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Low-impact energy


Repairing an off-grid wind and solar electrical system

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We recently blogged about a project: ‘rebuilding a home, and changing the surrounding fields from dead agricultural land into an oasis of natural life’ – as well as building an off-grid electrical and heating system. Here’s the next in the series – about repairing an off-grid wind and solar electrical system.

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£3.3 trillion fossil fuel subsidies

£3.3 trillion fossil fuels subsidies by G20 countries since Paris Climate Agreement

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All governments, including the UK, are telling us that they’re laser-focused on reducing carbon emissions. How are they doing? The chart above shows how they’re doing (source: Our World in Data). There’s a tiny flatline around 2020, but that’s because of the Covid lockdowns.

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the Big Solar Co-op

Jon Hallé: Introducing the Big Solar Co-op, and how you can help renewables and the co-op sector

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Today I’m speaking with Jon Hallé. We go back about 20 years. You ran courses on how to make biodiesel for Lowimpact, back in the early noughties, and you authored a book for us about making biodiesel, that sold about 15k copies in the first year. It caught the zeitgeist then, but of course diesel

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Help get solar onto more roofs in your community: Big Solar Co-op

How you can help get solar onto more roofs in your community: the Big Solar Co-op

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As it’s Community Energy Fortnight, I thought I’d have a word with my old mate Jon Hallé, who used to run Lowimpact’s ‘How to Make Biodiesel’ courses in the early noughties (and authored a book of the same title with us), and since then has gone on to found Sharenergy, who have helped over 100

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Jon Halle shares his thoughts about the future of community energy

What does the future look like for community energy? Interview with Jon Hallé of Sharenergy

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On the NonCorporate blog, we’ll be interviewing people who are out there building a non-corporate economy on the ground right now. We’ll be finding out exactly what they’re doing, what they’ve achieved, what problems they face and what they’d like to see change – and we’ll be asking them how we might co-ordinate the non-corporate

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Could all new houses be built with rammed earth and straw-bale?

A south-facing, rammed earth, straw-bale-insulated house doesn’t need heating; why aren’t all new houses built this way?

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Rowland ran rammed earth building courses with us for years. He said then that a C-shaped, rammed earth house with straw-bales for external insulation, and as much glass on the south side and as little glass on the north side as possible, wouldn’t need any heating. We wanted to catch up with him to learn

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