Energy System

To a first approximation, and up to a point, one's quality of life correlates with the amount of energy one uses. At the same time, we cannot dissipate heat well enough to prevent runaway heating of the atmosphere due to the increased proportion of gases which are opaque to infra-red frequencies of light. We are releasing too much heat while simultaneously increasing the insulation value of the atmosphere. We are cooking ourselves.

The life of Earth has developed sophisticated systems for mediating the physical factors of climate and weather. These systems are autonomic and resilient, but we have inadvertently interfered with their operation over the last two or three hundred years or so. Fortunately over that same time period we have developed a sophisticated scientific understanding of these systems and so, at least in theory, we can adapt our economic and industrial systems to not only no longer damage them but perhaps even help them to regenerate.

If we focus on efficiency, meeting our needs without wasting energy, and on integrating our energy systems with the flows of physical energy through biological systems, we should be able to have a high quality of life while regenerating the ecosystem of the Earth.

Uses of Energy

The main uses of energy:

(I left out transportation because we are dealing with a single village or neighborhood at first. I'll talk about large-scale transportation systems in another article. For now we assume bikes and perhaps draft animals pulling wagons for local transportation.)

In re: heating and cooling, passive solar design, worked out decades ago, solves most of our climate control issues for indoor spaces.

Sources of Energy

There's really only one source of energy: the sun. Our village doesn't have an oil well, nor an atomic reactor, so we will have to make do with the maintenance-free fusion generator in the sky that is so powerful it can burn out your retinas from 150,000,000km away.

All readily available energy sources are ultimately solar:

Collecting and Storing Solar Energy

Ways to store energy, in order of their simplicity:

the fundamental energy of the land we bought is the day/night cycle, with large changes in temperature.

Obviously we can store the heat of the day and the cool of the night in thermal storage,