Local Energy Farms and the Quest for Reliable Renewable Power

Why Local Energy Farms?
As we move inexorably into the post-peak world, measures such as solar cells on home roofs and increased domestic insulation will undoubtedly become a necessity. Unfortunately, such measures will be insufficient to insulate our systems from the coming energy shock for at least two reasons: it is clearly too late to build large-scale local energy systems before oil peak hits; and the political and popular will is sorely lacking in most industrialized nations.

What would a Local Energy Farm provide?
A Local Energy Farm or linked network of such farms would provide modest amounts of reliable, renewable energy - both electric power and biofuels. By modest is meant enough to run a new, low-energy infrastructure and the provisioning system needed for settled life.

What is a Local Energy Farm and how does it provide reliable, renewable energy?
An energy farm should consist of as many sources of renewable energy as possible, linked to as many small and medium-scale storage methods as possible. With a reasonable location it should be possible to achieve all or most of the following: electricity production from wind turbines, solar photovoltaic cells, and water turbines; electrical storage with batteries, pumped storage - such as into a mill pond or lake, and maybe hydrogen. Bio-energy should be supplied as biogas from an organic digester, bio-liquids from crops such as industrial hemp, and biomass primarily from forest forage.

Reliable renewable power will be provided by the primary combination of electronics (inverters, for instance) and high power batteries to provide short-term smoothing, and a water storage area that feeds a water turbine to provide the main medium-scale backup.

There is no question that an energy farm is a complex operation, but then so is any farming. In response to this reality, we are developing financial systems to help energy farms start, and one of the methods will borrow, once again, from the idea of Community Supported Agriculture, most likely tied with some form of co-operative ownership, to make what amounts to Community Supported Energy. Another interesting possibility that may be combined with Community Supported Energy, is to find struggling family farms, and help bring them back from extinction (an extinction which is deliberate government policy in most of the English-speaking world). At the moment, those few that are surviving are often entirely dependent on government subsidies for any profit they make. If they were able to become both an energy farm and a food farm, they could subsidise food production with energy production. One day we shall realise that there are few things more important than local food and we shall become willing to support our small locally owned farms, but until that day, we must try to keep as many small farms alive as possible.

Please Support Our Efforts To Establish Local Energy Farms!
To conclude: we believe that Local Energy Farms will be vital in a future of declining oil and gas production. Establishing such farms will not be easy or cheap or quick. We must start now. There is already at least one example in existence (West Beacon Farm in Britain) that demonstrates all the elements of producing local reliable, renewable electricity – we have interviewed its creator, Tony Marmont, and that interview can be seen (and heard) now at GlobalPublicMedia.com [http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/438]. Some photographs of West Beacon energy Farm can be seen at the bottom of this page.

The full version (5000 words) of this brief overview will appear as a chapter in Post Carbon Institute's forthcoming book, Relocalize Now! However, for those seriously interested in supporting our Local Enegy Farm Initiative, we will email a PDF preview of the chapter.

We urgently need people to step forward with money, land, time and the will to get the Local Enegy Farm Initiative under way. If you want to start taking part in the extraordinary experiments of Local Energy Farms, please contact Julian Darley, Director Post Carbon Institute (http://www.postcarbon.org). If you want to support the work of Post Carbon Institute, please donate here.

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* For those less familiar with the concept of a millpond, think of Constable’s Flatford Mill:

Flatford Mill (`Scene on a Navigable River') 1816-17
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=2591&tabview=image

Details of a British energy farm, West Beacon Farm: http://www.beaconenergy.co.uk

Photographs of West Beacon energy Farm: