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Electricity

How to Build a Solar Powered Electric Oven

This guide explains how to construct an energy-efficient cooking appliance powered by a small solar panel. Thanks to its heat storage, the cooker remains ready to use even after sunset.

How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch

This manual guides you through the process of building a 12V DC electric resistance heating element for a self-made heating or cooking device.

The Compressed Book Edition

How to make books more sustainable? Inspired by the image compression on our solar-powered website, we squeezed the article catalog of our three-volume book series into just one book.

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.

How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator

We built a pedal-powered generator and controller, which is practical to use as an energy source and exercise machine in a household – and which you can integrate into a solar PV system. We provide detailed plans to build your own, using basic skills and common hand tools.

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.

Too Much Combustion, Too Little Fire

The fire – which we have used in our homes for over 400,000 years – remains the most versatile and sustainable household technology that humanity has ever known.

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.

Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security

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

Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage

Compressed air energy storage is a sustainable and resilient alternative to chemical batteries, with much longer life expectancy, lower life cycle costs, technical simplicity, and low maintenance.

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.