LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again

For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change.

It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.

New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again – not just the blades, but also the rest of the structure. This would solve the waste issue and make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials. A forest planted in between the wind turbines could provide the wood for the next generation of wind turbines.

Heat your House with a Mechanical Windmill

Renewable energy production is almost entirely aimed at the generation of electricity. However, we use more energy in the form of heat, which solar panels and wind turbines can produce only indirectly and relatively inefficiently. 

A solar thermal collector skips the conversion to electricity and supplies renewable thermal energy in a direct and more efficient way.

Much less known is that a mechanical windmill can do the same in a windy climate -- by oversizing its brake system, a windmill can generate lots of direct heat through friction. A mechanical  windmill can also be coupled to a mechanical heat pump, which can be cheaper than using a gas boiler or an electric heat pump driven by a wind turbine.

Power Water Networks

During the second half of the nineteenth century, water motors were widely used in Europe and America. These small water turbines were connected to the tap and could power any machine that is now driven by electricity.

As we have seen in a previous article, operating motors with tap water was not very sustainable. Because of the low and irregular water pressure of the town mains, these motors used unacceptably high amounts of drinking water.

While the use of water motors in the US came to an end early in the twentieth century, the Europeans found a solution for the high water use of water motors and took hydraulic power transmission one step further.

They set up special "power water" networks, which distributed water under pressure for motive power purposes only, and switched to a much higher and more regular water pressure, made possible by the invention of the hydraulic accumulator.

Almost all these power water networks remained in service until the 1960s and 1970s. Hydraulic power transmission is very efficient compared to electricity when it is used to operate powerful but infrequently used machines, which can be distributed over a geographical area the size of a city.

Burning the Bones of the Earth: Lime Kilns

This is a guest post by Brian Kaller, who blogs at Restoring Mayberry.

Explore the now-ruined estates of the Irish countryside and you occasionally find a stone cylinder, as much as several metres high and wide, open at the top and with a small door at the base.

Some resemble the medieval fortresses that still dot the landscape here -- but no one built fortresses so tiny, or half-buried in the side of a hill.

In fact, they are kilns for lime burning, a now-forgotten industry that sustained many agrarian communities before energy became cheap.

The Mechanical Transmission of Power (3): Endless Rope Drives

You don't need electricity to send or receive power quickly. In the second half of the nineteenth century, we commonly used fast-moving ropes. These wire rope transmissions were more efficient than electricity for distances up to 5 kilometres. Even today, a nineteenth-century rope drive would be more efficient than electricity over relatively short distances. If we used modern materials for making ropes and pulleys, we could further improve this forgotten method.

Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain

These days, we use them almost exclusively to transport skiers and snowboarders up snow slopes, but before the 1940s, aerial ropeways were a common means of cargo transport, not only in mountainous regions but also on flat terrain, with large-scale systems already built during the Middle Ages.

Cargo tramways can be fully or partly powered by gravity, and some deliver excess power that can be utilized to generate electricity or to drive cranes or machinery in nearby factories. Some innovative systems have been constructed in recent years.

Ropeway in Gdansk/Danzig, 1644