I think you guys are wildly overestimating the existing capacity for at-home power generation, complicated by failing to account for how much harder it would be to get said things in a post-apocalyptic scenario.
Solar cells are not the magic solution everyone thinks they are. Most of the advances of the last couple of decades have not resulted in more efficient solar cells, but actually slightly less efficient solar cells that are considerably less expensive to make. Most of the existing home solar setups absolutely reduce the power bill enough to justify their installation, but they are a far, far, far cry from being able to power your home by themselves.
Solar cells degrade. Manufacturers these days list a lifetime of 25 years for a solar panel. Admittedly, a 25-year-old solar panel will still give you electricity, just at a significantly reduced rate, but that rate will continue to reduce over time.
Sure, motors and generators work on the same principle, and yeah, you can use most electric motors as generators, but… that’s not going to get you anywhere near the kind of electricity you think it will. Your retrofitted ceiling fan? Will not generate enough electricity to power a ceiling fan. And that’s before you factor in the fact that wind doesn’t blow constantly, nor in the same direction.
Rooftop turbines— uhm. Those aren’t electrical generators. They’re thermal vents. And before you say “Well, I could hook motors up to them” ask yourself why it’s not a common practice NOW. (Answer: the amount of power generated would be very not much.)
Batteries die, and you are quite unlikely to have the expertise and the resources to make new ones.
“You can power a biodiesel engine with cooking oil!” Okay, but what are you going to do when you run out of cooking oil? The five-year average for an acre of soybeans will get you ~75 gallons of soy oil. This was a record year for corn– you could get ~36 gallons of corn oil per acre according to the national average. Except of course, those figures are national averages– and even then, they were planted by by machines you don’t have (that require fuel), harvested by machines you don’t have (that require fuel), and processed by equipment you don’t have (that requires electricity), and then there’s the fertilizer you don’t have and the pesticides you don’t have. Do you even have soil and weather that will grow these things? Do you have access to the kind of water you’ll need?
“I can scavenge–” That’s great if it’s like, just you left. But every other survivor out there is going to be trying to scavenge the same things you are. Can you get to it first and get it home without someone looting it off your corpse? And that’s assuming that what you’re looking for is even there to scavenge, because if there was enough warning the menards out on highway 3… might make an excellent shelter, once you get rid of the empty shelves and the stuff that no longer matters in a post-apocalyptic world (and most of THAT will probably have already been scavenged anyway)– again, assuming you got there first and can defend it.
The thing you’ve got to appreciate is that everything is interconnected, and in our current system, everything depends on fossil fuels and electricity. And as far as electricity goes, most of us don’t live in areas that are powered by alternative sources, and there’s not enough power using alternate sources to reach everywhere, so that’s fossil fuels, too. To make it worse, those alternate sources require maintenance– not just manpower, but parts. A hydroelectric turbine is a hardy piece of equipment, and there are turbines in operation right now that are 50 years old. But everything ELSE in a hydroelectric power station requires a lot more maintenance, which includes replacement parts, and even if those factories are in a powered region and there are still people in those factories (more on that in a minute), there’s still a matter of getting the parts to the power station when trucks don’t have fuel. Not to mention that when a hurricane or tornado tears through the area, those power lines are probably going to stay down, because repairing them depends on being able to get to them, and in many cases, replacing things that require fuel to transport– and factories to produce.
And none of this touches on food storage and transportation, the lack of which is probably going to kill most of the people who would have been in those factories, either through the not having, the having when someone else wanted it bad enough to kill, being mistaken for someone who has it, or being too near someone who had it when someone else wanted it.
It’s not a question of lack of reference materials– it’s the fact that electricity requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure to maintain production and transmission. And the things that require electricity? Require more infrastructure. There are no artisanal lightbulbs. You can’t DIY an electric refrigerator. They require parts and tools to repair.
All of this is an excellent reason to switch to non-fossil-fuel sources, but we have not done so yet. We should try very hard not to have another apocalypse until we do.
snowghoul
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
izzy806
origamiaround
annaxmalina
dededos
baratheonpilled
