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Are water wheels/mills solarpunk? (Also solarpunk workshop design discussion) (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by JacobCoffinWrites to c/technology

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I know dams can mess up habitats, cutting fish and eels off from their full range or from their spawn points. But I'm also a big fan of using energy in the form we receive it (use solar light/heat for machining with focusing mirrors and lenses, use kinetic energy from windmills or water wheels to drive tools industrial revolution style, skip the lossy conversion into electricity and back again. I've got a workshop design in mind, what can I do to make a water wheel more okay?

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[–] JacobCoffinWrites 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I’m including a really rough sketch of the workshop I’m picturing, a sort of mix of water wheel driven retrofitted power tools, but centered around this big solar collector and a fresnel lens setup for a solar plasma cutter, welder, sinterer using a design kind of like an observatory with a big rotating dome on the top that can be aimed at the sun to pipe down a steady sunlight deathray. I’m not sure yet about the mirror design, and any other uses for the space as shown. Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas.

I figure this place is multi purpose, maybe a makerspace, maybe a small factory co-op, but mostly doing metal work. I don’t have a specific purpose in mind yet but it’d be nice if it reinforced those themes. I love workshops, so I think this will be a lot of fun. and I really loved those diagrams of mills from the industrial revolution in our midle school history texts, I’d like to take some of those technologies and reimagine them with a modern approach to workplace safety.

My instinct was to make the lean-to on the left a blacksmith forge, with a firewall separating it from the main structure, but coal or charcoal are probably not what I’d like to use (though charcoal probably isn’t out altogether as it can be kind of green). A solar forge would be an interesting challenge, it might have to work like a schieffer parabolic solar cooker, with the reflector shooting concentrated light through a hole in the wall, as the interior needs to be pretty dark so you can see the color of the metal as you work it. Could be all kinds of other things too.

[–] Charliebeans 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For some reason I really love these kind of sketches!

[–] JacobCoffinWrites 4 points 1 year ago

The cutaway diagram style? I really enjoy those

[–] poVoq 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can get energy out of a lot of slow running water with a small elevation difference, or a small amount of fast flowing water with a high elevation drop.

The latter is usually very low impact on the natural surrounding and ideal for running a small turbine for electricity production.

I don't think people will bother with mechanical power transmission water wheels if they can go the route of electricity production with power-tools.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites 3 points 1 year ago

The small amount flowing/dropping fast seems great if it fits the site (and what do you know, I'm drawing the site so it will!) and electricity production probably makes the most sense. Power tools are incredibly useful and quite plentiful as-is. I'll admit the mechanical transmission to the big standup tools idea is partly an attempt to find ways to avoid needing batteries, as I see them as a limiting factor and eventual waste, but as this is a static location, the people using it can certainly afford to build a bunch of simple, less efficient ones using less-environmentally-damaging materials, so that would be less of a concern. The other aspect was that old tools would lend themselves to it really well - most of my benchtop or standup power tools are old enough that the motor is just bolted on to the outside, so powering it with a mill would be almost as simple as running a belt to the new source of motion (granted, I'd want to install mechanical cutoffs between the main belt and the tool so the machines can be disconnected quickly in case of an accident.

[–] stabby_cicada 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Absolutely, they can be. I'm a big believer that solarpunk means appropriate technology, not just high technology. In some places electric power and solar panels are the most appropriate, sustainable, environmentally sound, and decentralized way to make power. In other cases it might be hydro. Maybe a million solar panels on the roofs of a million houses is the best way to power a town; maybe, when all the equities are taken into consideration, building a single dam and hydroelectric power plant has less impact on the environment than manufacturing and installing a million solar panels. It has to be case by case.

I don't know much about old school water wheels, but I can tell you that changing an environment is not the same as damaging it. Beavers turn streams into ponds and transform environments far more dramatically then dropping a water wheel into a river does, and they're still part of nature. You are part of nature, and as a tool using, home constructing animal, you have a right to use your natural abilities to modify your environment. And you have a duty, of course, to use your brain and think about the impact your modifications will have on your specific environment.

I can also tell you that when you talk about using kinetic energy directly from a natural source, you have to factor in transportation and storage. Taking the example of a water wheel used to mill grain: if you have to ship grain to the mill and ship flour out again, at what distance from the mill is it no longer efficient to transport? How much storage do you need for grain and flour on site? What happens when there's a drought - does the grain just sit there in storage? And what happens when there's a flood - how long can the grain be stored at the riverbank before it's damaged by moisture? And what do you do when there's no grain - the power produced by the water wheel can't be moved, so you have to repurpose it or it goes to waste, right?

A water wheel that provides kinetic energy is centralized power, just as much as a coal-fired power plant is - just instead of using a network of wires to transmit power to other locations, you have to use a network of roads to transmit materials to and from the location where energy is produced. But while a power plant can transmit electricity hundreds of miles away so location is not an issue, the water wheel's energy can only be accessed in a very small physical location, which means it can only really do one thing at a time and people have to line up around the block to mill their grain like they did with windmills on windy days in the 1600s.

Or think about the sunshine death ray in your diagram - if I'm reading it right, one person can use that death ray at a time. If the sun is providing more energy than the user needs, the excess is wasted. If the sun is providing less energy, the user can't do what they want to do. And you can't split off the power to share it with multiple users without building new death rays, which drastically limits the production efficiency of the makerspace. The studio you're designing is for one, or a handful, of people doing work in a deliberately inefficient fashion presumably for artistic or aesthetic or ideological reasons.

And I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or wrong. There's room in solarpunk for the joy of inefficiency and of doing things in completely analog fashion.

There's something sacred in taking the power of the universe into your own hands and manipulating it directly in an act of glorious creation.

But we can't run a society on water wheels anymore. Solarpunk demands sustainability, and a sustainable society needs to use its resources efficiently, and water wheels really aren't an efficient use of rivers or river banks.

(I appreciate simple, old-fashioned, analog technology, for both practical and ethical reasons. But the big reason solarpunk was dubbed solarpunk is that solar panels are practically miracle technology for sustainability and decentralization. They're made out of silicon, they last for decades, they're modular, they're portable, they require no supporting infrastructure whatsoever, and they produce free energy anywhere and everywhere the sun shines.)

[–] JacobCoffinWrites 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Agreed about the appropriate technology for the job. That's one of the reasons I think it's very much worth considering all sources of power, but also reconsidering some ways we've industrialized around profit motives and while ignoring externalities. A lot of technologies were in use recently (last 100 years) that might be a better fit for a more solarpunk world, but were dropped because they weren't as fast at making product, or because modern power or fuel are so cheap. I'm currently studying up on metal smelting and concrete production to see which designs seem easiest to adapt to a to a society that prioritizes minimizing externalities (like pollution, greenhouse gas, habitat destruction) over generating as much wealth as possible.

And I think there are some cool old designs with potential (and, as always, tradeoffs). For example, in all the scenes I've done and have planned, you'll see cable-powered streetcars and trains, rather than battery-powered electric busses. I'm not against batteries by any means, but they're a limited resource. Streetcars worked fine for decades long before batteries were anywhere near efficient enough to move a vehicle, and having the cars powered directly by grid the means more batteries available for other tasks, or simply less need to destroy habitats mining for the materials to make the kind of maximum-efficient batteries needed for onboard vehicles (and fewer to recycle after they've been used and reused long past the end of their functional life).

I think analog technologies, like water wheels and solar furnaces and solar cookers might also fit this niche. One of the things I really like about the solar furnace designs, is that they're so simple. Mirrors, framework, and established formulas for overall shape, and you can produce incredible heat - up to thousands of degrees. The materials are commonly available, and require very little tech base to produce or assemble, and they can take some of the highest-resource-consuming tasks off the grid. They're not as reliable as electric power (and electric power from solar isn't as reliable as from fossil fuels yet) and that's a trade-off, but the right combination of technologies, and some adjustment of expectations and schedules, could significantly drop the overall requirements for the collection and storage and distribution of electricity. Water wheels might be also be able to lighten the load from industry/manufacturing on the grid.

I should probably have made it clear that this scene, if I do it, definitely isn't a factory. It's a workshop, and they tend to be much more generalized spaces. I've spent pretty much my whole life in workshops, and I've never been inside a factory, so I won't be trying to depict a solarpunk assembly line, though I do believe we'll need them. I will say that for the spaces I've been, from personal workshops to makerspaces, to teaching classrooms, it's very rare to find more than one of each large machine, usually both for cost and physical space limitations. This isn't as efficient as a factory line with each person doing one task, but cottage industries can be incredibly flexible and powerful. Just look at the production of military equipment in homes and garages in almost every country in WWII, or if you want a more recent and positive example, the way the 3d printing community stepped in and provided an instant-turnaround communal mass production of face shields for medical professionals during COVID. In the first few weeks, while industry was talking about how long it would take to re-tool and step up production to meet demand, regular people churned out thousands of the things and filled that gap. And because the makers were themselves distributed, physically getting the goods to the people who needed them took less travel, mostly using volunteer distribution networks.

As for useful work, one of the cool things about the death ray is that once you've got the structure built/modified, and the focal point established, it can do all kinds of jobs. So far I've seen Fresnel lenses burn through steel, melt aluminum, and sinter sand into glass, and that's without the mirrors collecting additional light. With the right setup, you could basically roll/drag different tools into the workspace depending on how you wanted to use the beam of sunlight. With computer control of the mirrors and shutters, you could dial in how much power you want, or regulate against inconsistent light if you need less than max and clouds are passing overhead. In addition to the tasks I mentioned above, you could use it to heat metal quickly to bend it like a forge, or use it for other kinds of crucibles/materials, if you can dial in the temperature they require. And if nobody has any projects cued up for the day, you could roll a steam-boiler-based generator under it (likely you'd want this to be taller than the focal point so the light would be better distributed and less likely to overheat a specific spot) and charge the facilities' batteries.

[–] schmorpel 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Old water wheels did not dam up the entire river. A part of the river would be guided into a separate channel, where the waterwheel would be mounted. The remaining river would be undisturbed. I've seen this near a Portuguese river - not used anymore but I still met the old miller who had used it in her lifetime.

I also really love ram pumps, they can be installed in similar ways.

Old irrigation system use mad systems of channels to guide water along hillsides.

Might go into more detail later, need to tend to the animals.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks! That would be a much better way to do things. In the woods around here it's easiest to find old mills because the ruins of their dams are still exposed in the rivers (celarholes are a close second) so I'd kind of built this assumption in my head that dams are the default way to build water pressure for a mill without realizing it. It seems like without that, small scale mills are a lot more reasonable for small off-grid projects. And thanks! Any info is appreciated, though I'll do research before starting a photobash.