Energy Barn with 15kw solar photovoltaic array.

Design Ideals

At LivingFuture's Teal Farm, we have designed, engineered, and partially completed an energy system that demonstrates one of our orienting convictions: that all human enterprise--including energy-production--can ultimately serve the health of living systems.

The Teal Farm energy system has been designed to produce clean heat and electricity indefinitely, and to dynamically adapt to unpredictable future climatic conditions, including the next century of global warming.

Our system combines multiple renewable sources and integrates them with a specially-engineered control system so that power is consistent throughout Vermont's changing seasons. This design hints at what future energy production might look like: interlaced, ‘smart microgrids’ that integrate multiple, clean renewable sources over larger regions, amplify efficiencies and stablity, and are far less expensive over time.

While our result is by no means perfect, simply reaching for such a ideal goal has infused our team with creative purpose. Much in the way that the Apollo Space Project ignited the frontier of human imagination, super-charged a culture of innovation, and expanded perception of our physical place in the cosmos, imagining a perpetual energy system comprised of networked renewable sources can open another kind of frontier: the real possibility that our civilizations' core energy systems can support –rather than destroy– the future of all life, and spark even greater opportunities for conscience-based design.


Watershed with wind tower

System Features

The Teal Farm energy system reflects and captures the abundant natural resources in the Huntington River Watershed. By patterning our system on the natural flows of sun and materials, our system establishes a new prototype for how electricity and heat can be created.

The system's design is integral by nature; it combines sun, wind, water, wood, and (back-up) biodiesel to meet—and ultimately exceed—our electricity and heating needs. The completed system will run a ten-acre permaculture orchard (including food processing and storage), will electrify and eventually heat the farm's four buildings, two which were recently constructed to express the highest aesthetics and standards of living-systems design (30,000 sq. ft. of conditioned space), and, in time, will support plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles for staff and farm use.

We engineered this very ideal system using the following guidelines: rely on present-day solar energy (this includes wind, as solar radiation creates wind currents); anticipate future conditions (including climate change, energy costs and availability) integrate renewable technologies to capture abundance and magnify resilience; invent and deploy sophisticated control technologies to work with the complexity of the energy eco-system; adapt buildings to maximize efficiency, and carefully balance energy use with energy generation. These guidelines as well as the unique control technology we developed can be adapted to many different locations. While experimental, we hope to show that such a micro-system can be implemented on a larger, more distributed scale, integrating multiple and varied sources of generation (individual households) into one community-wide system.




Creative Data Expression

An essential aspect of the Teal Farm project involves the artistic, kinesthetic, practical, scientific, and transformational representation of its energy system via digital media. When complete, our creative data expression will reveal the systems themselves and illustrate how they work to a wide audience of on-site and virtual visitors. It will also help individuals who work at Teal Farm adjust their behavior in response to immediate information, i.e., is there enough energy to do a particular task? More generally, our virtual presentation of data will serve as a gateway for others to learn and partake in transformative and life-positive environments that link human action with global impact.

We are collecting data on many energy parameters. One set includes the quality and availability of natural resources like solar irradiance, wind speed and direction, water flow and volume. Another set includes energy generation and performance of the technologies installed (e.g., kilowatt hours of on-site generation, kilowatt hours taken from the grid, state of battery charge, and BTU's generated from each heating source). A final class of parameters measures usage from large electric loads as well as the performance of the heating system.