, a condensing furnace and a programmable thermostat. We both close off rooms we are not using.

So, when you’ve reduced how much energy it takes to make your home comfortable, it’s time to look into ways of providing the energy that natural energy flows can’t supply. Some might consider a heat pump powered by electricity because it can come from remote large wind or water turbines. Our utility generates power at Niagara Falls and can transport power from wind power projects but since we have space, we’d rather let others who do not have room for solar collectors take credit for those sources of renewable energy. We live on a hill surrounded by open fields, an ideal place for a wind turbine. After talking to folks who have lived with their own wind turbines, listening to how much noise they make when it’s really blustery and hearing of a few fatalities of careful people falling off towers during storms when this kind of equipment typically fails, we no longer consider using wind as our energy resource. So we consider solar equipment our primary future option. In the meantime, we burn wood.

Seven of eight photovoltaic, PV, panels that we purchased more than 20 years ago still work. The passive solar tracker they’re mounted on has seized up but the array, facing south, still works, as it would on a roof or other static structure. A solar thermal collector might deliver heat for a long time also but the problem with both is the amount of materials it takes to make them and how much useful energy they make available. It takes typical PV and thermal panels years to replace the energy invested in the materials, manufacturing and shipping so in 25 years they return less than 10 times the energy invested. This means they have an energy profit less than 10. Where there’s lots of sun, point-focus solar collectors that track the sun using two motions can harvest more solar energy than any other and might have energy profits of more than 50, and perhaps more than 75. So we have to develop affordable new energy systems that are simple, can harvest and homeowners use not 12% but 80% of the sunlight and work more than 60 years without much attention. How they should be able to do this I’ll get into over the next months.

Spring weather has been really great and the peas, lettuce, greens, potatoes, onions and four flats of seedling vegetables are reaching for sun. We’re already giving away pounds of asparagus to neighbors because after eating them every day this week we want something else. We’ve tried freezing them but didn’t like the results, except in soup. I’ve collected the grass clippings off four acres and used the tons for mulch, four inches deep on 20% of our acre garden, so far. It’s really worm food. Most of the dried grass disappears and has to be replaced a few times over the summer. This mulch almost eliminates weeds. Another benefit is that it takes only a few minutes to uncover a container of worms for fishing. We have over 300 tomato plants, 19 varieties that now range from 4 to 10 inches tall. I’ll start planting them next week. Peppers grow much more slowly and our 8 varieties and over 250 plants will go out later this month along with the eggplants and flowers.