 I'm Alexis Ziegler, this is Living Energy Farm. We've been here for 10 years. We started this project with the idea to build a community that would operate without fossil fuel, but to keep it cheap and simple and durable. We use the phrase Amish without the patriarchy. I had built a number of solar electric systems, off-grid solar electric systems before we built Living Energy Farm. And then whether that's usually done is with a big battery bank and you've got an inverter and charge controllers and all this electronics. Basically, they try to make off-grid power into something that acts like on-grid power. And what we discovered is really shockingly simple is that we could connect DC motors straight to a solar panel or a set of solar panels. Anywhere in the world where there's a grid, it runs on AC current. And the reason for that is because AC current, high-voltage AC, alternating current, will travel hundreds of miles down a wire with very little loss. So that's the big advantage of AC. If you're gonna power New York City or Paris with a single big steam boiler, which is the only way you could do it in the late 1800s when they first started doing this, it had to be AC. The big disadvantage of AC is all the AC equipment can only tolerate about 10% voltage variation, but not a lot of change. So direct current, it's drawn as a straight line, it's like a straight electrical pressure. That's what comes out of batteries and photovoltaic panels. The weakness of DC, direct current, is it can go a few hundred feet. We push it five or 600 feet, but it can't go a few hundred miles. The big advantage is that an industrial DC motor can tolerate 500% voltage variation without damage. So when you connect a DC motor directly to a solar panel and it gets bright and then it gets cloudy, the motor speeds up a little bit, it slows down a little bit, the sun goes down, the motor turns off, and it doesn't hurt the motor. You can't do anything like that with AC equipment. The AC equipment has to be overpowered to work. So if you've got a one horsepower AC motor and you're trying to power it with an inverter and a battery set or grid power, you have to have one and a half or two horsepower worth of supply because the motor has a start surge, it has to have some buffer in there because it has to have perfect solid power. The DC systems we have are the opposite. It's really, I never would have guessed that it's really shocking. If you have a one horsepower DC supply, enough solar panels to put out one horsepower in electricity and that's about a kilowatt, those are close to the same, you can load it down with two horsepower, three horsepower and the motors just share the electricity and the motors are just copper wire and magnets. We're not talking about any fancy electronic circuitry here. Just when you turn on another motor, they all adjust speed and then they're running. Now there are limits. At some point I'll turn on a motor and it's like, okay, well, I've got too many motors and I'll turn that one off. On a cloudy day, I can run two motors. On a sunny day, I can run seven or eight. So there's some adjustment. If I'm gonna cut firewood and I wanna run a big motor, I'll wait until the sunny day. I don't cut firewood when it's raining. Who wants to work in the rain? Who wants to work in the dark? So there is some adjustment but we don't need the electrical grid. So the daylight drive, like I said, sun comes up, motor runs, sun goes down, motor quits. So we grind green, we cut firewood, I cut steel during the day and then I sleep at night. That's the biggest piece of our electricity use. So it's a high voltage system. It's 180 volts. So six times 30, 30 volt panels in series, you get 180 volts. And then we have a lot of little systems. Like I pointed out the hot water system, the little PV panel that runs that hot water set is an independent daylight drive system. There's actually, if you count each little independent system, it's nine different systems. The refrigerator is the same way. One panel runs a DC refrigerator. So we took a lightning strike once on the refrigerator. It damaged a little piece of electronics but it doesn't shut the whole system down. It means the whole system's fail-proof, basically. The idea is to use your high-grade energy intelligently. So something that's warm, you might think of that as low-grade energy. Electricity is very high-grade energy. So what we try to do is we try to store energy in forms other than electricity and we try to leverage our energy to take energy whenever we can take a high-grade energy and use it to capture a large volume of low-grade energy. So our main house, well, our house and our kitchen, they're separate buildings here. The whole south roof has tilted up, the face the sun in the wintertime and it's got glass, cheap hot air collectors. And then we have our daylight drive blower. The sun comes up, the blower turns on while it's generating hot air in the collector and then it pulls that hot air down and instead of using little rocks under the floor, we just use bigger rocks about grapefruit size. We set those rocks in place and the air just blows through the rocks. So all day long, we're pulling heat off the roof and putting it in the floor and the air just goes around and around. So the next day, if it's cold and cloudy, we still have heat in the floor. So we stored a bunch of thermal energy. Our water system, instead of having a big electrical storage system that can run a water pump at night, so you can take a shower at night, we have somewhat larger water tanks and the water tanks are not free but the long-term cost, the water tank lasts forever. So you spend some hundreds of dollars divided by 10 people that comes up to a very cheap cost and you pump up the tank at night so you're storing water instead of storing electricity and that water is what you use at night. The hot water is the same thing. We have the daylight drive pump, the solar hot water collectors during the day, it comes on, sun comes up, it generates the heat, it stores that heat in the tank and that heat is there for days to come. So we don't have to store energy there. The refrigeration is the same thing. We have a refrigerator, now that's a commercial product, we didn't invent it, but still, it's a really well-insulated refrigerator with a DC motor because solar panels, solar electric panels generate DC current, direct current. So during the day, it chills down and it stays cold, it's well-insulated, we have a bunch of food in there and then it just stays cold. So we can store heat, we can store water, we can store coldness or the absence of heat all without storing electricity. The real principle here is not making the energy come to you, it's you going to the energy. So as a result of that, our battery bank for the whole community, and we've got a community of 10 or 12 people here, is about a 10th as big as a normal off-grid house and then we get to use really good batteries, which are nickel-iron batteries. They're a good battery technology. They last for many decades, but they're not portable. And then we try to do a really good job on the conservation side. So we use straw bale. There's other ways to do good insulation. I love straw bales. You can do a cheap frame out of whatever materials you have and then you lean the straw bales out, get 18-inch thick walls. Well, you need really good thick walls and then you're gonna put good insulation in the ceiling. We don't have crazy roof lines. No, we keep it, make sure it works well. Make sure it works well and then we try to make it look pretty. So what I call context, they're doing the right thing in the right place, which mostly means sharing resources and integrating systems. You get that right. That's the biggest piece. And then you get the conservation piece right. Then the renewable energy, the DC microgrid we call it, that's the daylight drive and the batteries and all of that works really, really well. If you invert that and try to make renewable, quote-unquote energy, meet, you know, pour it into leaky, privately owned houses or, you know, individually occupied houses and gonna pour electricity into battery cars and all those batteries, we're gonna do more harm than good. So that's basically the design of how we've laid it out here. I've been shocked that it hasn't spread more quickly, although I think it is spreading, but the grid suits consumers really well. You know, you can go to the store and you can buy a new DVD player and a big screen TV and an air conditioning unit and a bigger air conditioning unit. And I often make the analogy to homemade food, right? I mean, the United States has a terrible problem with people eating a lot of, you know, cheesy pizza and too much meat and too many dairy products. And what I'm bringing to you is whole wheat homemade bread, homegrown beans and vegetables and food. Well, if you want that food, it's like, yes, thank you for bringing that to me. But if you think greasy cheese corporate pizza is what's food, then my homemade food doesn't appeal. So it's the same with energy systems. If you've been convinced that AC power is what you want and that can be morally purified by putting up a bunch of solar panels, then that's what you want. And my homegrown energy and my homegrown food is not what appeals.