The vision of Living Energy Farm is to be a community that is food and energy self-sufficient. We are off-grid, and we are putting together the means to run our farm without fossil fuel. Our intent is for LEF to operate on a modest, globally applicable, renewable energy budget. We have found that this global perspective differentiates us from most other projects working on sustainable technologies.
In starting LEF, our plan was to pull together renewable energy technologies already in existence rather than “re-inventing the wheel.” We have found that we cannot buy a lot of what we need, and thus we are having to build some of the tools and machines we need. We live, day by day, off-grid and (mostly) without fossil fuel. We experience the benefits and limitations of our own ideas every day. We have assembled a set of documents to explain how our unique, off-grid systems operate. We suggest you review “Longterm Integrated Village Energy (LIVE) — community energy systems that make centralized power grids unnecessary” before proceeding to the other documents. That will give you an overview of the design process at LEF.
We have been pleasantly surprised by how well our DC Microgrid has worked. We have found a much, much better way to live off-grid. The widespread adoption of the tools developed at LEF could widen access to energy services for people all over the world while radically decreasing our environmental footprint. We are trying to spread these tools far and wide, and looking for support in that work.