Flying at altitudes of over 80,000 ft, they are above weather patterns and above commercial air traffic. Solar-powered drones will function like low flying satellites to provide Internet, Wi-Fi, and telecom services to people in remote places on earth. Last year Google bought a solar-powered drone company, Titan Aerospace, at roughly the same time that Facebook completed their purchase of a similar company, Ascenta. Since then a number of competitors have surfaced including Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Powervault, Samsung SDI, LG Chem, and the Saft Group.īattery systems like this will enable homeowners to keep plenty of power in reserve for all of the cloudy and rainy days when solar doesn’t work, and the super still times when the wind doesn’t blow. In February, Elon Musk announced plans to enter the home energy storage business as a natural offshoot of his Tesla battery business. The missing piece has been an efficient way to store the power from one day to the next. Alternative forms of power generation have been taking place in homes in literally every country in the world for many years. Solar and wind companies have been growing exponentially over the past decade. These advances will give us the tools for creating each of the inputs without wires, pipes, or infrastructure, and managing the outputs without polluting the surroundings. The innovations include energy storage for the home, solar-powered Internet drones, and atmospheric water harvesters.Īs some point, most of these structures will be designed and produced with some form of 3D printing in a matter of hours. Three recent innovations are causing a shift in design thinking, making it far easier for people to become part of the off-grid living movement. The inputs are energy, water, and media (Internet), and the outputs are sewage and trash. Writing a column like this is often an exercise in connecting the dots, and from my perspective, there are three primary inputs and two primary outputs for off-grid living. Living in rustic conditions, chopping wood, hauling water, hand washing clothes, and poor lighting after dark made the lifestyle changes necessary to make the shift rather severe. Until recently, the off-grid living community has been focused on energy-related issues. In Alaska, they’ve already figured out how to turn every one of their 3 million lakes into a landing strip, so transportation is far less of an issue than power, heat, lights, water, and communications. Having just returned from a trip to Alaska, it occurred to me that most of the 660,000 sq miles of this beautiful state will never be habitable until a more complete off-grid solution is found.
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