Bitch, Witch, Feminist

How to Build a Small Solar Power System - Low-tech Magazine

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Sand batteries are a significant advancement in clean energy technology.

Holy shit, this is incredible.

“This new facility can hold 100 MWh for about a month in summer and a week in winter.  That’s enough for the town of 5000 local residents.

TechCrunch estimates the Finnish battery’s costs are under $25 per kilowatt-hour, compared to around $115 for leading lithium-ion batteries.90% efficiency.It doesn’t use any “rare earths” or critical materials.  Instead using locally sourced, recyclable materials.Units are scalable and modular to fit different needs and uses.

Suits small towns (like the current facility) and large scale industrial uses.

13 meters tall and 15 meters wide. Independent of geography.  

No supply issues due to any geo-political problems.

March 25 2025, Dana O'Driscoll, AODA

Excerpt:

In my first post in this series, I talked about the global collapse that is happening and what to do about it–and as hard as it is, the reasons to keep up the hope and the vision for a better future and paradigm.  As I shared in my first post, what we need to do now, as things are collapsing, is to lean into and create the world we want to create.  But how to do we actually get there? One step at a time, my friends.  In my first post, I outlined the situation as I see it and then shared some resources to help orient our minds and mentally prepare and cultivate mental resilience.   This post assumes that you’ve read the first post, and also, that you are feeling like you are in a place to take a few more steps.  And so today’s topic is: building a good library!

Read the full post on The Druid's Garden.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7981801-putting-food-by

A rain garden is a shallow planted depression designed to hold water until it soaks into the soil. A key feature of eco-friendly landscape design, rain gardens—also known as bio-infiltration basins—are gaining credibility and converts as an important solution to stormwater runoff and pollution. Here we’ll show you how to make a rain garden fit handsomely into a landscape and still fulfill all of its environmental functions.

Refer to the list of links below to guide you through calculating garden depth, garden size, placement, and plant selection.

University of Nebraska NebGuide 1 – Rain Garden Design for Homeowners

University of Nebraska NebGuide 2 – Plant Selection for Rain Gardens in Nebraska

University of Nebraska NebGuide 3 – Installing Rain Gardens in Your Yard

Backyard Farmer Video – Rain Gardens and Rain Barrels

We've prepared a zine version of our text, "How to Organize an Assembly: Preparing to Respond in an Era of Disasters and Despotism."

https://crimethinc.com/zines/how-to-organize-an-assembly

Please print these out and distribute them!

Perhaps because we’ve become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we’ve forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It’s hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health.

[...]

As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don’t grasp its importance, and we don’t appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live.

Bottom trawling has been banned in an area off the Sussex Coast supporting rare chalk reef and sandstone reef ecosystems. With this new law, nearly 30% of inshore waters around Sussex are protected from trawling.

In other positive UK ocean news, a recent study found Scottish seabed ecosystems can see a dramatic rebound after receiving trawling protections. After a decade of protection, these areas had three times as much marine live and twice as many species present. Intact and undisturbed seabed ecosystems can also function as carbon sinks.

From the article:

Researchers at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Brazil have conducted a 2-year testing on second-life polycrystalline solar modules deployed at their campus and have found that they can still ensure “stable” behavior, with performance consistent with annual degradation rates of up to 0.44%. “Despite the many aspects making it a difficult sell, circular economy and sustainability issues might work in favor of second-life photovoltaic modules, due to the huge amount of panels that will become available with the exponential growth this technology is undergoing for nearly a decade,” the research's lead author, Ricardo Rüther, told pv magazine. 

This is so cool! They found that solar panels over two decades old still retain 87-88% of their original functionality.

How to Build a Kilowatt Wind Turbine for Under $30

This is a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine which uses wind energy to drive things like an alternator/generator for producing electricity, or air and water pumps for cooling, irrigation and similar.

The turbine uses the 35-40% mechanically efficient Lenz2 lift+drag design. It is made almost entirely from scrap materials, and should cost about $15-$30 for the six vane version, which can be made by two people in four hours without much effort. 

The three vane version has been successfully survival tested to 80 km/h sustained winds and the six vane version to 105 km. Both will do more, but exactly how much has not yet been ascertained. The current longest running version has been up since early 2014, through reasonable storms, with no noticeable wear and tear as of yet.

Read more…

It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.

Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.

In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.

Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:

Making It by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen [book] (The big crunchy household DIY book; includes every level of self-sufficiency from making your own toothpaste and laundry soap to setting up raised beds to butchering a chicken. Authors are explicitly left-leaning.)

Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust [book] (A guide to simple home repair tasks, written with rentals in mind; very compassionate and accessible language.)

How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis [book] (The book about cleaning and housework for people who get overwhelmed by cleaning and housework, based on the premise that messiness is not a moral failing; disability and neurodivergence friendly; genuinely changed how I approach cleaning tasks.)

Gardening

Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale [book] (Really great introduction to urban gardening; explicitly discusses renter-friendly garden designs in small spaces; lots of DIY solutions using recycled materials; note that the author lives in England, so check if plants are invasive in your area before putting them in the ground.)

Country/Rural Living:

Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler [book] (Memoir of a lesbian who lives and works on a rural farm in Maine with her wife; does a good job of showing what it's like to be queer in a rural space; CW for mentions of domestic violence, infidelity/cheating, and internalized homophobia)

"Debunking the Off-Grid Fantasy" by Maggie Mae Fish [video essay] (Deconstructs the off-grid lifestyle and the myth of self-reliance)

Sewing/Mending:

Annika Victoria [YouTube channel] (No longer active, but their videos are still a great resource for anyone learning to sew; check out the beginner project playlist to start. This is where I learned a lot of what I know about sewing.)

Make, Sew, and Mend by Bernadette Banner [book] (A very thorough written introduction to hand-sewing, written by a clothing historian; lots of fun garment history facts; explicitly inclusive of BIPOC, queer, and trans sewists.)

Sustainability/Land Stewardship

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer [book] (Most of you have probably already read this one or had it recommended to you, but it really is that good; excellent example of how traditional animist beliefs -- in this case, indigenous American beliefs -- can exist in healthy symbiosis with science; more philosophy than how-to, but a great foundational resource.)

Wild Witchcraft by Rebecca Beyer [book] (This one is for my fellow witches; one of my favorite witchcraft books, and an excellent example of a place-based practice deeply rooted in the land.)

Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"

Note: the "crunchy to alt-right pipeline" is a term used to describe how white supremacists and other far right groups use "crunchy" spaces (i.e., spaces dedicated to farming, homemaking, alternative medicine, simple living/slow living, etc.) to recruit and indoctrinate people into their movements. Knowing how this recruitment works can help you recognize it when you do encounter it and avoid being influenced by it.

"The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline" by Kathleen Belew [magazine article] (Good, short introduction to this issue and its history.)

Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby (I feel like I need to give a content warning: this book contains explicit descriptions of racism, white supremacy, and Neo Nazis, and it's a very difficult read, but it really is a great, in-depth breakdown of the role women play in the alt-right; also explicitly addresses the crunchy to alt-right pipeline.)

From the article:

On his return home, Schreiber wanted to spread the word. The next year he held his first wind turbine-building workshop, founding PureSelfMade, a nonprofit to teach people how to make their own wind turbines from scratch. Ever since, Schreiber, who returns to Scoraig every year to see Piggott and other friends, has been offering courses, usually for groups of between eight and 20 people, on how to make wind turbines from scratch, including rotor blades and custom-made generators, and setting up the basic electrics. Although outputs vary depending on locations, most turbines could power several appliances, but not an entire home. Often they are connected to batteries to store energy for when it’s needed. In the context of volatile energy prices, the pressing need to shift to renewable power, the limits of centralized electricity systems and the risks of relying on foreign supply chains, there’s growing demand for communities to become energy self-sufficient. Until now, so-called “small wind” has been a relatively overlooked local provider. But for Schreiber, the “DIY approach” brings with it a level of reassurance and freedom. “Instead of big industry, I prefer the more grassroots way,” he says. “I like the idea of decentralization. With a lot of chaos in the world, it’s better to be self-sufficient, to have a reliable energy system at home.”

A rain garden is a shallow planted depression designed to hold water until it soaks into the soil. A key feature of eco-friendly landscape design, rain gardens—also known as bio-infiltration basins—are gaining credibility and converts as an important solution to stormwater runoff and pollution. Here we’ll show you how to make a rain garden fit handsomely into a landscape and still fulfill all of its environmental functions.

Refer to the list of links below to guide you through calculating garden depth, garden size, placement, and plant selection.

University of Nebraska NebGuide 1 – Rain Garden Design for Homeowners

University of Nebraska NebGuide 2 – Plant Selection for Rain Gardens in Nebraska

University of Nebraska NebGuide 3 – Installing Rain Gardens in Your Yard

Backyard Farmer Video – Rain Gardens and Rain Barrels