The printed archives of Low-tech Magazine now amount to four volumes with a total of 2,398 pages and 709 images.
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.
If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.
A wooden rotor and tower greatly increase the net energy output over the lifetime of a small wind turbine.
Given the right conditions, a mechanical windmill with an oversized brake system is a cheap, effective, and sustainable heating system.
To improve energy security, we need to make infrastructures less reliable.
Adjusting energy demand to supply would make switching to renewable energy much more realistic than it is today.
Matching supply to demand at all times makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking.
For being such a seemingly ordinary vehicle, the wheelbarrow has a surprisingly exciting history.
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.
Increasing the share of renewable energy will not make us any less dependent on fossil fuels as long as total energy consumption keeps rising.
Would it make sense to revive the industrial windmill and again convert kinetic energy directly into mechanical energy?