permaculture

[Rain Tenaqiya <raincascadia@yahoo.com>]

Hey Jon,
 
This is very exciting and appropriate.  My partner and I have a permaculture 
mini-farm demonstration site in northern California that uses only ten 
gallons of propane a year (for cooking) other than the Prius which we drive 
5000 miles a year.  Our current carbon footprint is about 7 metric tons a 
year, below the UN target for the US by 2050.  We have a kitchen garden, food 
forests, numerous energy and water systems, and a strawbale/cob house that we 
built with mostly on-site or local materials.  I encourage you to check out 
www.coolcalfornia.org to get a sense of what it means to live without fossil 
fuels.  You can also contact us for ideas.  Mountain Homestead 
(www.mountainhomestead.org), in southern Oregon is the only other site that 
comes close to being free of fossil fuel use, as far as I know.  They do a 
lot of cooking with wood, which is something we would eventually like to do 
more of.  Currently, we cook with a solar oven, microwave, and
 wood stove during the Winter, in addition to our yucky propane stove.  We 
also have an alcohol stove which we have never used.
 
I would love to hear how things go for you.  Please keep in touch.
 
Rain



>From dwoodard@becon.org  Tue Oct 19 16:14:11 2010
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Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:08:05 -0400
From: Douglas Woodard <dwoodard@becon.org>
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Fw: Wow! Wind Power Without the Blades
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 From the drawings, these devices would sterilize a lot of land
apparently much more so than conventional wind turbines.

One would expect the wands to hit each other. Even if they didn't, one
would expect materials fatigue to be a factor.

There is nothing about testing and cost analysis. The relative merit
especially of wind power devices is all about cost of power over time.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said of invention in general:

"Inventer, c'est rien.
Construire, c'est peu.
Essayer, c'est tout."

"To invent is nothing.
To build is a little.
To try out is everything."

I see there is a link to another wind power idea, a shrouded turbine: an
idea which has been tried many times and always found to cost more than
building a bigger turbine for the same power. There is nothing about a
test of the design...

I'm sorry to seem like such a downer, but I have seen so much of this
kind of stuff: wide-eyed enthusiasm for a concept with no knowledge of
its past, no testing, and no theoretical basis in the absence of
testing. Conceptual designers who know nothing about a field had better
have good reasons.

This kind of "news" seems to be about ad hits. I find it as distasteful
as other kinds of deceptive money-grubbing.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada



On 19/10/2010 12:54 PM, FranandDave Nokes wrote:
>
>    Wind Power Without the Blades

<http://news.discovery.com/tech/wind-power-without-the-blades.html>