Quote:
Originally Posted by NachtRitter
jtbo -
Someone once said something to the effect of "If you think you can or if you think you can't, you are right."
I am sure if you really wanted to move somewhere with more sun and with warmer weather, you would be able to do it.
And there are other ways to generate electricity efficiently besides sunshine. As you mentioned, there is wind. Of course that is not always available. Another option that seems as if it could serve a dual purpose is biogas / syngas generation. This approach burns organic material (wood, for instance) under controlled conditions, with the byproduct being a flammable gas (syngas). The heat from the burning could be used to warm the home, and the syngas can be used to fuel an ICE or gas turbine generator.
One summer I went to visit my cousin living in Sweden near 65* latitude and I understand what you mean about the summer sun... it seems like the sun is a heavy ball that can't make it up into the sky... it climbs so slowly in the mornings and then drops slowly in the afternoon but never goes all the way down. To me, it seemed like it was always either time to have breakfast or time to have dinner... never time to sleep or time to do work. 
Even so, I think there are options... |
I agree that there are always options, here wood is most likely to be best option. During WW2 here people did not have gasoline, not much cars either, that few were took to military use during the war of course. Then even military had shortage of fuel, so they started to build devices to cars which burned wood and produced gas to run the car, which I believe is what you mentioned as getting biogas from wood with controlled burn. Direct translation is wood gas, wiki has this to say about that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
Moving to warmer country just would require some financial level which is impossible to gain for me any more because of health, but what I can do is to minimize need to use money and maintain somewhat decent level of living despite very small amount of work that I'm able to do.
Indeed, our bright day must be tad dim for other places, I shoot photos as a hobby and even at bright summer day I can't find need to go to ISO200 if using 300mm setting of lens, also I have not found enough bright day to use my 1500mm lens yet, there is light, some places even lot of it, but it is perhaps not nearly as bright as at some other places of earth.
At October sun can't get above trees any longer on my yard, mostly of course because trees are very tall around the yard, but it is huge difference to summer and change is relatively quick too.
It is not only electricity that it affects to, also how sun's energy can be stored to soil is somewhat limited, this year it was 5. month that snow melted away from my memory, it is not unheard of to get snow already at 10. month, but after 9. month sun has no longer power to charge soil with solar energy.
This then leads to very limited energy capacity that could be stored with soil in earthship to be used to keep place warm, even there is sun energy available at end of 3. month it takes usually month or even bit more to get all snow melted and after that it takes weeks to soil to dry until it starts to warm up again properly.
We have also now new regulations of fireplace efficiency, I think it should be over 85% with new fireplaces used for heating. Don't know if wood gas would be better total efficiency than such fireplaces. For me something around 2-3 cubic meters of wood would be plenty for year's heating if I would have such fireplace, maybe some day.
What I think is that with older house with proper setup one could maintain such low level of consumption that demolishing old house and building earth ship might not be much more ecological.
Of course when building new anyway, then earthship or other building using similar general ideas might be good.
Same is often with cars, swapping engine and drivetrain might provide more ecological solution than getting new car, when one accounts whole chain from digging up the minerals and all those effects to nature.