03261 Design Challenge: Your Personal Energy Plan

There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance. — R. Buckminster Fuller

In permaculture, we learn design by actually doing design. The purpose of the Design Challenges document in each of the sections is to give you practice doing design. Each challenge document has some small projects that you can work that will help you to develop design skills. Never forget that none of these challenges exists in isolation. Each is an aspect of the holistic design for your life that is the iPermie goal!

Your Personal Energy Plan is an important component of the permaculture design for your life.

As you work your way through your energy inventory, you will learn how about the kinds and amounts of energy you use for your present lifestyle.

Your challenge is to determine how to do things differently in your life so that you use less fossil fuel energy and how you can replace all or part of the remaining requirements you have for energy with renewable sources. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Many people, when they start to think about energy conservation, want to run out and spend a bunch of money for solar PV panels. Or if they don’t have much money, they dream of being able to buy solar PV. We do this because we are all conditioned against admitting that we have an energy problem. We want an Energy Fairy to fly in and save us from the consequences of our energy follies.

This is a staging mistake. Solar PV is a fine goal but it isn’t the first goal.

There Ain’t No Such Thing As The Energy Fairy — TANSTATEF.

Renewable energy tools, like solar PV, are fine and necessary items in our designs but we have to understand up front that their net energy is much less than fossil fuels. So we must first learn how to live with less energy. Then we can learn how to live with renewable energy systems.

Your energy plan is a design for how you will deal with this issue for the rest of your life. The energy situation will not get better during your lifetime and the lives of your children and grand children. It will get steadily worse for all of your life. To go into this without a personal energy plan invites disaster.

Take this one step at a time.

One sure road to failure is to try to do too much, too fast. So stage your response. First things first. Then come the second things. Etc.

Focus on your own personal demand destruction.

As you proceed through your design process — you constantly ask —

Can I do this with no fossil fuel energy?

If the answer to that is “No” — how can I do this with less fossil fuel energy?

Design your interdependencies so you can live energy conservative.

You don’t live in isolation. You live in community. How can your community help you to live energy conservative?

As you radically reduce your demand, you can begin to look for renewable energy resources.

If your utility offers wind generated electricity, sign up for it, even if it costs more. It’s the right thing to do. If you live in a dormitory or other campus housing, get your school to sign up for wind generated electricity. Use solar battery chargers to recharge your small batteries.

Write the plan.

This is a written plan. It has goals and points of accountability, so you know where your destination, the route for your journey, and how to recognize the mileposts and destinations on your energy itinerary.