Tidewater Community College – Oleg woke me early today to get a look at some of the power generation efforts of the compound. We started with the sun, with the solar arrays. On the upper floors of the south end of the building, they had lined up just about any kind of solar panel they could find. When I asked where they had come from, they had a long list of places. The largest source had been traffic and construction lots, where solar panels powered road signs and came with large batteries. They had wheeled over two hundred of these here from a few different yards, and were still bringing some in as they found them. They dedicated almost half of their scavenging runs to getting these solar panels and batteries. The panels and batteries became an array, and it had supplied enough power for the compound before the computers came on line. In a unique use of recycling, they reused the lights in the compound and the chassis were modified in the shop into a pair of spikes which were positioned around the border fence to discourage trespass or vehicular breaches of the fence.

This wasn’t the only source of solar panels. They took some from houses, some from public sites, I think they even had a number of solar panels from calculators wired up. When I saw some of these small ones Oleg simply smiled.
“Every little bit helps.”

We then went into the bowels of the buildings. There I met Pawel Raczick, an Eastern European engineer who was in the States on a temporary visa when things happened and he was stuck. He was working on a diesel generator which had been on the property, had converted it to biodiesel production. The generator was not running during the day with the amount of power the solar panels were providing. They tried to run it only overnight, to keep their computer links active. I was actually talking to a significant percentage of the people in the world who had an email address right here.

Pawel took us up to a greenhouse of sorts he had created in the central atrium of one of the buildings. Here, he had constructed many frames which held curtains of sheet plastic tubes filled with water, an algae farm. From these, and several other sites he had on the location, he harvested algae and made biodiesel fuel from them.
Pawel was a small man, humble, with graying straggly hair and a bent pair of glasses. Everywhere he went, the smell of a workshop followed, the smell of lubricants and oil.

We met then for lunch, the biggest meal of the day for all of them, and over lunch they talked about progress and problems, a free exchange of knowledge all in the drive for a better and stronger community. They also spoke about capacity, something on everybody’s mind, and if they could bring in anybody else from the surrounding area and sustain their needs with food and power production. They talked about digging up one of the parking lots to make a field for planting, but they weren’t sure if there was enough fuel for the machines to do it, and how fertile the ground would be afterwards. Intelligent sustainability was the most common thread of the meal, and I began to understand, every meal.