Roland to the rescue
One
of the most popular topics among homesteaders is alternative
energy. We've done some thinking in that direction ourselves (and
recently posted a series on assessing your
site for microhydro.)
Unlike gardening, though, which is largely intuitive, really
understanding alternative energy requires some grounding in
physics. My high school physics is unbelievably rusty, and I
suspect many of our readers may be equally out of practice, so I
thought it would be a good idea to bring us back up to date in a
lunchtime series.
This is where Roland
came to the rescue. Regular commenters have
probably noticed lengthy, well-thought out comments by Roland in the
past, often correcting our engineering mistakes. (Oops.)
Roland is a design and manufacturing engineer in the Netherlands, and
when I asked him if he might be interested in writing a lunchtime
series about energy, he quickly whipped off a primer on the physics of
energy sources. I have to admit that I'm beyond impressed at his
writing skills since English is not his first language --- I barely
cleaned up what he wrote at all. If you're similarly enthused,
maybe we can tempt him to write another series for us in the near
future.
| This post is part of our Energy Primer lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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"Unlike gardening, though, which is largely intuitive, really understanding alternative energy requires some grounding in physics. "
Speak for yourself... I find physics more intuitive than figuring out why in the hell that plant that was perfectly healthy a week ago, now is a withering dying wretch.