The property that makes its own power.

Backup power carries a household through an outage. This is the other thing: generating continuously, as a matter of course, from what a property already has. Sun, moving water, wind, wood, and fuel.

Six areas, each with its own demands, its own honest economics, and its own reasons you might walk away from it.

Who this is for

A different problem, not a harder one.

The rest of the Energy section is written for a household that owns a house: what to buy so the refrigerator keeps running, how to light a room without the grid, how to stay warm when the power is out for three days. That is most people, most of the time, and it is where nearly everyone should start.

This section is written for a property that intends to produce its own electricity as normal operation. Acreage, a woodlot, a stream, a clear ridge. The equipment is larger, the systems are permanent, and the maintenance is a standing commitment rather than an occasional chore.

Neither is more serious than the other. A person with two acres and a stream is not further along than a person in a townhouse. They have a different problem, and it takes different answers.

If you are sizing a battery station or a generator for outages

Start in the main Energy section instead. It answers that question directly and in less time, and nothing here will serve you better until it is answered.

Energy: build your independence

Before any of it

The arithmetic does not change. Only the numbers do.

Every page in this section resolves to the same four checks that govern a portable power station: what voltage the equipment needs, how many watt-hours a day the load consumes, how much continuous output it draws at once, and what it demands at the moment a motor starts.

A property-scale system is a bigger answer to those questions, not a different question. Work your load list first. Every decision downstream, from array size to penstock diameter to how many hours an engine runs, is set by that list.

Work out your load first

The six areas

Where the power actually comes from.

Each one gets a hub and a set of pages beneath it. Solar, hydro and wind are finished, and biomass is under way with its hub and first guides live. The last two stay unlinked until they exist, because naming a page before it is written is how a site starts lying to its readers.

Solar at Property Scale

Sizing an array to carry a property rather than supplement it. Battery banks, charge control, ground mounts, wiring and code, and getting through a run of grey days in January.

Micro-Hydro and Water Power

If you have moving water with real drop, it beats everything else on this page, because it runs at three in the morning in February. Measuring head and flow, run-of-river systems, waterwheels, and the permits.

Wind at Property Scale

Assessing whether your site has a usable wind resource, which most do not. Horizontal and vertical axis machines, towers and maintenance, and an honest account of why residential wind so often disappoints.

Biomass, Wood Gas and Heat Conversion

Turning what a property already grows or discards into power and useful heat. Gasification, digesters, Stirling engines, thermoelectric generators, small-scale steam, and combined heat and power.

Continuous-Duty Generation

An engine that runs daily is a different machine from one that runs three times a winter. Sizing for duty, fuel logistics and storage, biodiesel, transfer switches and interlocks, and what daily running really costs.

Site-Specific Sources

Sources that depend on a property having something unusual. Geothermal, tidal and wave, human-powered systems, and one page on what genuinely does not work at this scale and why.

How the dangerous ones are covered

Understand it here. Build it with someone qualified.

A few subjects in this section carry risk that is structural rather than incidental. Wood gasification produces a gas that is largely carbon monoxide, by design. Digesters accumulate methane in a sealed vessel. Distilling fuel alcohol requires a federal permit before the still is legally run. Small boilers fail in ways other equipment does not.

We cover all of them, because leaving them out would be dishonest about what property-scale generation involves, and because a reader who wants to know will simply find a worse source.

What we publish is what each system is, what it genuinely demands, why the risk sits in the design rather than in carelessness, what it costs in money and attention, and when it makes sense at all. What we do not publish is build instructions or operating procedures for those four. Each page says plainly what qualified execution looks like and where to find it.

In the meantime

What is already written and useful.

Several pages in the main Energy section carry directly into this work, even though they were written for a house rather than a property.