 It's raining again here in Cooksville, Wisconsin, which is just as well, because today we'll be looking at part two of the Low Tech Innovations panel discussion from Earth Day last week. We'll be hearing from people working on water, cooking, and energy, which are all key components of a sustainable future. This is the Low Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 47 on April 29th, 2022. Welcome to you at the Low Tech Institute's gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks for joining us. Today we're going to be listening again to a panel discussion on Low Tech Innovation that was hosted by the French Embassy's Office of Science and Technology. This is the second part of a podcast on this topic. If you haven't listened to part one, just head back in your podcast feed. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts, as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. And unless you hear me doing an ad, somebody else is making money on that advertising. This is where it usually makes a short pitch for you to visit our Patreon page and support the Institute directly. But instead, just like last week, I'd like to call attention to the organizations represented in these presentations. You can find links to all of their respective organizations in the show notes and also at the bottom of the screen if you're watching this on YouTube. Please check them out and consider supporting them directly. To kick us off, I was very honored to be asked to speak a little bit about my own work as part of the panel. So I'll just give you a quick presentation on my work. So sharing my screen here. I work at MIT D-Lab, a program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. My background is in civil engineering and I came to D-Lab because I was really interested in sort of the social impacts of engineering and how we could be more participatory about the types of projects that we engage in as engineers. So D-Lab is about designing for a more equitable world. And we do that by working with people around the world to develop and advance more collaborative approaches as we seek practical solutions to global poverty. And because we are at a university, our program is very focused on engaging students effectively in socially impactful work, which is by nature low tech. We were founded 20 years ago. We're celebrating our 20th anniversary this October. And we have offered 24 different classes at MIT that look at various aspects of low tech. You can see in this photo a prosthetics class that is working with users in Indonesia. And over 2,500 MIT students have enrolled in our classes, many of whom have gone on trips around the world to engage in effective user design and participatory development. We have a number of different research programs and field practice programs. And our staff is made up of practitioners with deep experience in various parts of the world. So we work in over 25 different countries. And COVID permitting, we hope to be able to start taking our students on field experiences again soon. So we have a few design principles at D-Lab, which you'll see have some overlap with the principles of low tech that we've been discussing today. We think about how to be more inclusive when we are designing for users living in poverty, whether they be in the U.S. or abroad. And we engage in co-creation or co-design processes with people living in poverty to engage them, to teach them the design process and to make that process as participatory and open as possible, as we're thinking about projects in the food and water and energy spaces around the world. And the methodology we've developed at D-Lab is really focused on what we call creative capacity building. So building the confidence and the capacity that is needed for users to engage in the design process to address whatever it may serve them for in their lives, regardless of whether they're working together with trained designers or not. So we think about the design process and how it can be applied to these low tech projects more effectively. So I've worked with students for the past 10 years at D-Lab, engaging them in low tech projects that are really thinking about how to make that design and engineering process more inclusive. I'll just tell you about one of those today focused in the water and sanitation space. This is a picture of me with two of my students who are wearing yellow shirts and a family in El Salvador who engaged in material experiments with us to be able to construct compost toilets with local materials as cheaply and effectively as possible while maintaining cleanliness and the effectiveness of the compost toilet system. So just for those of you who are not familiar with compost toilets, this is a method of very low water toilet building. The compost toilet basically separates liquid waste and solid waste because then that solid waste in the absence of excess moisture can be composted in a chamber underneath the latrine and can be used as fertilizer, as soil, once it is composted over the course of six months. And so it's a technology that's been deployed all over the world. It has a very low environmental footprint. It is flood resistant. It addresses some of the issues with more traditional pit latrines in parts of the world that are prone to seasonal flooding. And it is an odor-free method of building a latrine that has been well received by people who need latrines in many different parts of the world. So these latrines obviously could be built out of many different building materials, but we were really looking at how to radically reduce the cost of building these latrines in Central America. And so you can see in this photo, if I go back to this photo, oops, you can see materials like bamboo, adobe bricks underneath the plaster that have been used to bring the cost of this toilet down from an original proposal that was more focused on exported materials like concrete blocks. So we have three goals with this project, which are goals that I could say extend to a number of different D-Lab projects. One of them was to really radically reduce the cost by focusing on local materials and on verifying our comfort with using those materials from a structural standpoint. So bamboo is a fast-growing renewable resource in many parts of the world, including Central America. And so we were really looking at what we could do with bamboo and engaging the family members, the community members in learning how they already constructed bamboo and how that could be used in the context of the toilet. So rigorous engineering analysis of these materials was an important component. The second goal was to really guide the students to be thoughtful participants in this design process, not the authorities. So in terms of thinking about using indigenous materials and really ensuring that the users of the toilets felt confident in how to compost the material and maintain the cleanliness of the toilet, the students really had to sort of pull back from maybe roles that they had played before as more leaders of the design process and think about how to be effective participants in the design process. And so here you see students interviewing, sort of spending time with potential users as they go about their daily tasks to learn more about what their needs are. The third goal was really to follow up and reflect on the impact of the design project. So although we spent a month working with families building these initial prototypes, we came back six months later and a year later to continue analyzing how the materials were holding up, performing more tests and making improvements to the process of the composting to ensure that families were comfortable with it and were using it effectively. So that follow up with future groups of students who come back and sort of help maintain experiments and gather feedback from the users is a very important component of our work. So thank you very much for letting me give you a short introduction to my work. I'm happy to take questions and very excited to engage new partners around the world in D-Lab projects. Thank you. Without further ado, I will resume wearing my moderator hat and move on to our next speaker, Sophie Lyman, Executive Director of Solar Household Energy in Washington, DC. Sophie, I'm looking forward to hearing about some solar technologies from you. All right. Thank you so much, Libby. Yes, it's an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me to be a part of this panel. My name is Sophie Lyman. I'm the Director of Solar Household Energy, and I'll be talking about solar thermal energy for fuel-free cooking. We are a small-known profit based in Washington, DC with international projects, and our mission is to unleash the potential of solar cooking to improve social and environmental conditions in sun-rich areas around the world. We primarily carry out field projects, but we also do education and research and development for solar cooking technology. So before I talk about solar cookers, I've got to talk about the problem of dirty cook stoves. So the three-stone fire is used by, or rudimentary cook stoves, is used by three billion people around the world. That's more than a third of the world population. You can see these three-stone fires here, and it, collecting fuel for these fires can be dangerous. Women go out, walk for miles to collect fuel wood. They are faced with sexual and gender-based violence. As you can see, it's also backbreaking labor and time-consuming. It can be very costly, especially for families living in cities who have to buy fuel. So for example, the family of Ait and Haiti, for them it costs $2 a day, and that's, you know, many of the world's poorest families live on $2 a day. Here's a stark example of deforestation it can cause. In Haiti, they primarily use fuel wood and DR. They use gas to cook. It is also a big factor in mortality 4 million. It causes 4 million premature deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization, primarily from respiratory and cardiovascular disease. And it is, of course, a contributor to climate change and black carbon, the soot emits heat. So now I'll talk about solar cooking solutions. I'm just going to fly over these slides because there are so many different types of solar cookers, and I just want to make you aware of them, and you can, you know, research them later on on the solar cooking wiki or look at these slides. So this is a low-tech technology. I'm not talking about solar photovoltaic, which uses electricity. We're just talking about black pots and reflectors. So you need a black pot to convert sunlight to heat energy. You can retain that heat with the greenhouse enclosure, transparent plastic bag or glass top, and you can capture more sunlight with reflectors. And this is a feasible viable technology for most of the developing world, as you can see in the red-orange-yellow areas. So your basic, very low-tech solar panel cooker is a cooket. It's basically cardboard covered with aluminum foil. The black pot is in a turkey oven bag. You can make this for a few dollars at home, and you can cook a chicken in two hours with just this very low-tech technology. The hot pot on the right is basically a more durable version of that. It'll last over 10 years. That works like a crockpot. Now we have our ovens for baking, roasting veggies, etc. We have parabolic solar stoves that work like your oven top range, like solar flames under the pot and make it so that temperatures reach frying and sauteing temperatures. We also have tube cookers with vacuum insulation for good heat retention. We have Fresnel lenses if you want to cook from above. We have solar or electric hybrid cookers, which have backup electricity if there's no sunshine or backup gas when the sun isn't shining. We also have fixed focus solar cookers for indoor community cooking and slightly more advanced cookers with thermic fluid that allow cooking when the sun isn't shining, even at night. I'll end with one of the world's largest solar cooking system, I think the largest, which cooks for 100,000 people per day at the Shirdi Sai Baba Temple in India. This is a map from Solar Cookers International, which shows that there are over four million solar cookers used worldwide, impacting over 14.3 million people. I'll talk a little bit about some of Solar Household Energy's projects. We carry out humanitarian aid. We work with local partners, so we usually plant the seed and let the local partners continue without us. We started with a 50 hot pot project in Gaga refugee camp in Chad, and they added another 200. We are one of many partners in an education project, creating a university level course, and these are our many partners. We carry out research and development, so we helped design the hot pot over 20 years ago, which is a very simple solar cooker, and then our partner in Mexico, FMCN, has distributed or sold over 20,000 hot pots in Mexico, and there's over 30,000 in use worldwide. One of our latest projects focused on trying to kickstart a social enterprise. I'll go into a little bit more detail about this one. We use the Hain solar cooker, that one there is basically a more powerful yet far more affordable version of the hot pot, still very durable. We started out by doing market research. What are the existing cooking technologies? We see a very simple open fire, some charcoal grills, a few people of gas, and our entrepreneur, our field project manager, who wanted to start this enterprise, can be seen here recruiting and training solar cooking ambassadors. These are women who live in very rural remote communities who want to promote and sell solar cookers to their neighbors and friends. Here's Bibiana on our left, she's our star promoter, and here's some very happy customers who you're seeing, solar cooked rice and beans. One of the beauty of these solar cookers that they're very safe and easy to use, you know, instead of hovering over a smoky fire with her baby, this woman can just set in the sun and leave a beef for a couple hours and come back and her food is cooked. Even the husband got into it, which is great. One of the nice things about these panel cookers is that they act as ovens. So most people have a stove, they've got something with big flames, you can't really bake cakes or big bread and things like that. So this is a very affordable alternative to make cakes, and they love it. And so we use these solar cooking ambassadors because they're in their community, they know everybody, these are small towns, and they're there in the long run to ensure long-term adoption and satisfaction, and they're there to make any repairs, make any replacements if needed, and they're always in touch with our main entrepreneur, and they help carry out surveys too. So she's role is to, of course, kickstart these things, find a field project manager, help with the training, and then also do some monitoring evaluation. So we have usually people on the ground carry out surveys and focus groups. We measure adoption, how much are they using, are they keeping it in good condition, as well as impact, what are they noticing in terms of like any health improvements, are they coughing less from reduced smoke exposure, and are they, are they seeing it in their pocket books. We try to use international standards for M&E, such as those developed by the UN Foundation's Clean Cooking Lines, as well as Solar Cookies International and the International Standards Organization. One of our board members is part of a committee of the ISO to develop clean cooking standards. So this all sounds wonderful, but of course there are many challenges on the ground. Most people cannot afford to buy a Solar Cooker, even though in the long run it saves you a lot of money because it's cooking for free for five to ten years, and they don't know how it works. So most people are not willing to risk that kind of investment. And also even though the woman who does the cooking, the husband usually makes the financial decisions. There's many social and cultural challenges. Solar Cookers are really unlike any other cook stove you see. So if you don't understand how light reflects upon reflectors and it can look like witchcraft, and it can lead to incorrect usage. And often women don't have the luxury of trial and error. Women's got to be ready on time and they can't throw food away if it just doesn't work for whatever reason. And finally with some of the slow cooking panel cookers, sorry, that can mean starting to cook a little earlier, which can be an adjustment in your schedule and thinking ahead. And of course there's the obvious challenges of the fact that you cannot cook in cloudy weather. And for some Solar Cookers you can't cook in very cold weather. You can cook in the snow with box cookers and parabolic, but not with panel cookers. So I'll just talk a little bit about partnering with us. If you're an on profit who's working with women to help reduce their fuel usage, we are developing an online training course right now which should reduce our project costs substantially. And you can look at this later if you're interested or shoot me an email. And I'll end with why everybody needs a solar cooker just even in the US. It's great as an outdoor grill alternative. There's some powerful parabolics which will grill your food. And you never know when you'll be, you know, a hurricane will hit your town and then your only way to cook food will be solar cooking on top of your roof like this lady here. It's also great for living off grid. If you live in a tiny house for camping for sailing, reduce the fuel you bring on a boat. And that's it. That concludes my presentation. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to your questions. Thank you so much Sophie. I love seeing the diversity of designs and all the different ways that you can harness solar energy to cook something. It's fascinating and we already have some questions coming in that we will get to later. Our next speaker who's going to be switching over to the topic of energy systems is Alexis Stigler who is the Director of Living Energy Farm in Virginia in the United States. Alexis. So Living Energy Farm, we are a community and technology development center in central Virginia. The big difference with us is that we live the technologies we are trying to encourage other people to use. So for over 10 years now we've been developing renewable energy systems. Our intention is to keep them as small and durable as possible. Most of my slideshow is going to be about what we call a DC microgrid. It's a way we've discovered to use DC energy that solar energy that has proven very effective for us. So the way DC microgrid works and also I should say from this first slide we published a book Empowering Communities. You can go to livingenergyfarm.org and you can download that or you can get it directly from us. So the way DC microgrid works is we have a multi-leveled energy system. The biggest thing that we do that's different than traditional upgrade systems is that we do a lot of what we call daylight drive. So we have all kinds of equipment, including solar cookers incidentally, that run directly from the solar panels. So we can run, we can grind green, we can cut firewood, we can pump water, and now we're doing about 70% of our cooking now with insulated solar electric cookers. This is a project in conjunction with a working group at Cal Poly to develop these cookers and disseminate them around the world. It works great. The cookers now, we were using thermal cookers before and doing maybe 10% of our cooking. Now we're doing about 70% of our cooking with these cookers. So that's the big thing we do that we do a lot of daylight drive, running things straight off the solar panels. Surprisingly you can run, you can really overload these systems with an AC based system, alternative current based system, alternating current based system. You have to have more supply than you have demand. With the DC system you can actually run about 3,000 watts worth of motors off of 1,000 watts worth of supply. It's simply industrial brush motors and these thermal systems tolerate tremendous power input swings very gracefully. It doesn't do any harm. The second aspect of how these microgrids work is because we have a dramatic reduction in how much money we're spending on batteries and inverters and that sort of equipment, we increase the amount of, we can increase, improve the equality of what we're using. So this picture on the left is my daughter with a nickel iron battery from 1946. This still works. The nickel iron batteries, they're big, they're bulky, but they last for many decades. They're somewhat more expensive. This isn't a critical aspect of the design, but we do like them. They do work well. So a graphic display of how this works is with a traditional off grid system, you've got battery costs are quite large. You've got significant inverter costs, then you've got your PV costs and that gives you how much total work you can do in a day. With our system, the battery cost was reduced about 90%. There's no AC power, there's no electronics, small amount of inverters, perhaps some of the larger investment in PV power and the total daily work accomplished grows significantly. And you notice we use, we don't use the phrase total power output because the power output doesn't matter. It's how much work you can do. So we're not worried about stored kilowatts. We're worried about what we can do in a day and we can do a lot more with our systems than we can do with battery-based systems. So another aspect of how these systems are much more effective is that the components we're using are extremely durable. Solar panels, they are made by big corporations, but they last for many decades. DC industrial motors in the thermal systems as well. But the DC industrial motors, they're copper wire and magnets, they last for many decades. This particular machine is in our shop. We run a fully-tooled machine shop. It's actually a drill press from the late 1800s running on a motor that will last for decades with a solar panel that will last for decades. This equipment will last multiple lifetimes. My computer is misbehaving on here. All right, there we go. The other advantage of this system is that the annual cost, we have no cost for replacing batteries. A normal off-grid house spends hundreds or even a thousand or two thousand dollars a year replacing batteries to run a bunch of AC equipment. We find ways to store energy that don't involve batteries that involve near zero daily monthly yearly costs. So for water, for instance, we have a DC pump that pumps into a storage tank. That equipment is not free, but that is a, it's called a fiber wound tank. It'll last for many decades. So you're looking at a zero cost to run that on a daily basis. Instead of having an AC refrigerator with inverters or with centralized industrial power systems, we have thickly insulated DC refrigerators that store a stake hole overnight so you don't have to worry about running AC power. This is a graphic layout of our whole system at Living Energy Farm. The blue squares are power supplies. The red squares are loads. The green squares are battery-supported loads. So because this is a multi-linear system, there's never a general power failure. Basically, the lights never go out. In 12 years, a dozen people living off-grid were economically self-sufficient, largely food self-sufficient, living on a poverty level budget, and we've never had a, never had the lights go out. So we have very small systems, such as a PV panel running a pump to pump hot water for a thermal system. The biggest system we have is a high voltage DC system with over 22 loads on it. That runs a machine shop. It cooks 70% of our food. It runs the heating blowers for our buildings. So it's a very resilient system. There's never a general power failure. Another advantage of these systems is that it's very scalable. You can do very small-scale systems. You can do larger commercial systems. So we have three projects now. We have run that we started in Arizona and the Hopi and Navajo Nations. We have one ongoing in Jamaica, and now we're starting a project in Puerto Rico. We can do small battery kits that are very durable, that can charge laptops, cell phones. This is a kit workshop in Jamaica, assembling those battery kits. We have commercial scale equipment at Living Energy Farm, a machine shop, agricultural equipment. We set up a commercial scale food processing facility in Jamaica. And again, the difference here is that, so this is Charlie, who might help me put those solar panels on the roof. That is in the poorest part of Jamaica. Once this system is set up, it's not free, but it will run commercial scale equipment for many, many years to come with no ongoing power bill. So they're processing breadfruit and other agricultural products into value-added products that the farmers can then sell. Another advantage of our DC microgrid, several people have mentioned the war in Ukraine. The supplies of fossil fuel are, of course, a big issue for all of us. The one of the things that has crippled solar thermal in general, particularly solar space heating, is that it has been over-designed, over-built. It is basically because it tries to imitate grid power. It's the same problem, it's the legacy problem, the same problem we have with big battery systems, where we have a battery and an inverter to make AC power to power the appliances that we're accustomed to. It's the same problem with solar thermal in that we want a thermostatic system. So some thermal systems have been built with big solar storage tanks, computerized controllers. This system is simply a very cheap glass over black metal collector on the roof, daylight drive, pumps, air blowers. So again, the blowers are connected directly to the solar panels, just like all our other equipment. It pulls the heat off the roof directly, goes directly under the floor. So we're using thermal storage instead of electrical storage. This is very cheap and it runs, it'll run forever, many, many years. So all of this works so well, well, haven't you heard of it? There's several issues. The first is the lack of DC equipment. All our markets have been standardized to AC equipment. So if you want a solar fan or a solar refrigerator or a good solar cooker, you can't get it. It's not on the market. So what we're doing in Jamaica in Puerto Rico is we're setting up supply chains to bring this equipment in. Some of it, like this little solar fan, pretty cheap, $20 out of China, but you've got to have $20,000 to bring in a container of them. So we're bringing those in. Some equipment, a lot of household appliances. Any appliance that you can pick up and walk around with will actually run DC. They have universal motors in them. So a little hot plate or a blender, you can actually run it straight DC. You do have to swap out the switches. You can't run AC switches. Computers and electronics, you simply have to get the right charge cords. This solar cooker here on the right is our latest version. And solar cooking is a great idea. This cooker actually is much better in terms of usability. Like I said, we're doing 70% of our cooking now with this style of cooker. So these can be manufactured locally, which is, of course, an economic benefit to the people there. So we'll be setting up production facilities. We have a production facility now in Virginia making those. The other big issue that is the reason we don't already have DC micro grids is that because of the solar energy has become very politicized to the extent that the big power companies and our economy in general supports the centralized development, centralized power companies. So we now have these big solar fields. And it's a bit of a no-brainer that if you put where the locus of capital investment, where you put the money is where you tend to have good things. So we have very expensive, very well-built power plants, whether they're fossil fuel powered or nominally renewable. And then we have badly built houses. This house that's shining red, that's an infrared camera on a house nearby living energy farm. In the middle of winter, the sun doesn't shine in winter. So that house, no matter how much solar energy you build, is still fossil fuel powered. Whereas our house at Living Energy Farm, we went through this past winter in Virginia. This is the same night. Those pictures were taken minutes apart. Our house is leaking almost no heat. We went through this past winter with basically no firewood. Just pulling the heat off the roof, put it in the floor and it works. But it's not, it doesn't fit our current consumer economy. It doesn't fit our current tendency to want big centralized solutions. The two goal, the two prizes, the two things we can achieve if we can spread DC micro grids all over the world is that it can provide energy to it's, they're much cheaper systems. They're scalable. There are 2.2 billion people worldwide who do not have reliable grid power. This can supply power for them. And the bigger prize, we all know that the climate change crisis is a huge issue. DC micro grids have a radically lower environmental footprint. We can make a dramatic impact on climate change gases if we can spread this energy system around the world. So I'll leave you with Greta Thunberg and her, I don't want you to panic. I don't want you to hope I want you to panic. I've used the phrase constructive panic that we don't need. We need to respond to this with the appropriate, the appropriate emotional response, which is to do what we need to do quickly. What a great note to end on. Thank you, Alexis. And can I just say how much I love how people come out of the woodwork during these conversations with their own low tech stories about using a solar cooker or using a compost toilet or being exposed to a micro grid. I think this is, I'm so glad you're all sharing so many examples. So we do have one more speaker. And just to let you know, I talked to Linda, we are going to go a few minutes past the hour just to allow time for questions. If you're able to stay with us or share your resources and stories before you leave. Our last speaker is Olivia Borey, a PhD student from France who is going to tell us about her research on energy for autonomous households. Olivia. So good morning, everyone. I'm Olivia Borey-Debis. I am currently working at Integral Engineering as a PhD student. This is a company specialized in building conception. This is a research project in collaboration with Energy Lab at the University of Rhinon Island and at this laboratory from Grenoom Institute of Technology. So I'm happy to share with you my research thematic, which is called DC architecture, micro grid architecture development with energy production and hybrid storage for standalone building. So to start, I will begin with some words about the context. As we know, it's essential that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, which are currently strongly linked to our energy production, dependent on oil and gas. This is an even greater priority for isolated territories, which due to their geographical position require finding autonomous and sustainable energy production solutions. Currently living in Rhinon, a French overseas department located next to Mauritius, I would like to introduce you to the energy issues that we encounter here. First of all, the part of renewable energy represents only 32% of Rhinon's energy mix. So as part of the energy transition for the green growth and the French decree, one of the goals is to reach energy autonomy for overseas departments in 2030. Moreover, in 2025, according to the BICS decree, buildings will have to justify their energetic constructions by instrumentation. So if we take a look on the Rhinon energy, tertiary and residential buildings are the main energy consumers and due to a really nice climate, sometimes too hot, air conditioning is the main energy load. So this concerns city, but other problems exist here for isolated sites, such as, for example, Mafat, which is a wild, natural place where the houses are only accessible by foot. So the autonomous electrical architecture required most of the time generators are generally oversized to meet the energy requirements. So this is not a solution for resilience because growth in the number of solar panels and batteries is not the best choice. And finally, with renewable energy insertion in the grid this last year, a non-debate is growing up between alternative and direct current. Indeed, to use solar energy, we need many converters between solar panel and our equipment. First, we convert direct current in alternative for our grid and then we converted a second time for DC equipment like LEDs, screens, computers, data centers, and some motors. This is not optimal and creates a lot of energy losses, but currently we don't know exactly how to quantify energy savings which are possible with DC current. That's why my research was all divided in three points. First, develop new DC architectures to reduce energy losses linked to converters and electrical light transport. According to the state of art, experts have an estimation of almost 50% for the motor. So I'm currently standing up an experimental DC measurement bench in a laboratory. I'm also introducing many environmental and current sensors to control the efficiency of the architecture and to control this data, I will use statistical indicators in an application. And suddenly, my main objective is to set up an energy management system to deliver energy at the right time, taking into account external conditions, user comfort, and the state of health of the storage equipment. This is in order to reduce the overall energy consumption of the system. And the main constraint is to have no fuel support. On this slide, you can see a simplified diagram of the architecture of the DC test bench that we want to put in place. And this is where Lotte comes in because to carry out our environmental measurements with test virus components, including wired and wireless sensors, they communicate according to different communication protocols, such as local world technologies, the openness and accessibility of equipment in terms of development depends on the supplier and the degree of stability that someone wish to deploy. For data storage monitoring, we use a free database management system. And with the help of fellow IT developer, we connect the database to a mobile app to automate data analysis. Concerning the electrical loads, they are managed by the power of an internet protocol, which operates at 48 vote DC and allows us to power and control the equipment via a single RG45 network cable. In resume, the innovation of architecture is mainly in the fact that we have the consumption of each element and we will have the possibility to adjust the power of each point separately. It also means that the energy management system will have a lot of new and numerous parameters. And this is a challenge to associate energy constructions and user comfort. Thanks to the development of this system, the goal is to promote self-construction as much as possible and drastically reduce the use of storage. So for the moment, we are starting for the lighting and the fun. So the main goal of this test bench is to test first a classical architecture with a lot of converters between alternative currents and DC currents and do the same thing with same equipment but with DC architectures and evaluate which is more efficient. So we will take all the data in the database and generate automated evaluation of the electrical architectures in the form of a multi-parameter radar chart which will compare for each architecture, total of raincoats, electrical line transport losses, resilience, carbon impacts and energy savings with taking into account user comfort. So thank you all for listening. Thank you so much, Olivia. This is fascinating and I look forward to reading more about it. So it is 12 o'clock Boston time. I totally understand if anyone needs to jump off. Thank you so much for coming. But we do have a few questions that I'd like to ask the panelists before we conclude. We have a couple of questions for Sophie. Someone asked what do you think of cooking bags in the chat? Is he talking about heat retention baskets? That would be my guess. Yes, definitely. Yeah, heat retention baskets are great and they should definitely be used in conjunction with solar cookers. They can finish the cooking process just with the retained heat. So that's great for using not just solar cookers but any type of cook stove. Yeah, I didn't have time to go over every single type of technology, unfortunately, and there's plenty of other types of solar cookers I didn't even have time to address, but yes. And I have sort of a behavioral question. Someone said the cooking with a solar cooker is sometimes longer than a classical fossil fuel cooker. Should people that change to a solar cooker modify the organization of their day by cooking at different times of day maybe? And is that a problem for families? How have you found that behavior change to go? I mean, yes, if you cook longer, then you'll need to start earlier generally. But for some people that can be a bonus. The nice thing about cooking with a panel cooker, which is like a crock pot, is that you don't need to stick around and keep on stirring the pot and you don't need to stick around. So you can just put it out in the morning, leave for a few hours, come back and it'll be done. So in many, maybe it will require you to reorganize your day or maybe it'll actually be easier. Right, right. So behavior change doesn't have to be a bad thing. Yeah. Well, I would like to ask a similar question to Alexis in terms of, you know, are there any sort of behavior change expectations or sort of issues that you run into in thinking about your work that have required a learning curve or a different approach? Yeah, definitely. And the interesting thing about the DC microgrid, and I did not predict this, is it actually encourages people to conserve energy. We tend to think of energy consumption as this negative side of human nature. What we have at Living Energy Farm, the electrical systems, the water system, every system that we have weakens slowly. So for most people, it's about a 48 hour learning curve. Within two days, you get it. You have to pay attention to the weather. You're not going to water the garden at five o'clock in the afternoon because we'll drain the water storage tanks. You won't water it at nine o'clock in the morning. As Sophie mentioned, cooking, you know, you think about it ahead of time. The advantage with these I6, the insulated solar electric cookers, is you're actually indoors using them. But in any case, there are behavioral changes that have to occur. But it's usually only two or three days. Most people get it. Some people take a little longer. And the net result is a dramatic reduction in total environmental impact and a natural kind of people learn to have an inbuilt tendency to conserve energy rather than an inbuilt tendency to waste energy because that's how the system is set up. Interesting. Well, I hung on to a question that was asked in the first hour, but I'd love for Olivia or Alexis to answer to share their thoughts. The question was, does the low tech school of thought believe that electrical based infrastructure is sustainable? Any thoughts about sort of electrical grids versus other solutions? I mean, in the long term, no, it's not. But what so a lot of people have a lot of ideas and that's great. But what what works, you know, so we live, we have no generators, no backup anything, we live with what we have. And it would be brutally inconvenient to not have some external energy sources. And the solar panels, most of the big economic research institutions have estimated somewhere around 500 watts per person to sustain people were about 200 watts per person. Food self sufficient economically self sufficient. So no, 500 years from now, we might not have photovoltaic panels. I'm not sure. But for now, it's not a question of moral purity. It's just the question of what works. This is what works. And if we can use them in a moderate and intelligent way, that's what makes sense. Moderate and intelligent. I like that. Olivia, any other thoughts to add in terms of your research? Electricity versus versus other solutions or any potential unintended challenges that have come up? Yes, those are challenges. One of the changes, many changes is different standard for equipment, because we didn't have any rule. So each constructor made his own voltage, for example. And so the research is how to make a transition with all the different equipments and switch with DC distribution, electrical distribution. And we have one question from Greg in the chat saying, where can we find a database with impact data for different low tech projects? I know Linda and Sophie have answered in the chat. But do any other panelists have anything to add? Any other resources where we might sort of be able to dig into some of the data on this work? I'll throw one in. Engineering for Change is a website. It doesn't talk about impact, but it does sort of crowdsource a lot of different plans, products, designs, ideas in one place. So I would recommend googling that. And Cedric, I saw you unmuting yourself. Yeah, of course, there is the solar, the low tech magazine. These people, they are based in Netherlands. They make a great work for years now. And of course, Palio Energetik, you can also like share it. You can push some ideas inside. You can make a group to look for a great innovation and patent into the US patent office. I think there is with the MITD lab, you have a huge resource into your country. And I can say we have the plan to make the website translated in Russian because the Russian, they have this tradition of making sort of sustainable product because of the communism. So they have an approach of the technology that is totally different from our approach in Europe or in the United States. So in energy, they have a lot of patents that are really powerful, interesting. But the patents, they are not translated in English. It's only in Cedric. But we are interested to bridge with the people. Okay, there is the war, but we have to take care of the people of the Russian. We have to make a sort of bridge for peace with the Russian. And I think they realize because the war is destroying the economy also. So I mean, the people, they would suffer in Russia also. And we have to bridge with the people. So that is one of our goal and to translate in Chinese, in Indian also too. Because all the territories, their resources, their roots, their people facing crisis and innovating when the crisis is there, the people are innovating a lot. So yeah, thank you for those thoughts. I feel like we need to put a pin in that discussion and have another webinar just about that to take it in a different direction. But thank you all so much to honor your time. I'm going to wrap it up here. I encourage you all to make use of the resources that everyone has shared in the chat. And we will be sharing the recording and the chat transcript with you afterwards so you can pursue those connections. Thank you to all seven of my colleagues who agreed to speak on the panel today. And thank you to the French Embassy for inviting me to moderate. I wish you all a wonderful Earth Day and stay safe and healthy. Bye-bye. That's it for another extra long episode. We'll be back to our regular programming in a week or two. The low tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute and at the moment the show is hosted, edited and distributed by me, Scott Johnson. But stay tuned for changes in that team. This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute Gardens. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube and elsewhere. We hope you've enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash Low Tech Institute and signing up. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. You can find us on social media and you can reach me directly. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music today was Early Sun off the album Bitter Sweet Endings by Crowander. That song is under the Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial license and this podcast is under the Creative Commons Attribution and ShareLag license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks and take care and I'm going to come in out of the rain now.