MISSION

Renewables

The Environmental Pendulum

The ultimate purpose of our work is to help bring back the freedom of the past, by loosening the shackles, bondage, traps, controls and costs to health and life of our present day existence is enmeshed in. The blatant truth is our economy is totally unsustainable, temporarily supported on a thin ice of depleting fossil fuels.

The more energy and resource independence each person and building can attain, the more prosperous the economy, the more successful job creation, the more meaningful new career opportunities, the greater the business incentives, the larger the return-on investments, the more vibrant the business prospects and the more healthy our people, planet and enterprises.

We can eclipse today past mistakes and invest in the promise, peace and growth rates of the solar-hydrogen era and a free-energy future, rather than stealing the capital from future generations, which belongs to them. We also need to show proactive compassion and understanding to the only earth we know.

The Great Housing Problem
There are currently about 400,000,000 people homeless on Earth. Current projections say another 400,000,000 by around the year 2030. That means that if we started today, producing 10,000,000 houses per year, (That's 27,397 houses per day, also working on Christmas!) then we won't hold even. It would take 40 years to house today's 400,000,000 homeless at that rate, and we'll have replaced them in less time than that!

Not everyone is going to want, or be able to afford, the same kind of house. There are already designs available for everything from "disaster/war victim who's just had their entire world destroyed around them" to "just graduated from college, looking to get a first home and start a family" to "established professional, looking to escape the suburbs and live in comfort on some large plot of land they just bought."

It's more important to provide the appropriate technology for people, so they can move up their own personal standard-of-living ladder. So someone who has no house would probably appreciate even a cardboard or Corrulite dome shelter. Professionals from the city will not be tempted by a cardboard dome.

However, something with 2-4 times the floor space, at 1/5-1/10th the cost of a standard house, and more privacy than they've ever had in a city, no utility bills, their own garden, great views, and still in touch with the communications net...that might be interesting to them.

Autonomous Housing
Rather than designing everything around a centralised system, with central power plants, water-treatment plants, sewer systems, gas lines, phone lines, TV cable, and the attendant spider web of wires and pipes that those use.

One could instead build a self-contained house, which allows one to cut free of the various umbilical cords of current society, and live anywhere on this planet's land surface. Eventually, also the sea surface, under the sea, and then the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, but that's projecting far into the future !

The basic design must possess a strong shell that shelters you from the elements, insulated walls, solar & wind power, along with fuel cells, methane-digesters hooked up to composting toilets, water-reprocessing facilities in the house, a hydroponic greenhouse, wireless communications, etc. It catches rainwater, and/or pumps & purifies from nearby lakes, streams, & rivers, or even condenses water directly from the atmosphere.

It's meant to help you survive in the various extremes of this planet. it could even be a stationary base-camp, which can be picked up by helicopter and delivered to any GPS coordinates required.

This idea still presents one problem though, how do you get rid of the need for roads ? We can make self-contained power systems, and water, food, communication, etc. but what about getting to & fro? What about going to work ? What about driving to town for some supplies ?

Besides the transport problem, autonomous housing stacks up really well in a cost/benefit analysis. The following two tables show the energy benefits accrued in comparison to an average UK house and other sustainable house designs round the world, some admittedly older before advances brought greater efficiency.