Solarpunk technology

I’m including a really rough sketch of the workshop I’m picturing, a sort of mix of water wheel driven retrofitted power tools, but centered around this big solar collector and a fresnel lens setup for a solar plasma cutter, welder, sinterer using a design kind of like an observatory with a big rotating dome on the top that can be aimed at the sun to pipe down a steady sunlight deathray. I’m not sure yet about the mirror design, and any other uses for the space as shown. Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas.

I figure this place is multi purpose, maybe a makerspace, maybe a small factory co-op, but mostly doing metal work. I don’t have a specific purpose in mind yet but it’d be nice if it reinforced those themes. I love workshops, so I think this will be a lot of fun. and I really loved those diagrams of mills from the industrial revolution in our midle school history texts, I’d like to take some of those technologies and reimagine them with a modern approach to workplace safety.

My instinct was to make the lean-to on the left a blacksmith forge, with a firewall separating it from the main structure, but coal or charcoal are probably not what I’d like to use (though charcoal probably isn’t out altogether as it can be kind of green). A solar forge would be an interesting challenge, it might have to work like a schieffer parabolic solar cooker, with the reflector shooting concentrated light through a hole in the wall, as the interior needs to be pretty dark so you can see the color of the metal as you work it. Could be all kinds of other things too.

You can get energy out of a lot of slow running water with a small elevation difference, or a small amount of fast flowing water with a high elevation drop.

The latter is usually very low impact on the natural surrounding and ideal for running a small turbine for electricity production.

I don't think people will bother with mechanical power transmission water wheels if they can go the route of electricity production with power-tools.

Absolutely, they can be. I'm a big believer that solarpunk means appropriate technology, not just high technology. In some places electric power and solar panels are the most appropriate, sustainable, environmentally sound, and decentralized way to make power. In other cases it might be hydro. Maybe a million solar panels on the roofs of a million houses is the best way to power a town; maybe, when all the equities are taken into consideration, building a single dam and hydroelectric power plant has less impact on the environment than manufacturing and installing a million solar panels. It has to be case by case.

I don't know much about old school water wheels, but I can tell you that changing an environment is not the same as damaging it. Beavers turn streams into ponds and transform environments far more dramatically then dropping a water wheel into a river does, and they're still part of nature. You are part of nature, and as a tool using, home constructing animal, you have a right to use your natural abilities to modify your environment. And you have a duty, of course, to use your brain and think about the impact your modifications will have on your specific environment.

I can also tell you that when you talk about using kinetic energy directly from a natural source, you have to factor in transportation and storage. Taking the example of a water wheel used to mill grain: if you have to ship grain to the mill and ship flour out again, at what distance from the mill is it no longer efficient to transport? How much storage do you need for grain and flour on site? What happens when there's a drought - does the grain just sit there in storage? And what happens when there's a flood - how long can the grain be stored at the riverbank before it's damaged by moisture? And what do you do when there's no grain - the power produced by the water wheel can't be moved, so you have to repurpose it or it goes to waste, right?

A water wheel that provides kinetic energy is centralized power, just as much as a coal-fired power plant is - just instead of using a network of wires to transmit power to other locations, you have to use a network of roads to transmit materials to and from the location where energy is produced. But while a power plant can transmit electricity hundreds of miles away so location is not an issue, the water wheel's energy can only be accessed in a very small physical location, which means it can only really do one thing at a time and people have to line up around the block to mill their grain like they did with windmills on windy days in the 1600s.

Or think about the sunshine death ray in your diagram - if I'm reading it right, one person can use that death ray at a time. If the sun is providing more energy than the user needs, the excess is wasted. If the sun is providing less energy, the user can't do what they want to do. And you can't split off the power to share it with multiple users without building new death rays, which drastically limits the production efficiency of the makerspace. The studio you're designing is for one, or a handful, of people doing work in a deliberately inefficient fashion presumably for artistic or aesthetic or ideological reasons.

And I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or wrong. There's room in solarpunk for the joy of inefficiency and of doing things in completely analog fashion.

There's something sacred in taking the power of the universe into your own hands and manipulating it directly in an act of glorious creation.

But we can't run a society on water wheels anymore. Solarpunk demands sustainability, and a sustainable society needs to use its resources efficiently, and water wheels really aren't an efficient use of rivers or river banks.

(I appreciate simple, old-fashioned, analog technology, for both practical and ethical reasons. But the big reason solarpunk was dubbed solarpunk is that solar panels are practically miracle technology for sustainability and decentralization. They're made out of silicon, they last for decades, they're modular, they're portable, they require no supporting infrastructure whatsoever, and they produce free energy anywhere and everywhere the sun shines.)

Old water wheels did not dam up the entire river. A part of the river would be guided into a separate channel, where the waterwheel would be mounted. The remaining river would be undisturbed. I've seen this near a Portuguese river - not used anymore but I still met the old miller who had used it in her lifetime.

I also really love ram pumps, they can be installed in similar ways.

Old irrigation system use mad systems of channels to guide water along hillsides.

Might go into more detail later, need to tend to the animals.