I would go for a Pi - it has a power draw that is tiny compared to used PCs from previous ages. It is likely that the difference is significant (e.g. 150 W vs. 5 W).
Power consumption is especially relevant for servers, less so for computers used for brief periods of time.
Well, one bad thing is that existing cities would need to be re-designed. It will take resources and decades of time. If we are patient, there is nothing bad there.
A potentially bad side effect: if planners take the easiest route and make the city ultra-dense and ultra-high, we get a vulnerable city that doesn't function if something is wrong with the infrastructure. People are, after all, known for taking easy routes (which may later prove hard for others).
Myself, I live in the countryside and don't like top-down planning at all, so I can't comment more. To me, the experience is typically: "can I build a road here? - no you can't", "can I make a thermal store? no you can't", I'm sure they will eventually tell me I'm producing solar energy the wrong way too... I know that things are different in cities because the threshold to disturbing others is tiny, but I don't think about it much - it is not for me.
Yep. It doesn't even have to be very deep. Helsinki is using some old "oil caves" (oil storage caverns excavated into granite, depth 80 m) to store some 10 GWh of heat for extraction during winter. Apparently, granite is an excellent insulator. They pump the heat from sewage (cooling the sewage and heating the cavern) during summer...
...but that wouldn't be classified as natural geothermal, and not primary production but seasonal storage.
But it works. But only on large scale. I ran the calculations for a private little project and the results looked bad. With anything related to thermal storage, it has to be big (energy loss scales with the square of volume, storage with the cube of volume).
Also, new drilling tech (maser drilling, if it ever becomes real enough) could bring geothermal energy to boring and non-volcanic places like continental Europe.
Interesting article, thank you. :)
I wonder if it can be overridden with education or experience. It would be interesting to see if behaviour is influenced by: a) training for a crisis or b) experiencing a crisis.
Good quality wind is high up.
Installing a turbine on a house is technically problematic (a mast is simpler to deal with), it is hard to maintain there and can convey noise into the house.
The advise about having a few acres of flat land as a minimum - it is sensible, unless other options beside wind cannot be chosen.
I suspect the compound isn't necessarily the same as in Asparagopsis taxiformis (one of the weeds that work), but the similarity is on another level of abstraction - it influences the gut microbiome in the same way, favouring certain bacterial species and metabolic paths over others (because bacteria often have a choice of "how to eat" - which chemical reactions to perform).
Can't be sure with the limited information published, though.
I wish I knew, but I can't answer. Intuition suggests that they didn't run the experiment with grazing cows, because then they wouldn't have an overview of what was eaten, and how much was eaten - and measuring would be far more difficult.
Now this is where a battery alarm (I use a type meant for model planes) and an active balancer (made for this battery chemistry, of course - I use cheap balancers bought on EBay from China) will help.
Since my household has a type of batteries which can burn nastily and they're not in a bunker, I have two autonomous battery alarms and two autonomous balancers. To everyone using batteries from a old electric vehicle, I recommend the same: don't overdischarge and don't overcharge, both do harm in their own way. Have a system that either notifies or takes automatic action to prevent this.
True. But also (not necessarily in that order) carbon monoxide, incompletely combusted hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. Trying to figure it out, I stumbled on a Wikipedia article about it here.
They have a quantity analysis based on the average US car, saying 35 kg of hydrocarbons per year, 261 kilograms of carbon monoxide per year, and 17 kilograms of nitrogen oxides...
...alongside 5 tons of carbon dioxide (my driving scenario of 2400 liters per 4 years was not based on averages or the US, but my own consumption before going electric). On the other hand, this kind of driving will probably also increase the amount of tyre pollution - these average cars will be changing tyres more frequently.
Thanks for the T-pipe tip, it seems I should try it.
I also use rainwater, but I never drink it - only wash things with it. It goes through 3 filters (fine sieve to remove macroscopic objects, antibacterial coarse filter and fine filter). The collection tank has viewports to check how bad the sediment situation is. Typically the sediment situation is is bad - rainwater is not without nutrients. I use a suction hose with a filter attached to clean the sediment, but do it seldom, so I bring drinking water with a canister.
Since the same tank acts as a short-term thermal store during heating season, it contains stainless steel heating elements at the bottom (excess solar energy gets dumped into the water tank when batteries are full). The heaters go a long way towards keeping it sterile in winter - but in summer, they are off and bacteria can do their things.