 So I'm Alexis, and this is Living Energy Farm. The purpose of Living Energy Farm is to create a small village scale model that runs without fossil fuel and to try to do it as cheaply and simply as possible. So instead of asking the question, how do I make renewable energy suit all of my needs, we ask how do we adjust our lifestyle to live within a modest renewable energy budget. And we want to create a model that can, as much as possible, spread all over the world, including to a lot of people that aren't very wealthy. We tried to build a better solar energy system using off-grid batteries, standalone solar electricity, and we've developed what we call a DC microgrid. It's worked out really well. We run motors straight off the solar panels. We call that daylight drive that allows us to shrink our battery bank way down so we can use a small battery bank. We use nickel-iron batteries, those last forever. We have a lot of other projects. We've been using biogas and expanding that biogas for cooking, and now we're using biogas to power small tractors. We're also developing better grain harvesting equipment. Basically anything that a small, low-income farmer would need anywhere in the world, we're trying to develop it, and that's what big corporations don't do. And a lot of people who try these things over-engineer it. They try to do things that are big and complicated. We're trying to keep it as simple as possible but still be effective. Regarding solar cooking, we have several kinds of cookers. We use a regular solar oven, and you can make those, or you can buy one. Sunoven is a popular brand in the U.S. They work, but they need very good weather. Only in bright, sunny, warm weather do those work. We have a parabolic dish. It looks like a little satellite dish. That works a little better. It's a little better for slightly cloudy weather. They do work, but we found that we could only do a small fraction of our cooking with those. The weather needs to be pretty good. It needs to be warm. You need to go out to the cooker, which when you're trying to cook for a dozen people, having to run around between different solar cookers is a bit stressful and tiresome. And then we, about nine months ago, we discovered insulated solar electric cookers. Isak's first developed by Pete Schwartz at Cal Poly, and now it's an international effort to improve them, uses DC electricity off of solar panels into insulated cookers. And the insulated is an important part of that. And they are much, much more effective. They've allowed us to cook now. 80, 90% of our food now is solar electric in the summertime. And even in the wintertime, it's still quite a lot. So if you have a toaster, like in an ordinary house, and you look in there and you see those little glowing wires in there, it's called nickel chromium. That's what it looks like. It's very, very cheap. This is our simplest burner here. And we take the nickel chromium and we just wiggle it back and forth. We lay down some concrete. So that is connected directly to the solar panel. There's no fancy electronics at all. And then you put it inside of an insulated box. And then that sits under your pot and makes heat. We wanted to start with the simplest, cheapest, easiest cooker to build. So we came up with the bucket cookers. We call this pearl because it has made with pearlite. If you look down in there, you can see the circle, the nichrome wire and the little circular burner. This is a metal tube. And then most of this bucket is filled with pearlite. That's a white material. You often see it in potting soil. Pearlite insulates moderately well and it has very high temperature resistance. Now for this kind of cooker, we have to get a pot that actually fits in there. This is called a bain-marie, but it slides right in there. You plug this, again, straight into the solar panel. There's no fancy electronics at all. Then we make a lid. So this cloth right here and this cloth right here are flame-resistant cloth. This is not wool or cotton. This is what's called a welder's blanket. This is called aramid. We use a little bit of rock wool around the top to give that. We want to make kind of a gasket, something that seals a little bit. We put that on there, boom. And this basically functions like a crock pot. It cooks somewhat slowly. Now, this particular one was made to work at 100 watts, 12 volts, but you could put 200 watts, 300 watts. You can put different wattages, different voltages. The smallest cooker like this with a 100 watt panel is going to take all day basically to cook a couple of liters. So you would cook dinner with this. And we found that it's often better to bake rather than boil just because you get rid of the thermal mass of the water if you have a very small cooker. But now we have developed these in many different sizes and many different configurations. We make the box cookers, the Roxy's. So the burner would sit on this one. Now this is a sheet metal cover. This is made with metal fabrication tools and that sits on top of that and there. Roxy box cookers that run up to 1400 watts. When you're at that level, it will cook as quickly as an ordinary oven. We can cook three meals a day on these. You can cook at 9 o'clock in the morning because the big advantage of these cookers, it could be very cold outside. It can be partly cloudy and you're bringing that energy in and putting it inside of an insulated box. They work far better than any other solar cooker. The big challenge is with any kind of traditional cooking meaning electric gas or even firewood, you cook really quickly. And even the stronger Roxy cookers are a little bit slower and the really small ones are quite slow. So the biggest challenge is just getting people to plan ahead. So instead of coming in at 5 o'clock to cook dinner at 6 o'clock and have dinner ready by 6, you start dinner at 2 o'clock. You get it all packed in the ovens. You let it cook and by 3 o'clock it's cooked. You unplug them, you let it sit there warm and then you eat at 6. That's our biggest challenge. Here's the interesting thing. So with a 100 watt cooker, a 12 volt cooker, when it gets even moderately cloudy, you're shut down. Our biggest cooker is tied into our high voltage system. Now our high voltage system at Living Energy Farm runs dozens of motors as well as our cookers, heats the houses, does a lot of different things and that runs at 180 volts. At 180 volts DC, we can cook when it's cloudy. Not heavy overcast, but mild overcast, partly cloudy, we can still cook and that's pretty amazing. But it's because of the integration of the DC microgrid, we call it, that integration of systems. Well, we have been doing this project for 11 years now and we have relied on solar cooking, firewood and biogas. Firewood's easy, it's cheap. Poor people all over the world use firewood, it's smoky, it's a fire hazard. People of course use charcoal in a lot of places but charcoal throws away 70% of the energy content of the wood. So you can't imagine the cities of the world cooking on wood, it's not going to happen. We do use biogas and we like biogas. For us, the biogas and the solar cooking are very well, they're complementary. So instead of having a big biogas digester that can do everything, we can have a moderately scaled biogas digester. We do a lot of our solar cooking, cooking with the solar and then the biogas because the solar, you have to use it when there's sunshine. There has to be some sunshine, but the biogas, they can store it and then use it tomorrow. So we hit a long cloudy period and we can adjust the feed rate going into our biogas digester. And when we need more biogas, we can push more food into the digester or back off on it when we know we've got good weather and can mostly rely on the solar cookers. So insulated solar electric cookers and biogas, I think that's what happens after industrialism is done. After the fossil fuel and the natural gas are all gone, this is how we could live gracefully and still have something resembling a civilization, which is a mixed bag at best, granted. But it's a lot better than firewood. Insulated solar electric cookers will spread. I'm quite sure of that. It's so cheap, so simple, so effective. It's the best solar cooker on the market. You can buy these expensive vacuum tube cookers. They're fine, the big dishes, they're hard to make. They only work in good weather. They work in bad weather or moderately bad weather. Pretty cheap to build, pretty easy. They will be mass manufactured within five years. That will happen. But even then, if you want to make it yourself, you can make them. I mean, that's pretty easy to make right there.