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Wind Power

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 Design a Sailing Ship for the 21st Century?

It is surprisingly difficult to build a carbon neutral sailing ship. This is even more the case today, because our standards for safety, health, hygiene, comfort, and convenience have changed profoundly since the Age of Sail.

How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again

If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.

Reinventing the Small Wind Turbine

A wooden rotor and tower greatly increase the net energy output over the lifetime of a small wind turbine.

Heat your House with a Mechanical Windmill

Given the right conditions, a mechanical windmill with an oversized brake system is a cheap, effective, and sustainable heating system.

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 Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow

For being such a seemingly ordinary vehicle, the wheelbarrow has a surprisingly exciting history.

Medieval Smokestacks: Fossil Fuels in Pre-industrial Times

Almost all of the leading economies in Western Europe during the last millenium relied on a large-scale use of fossil fuels such as peat and coal.

How (Not) To Resolve the Energy Crisis

Increasing the share of renewable energy will not make us any less dependent on fossil fuels as long as total energy consumption keeps rising.

Wind Powered Factories: History (and Future) of Industrial Windmills

Would it make sense to revive the industrial windmill and again convert kinetic energy directly into mechanical energy?