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Solar Power

How to Build a Small Solar Power System

This guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.

Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries

Using solar panels without backup infrastructure makes renewable energy production much more affordable, efficient and sustainable.

The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments

The printed archives of Low-tech Magazine now amount to four volumes with a total of 2,398 pages and 709 images.

How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel?

George Cove, a forgotten solar power pioneer, may have built a highly efficient photovoltaic panel 40 years before Bell Labs engineers invented silicon cells. If proven to work, his design could lead to less complex and more sustainable solar panels.

How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

From the Neolithic to the beginning of the twentieth century, coppiced woodlands, pollarded trees, and hedgerows provided people with a sustainable supply of energy, materials, and food.

Thermoelectric Stoves: Ditch the Solar Panels?

Wood stoves equipped with thermoelectric generators can produce electricity that is more sustainable, more reliable, and less costly than power from solar PV panels.

Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures

During the first half of the twentieth century, Soviet citrologists grew (sub)tropical plants in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius – outdoors, and without the use of glass or any fossil fuel-powered assistance.

How Sustainable is a Solar Powered Website?

We present our website’s energy and uptime data, calculate the embodied energy of our configuration, consider the optimal balance between sustainability and server uptime, and outline possible improvements.

Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security

To improve energy security, we need to make infrastructures less reliable.

How to Run the Economy on the Weather

Adjusting energy demand to supply would make switching to renewable energy much more realistic than it is today.

How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone

Matching supply to demand at all times makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking.

How to Get Your Apartment Off the Grid

Solar panels on window sills and balconies can supply more power than you would think.