Oil crisis ahead? 'Peakniks' build for future

[kurth]

Oil crisis ahead? 'Peakniks' build for future
West Lake Hills home will have energy, water, food while skipping fossil fuels.
By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 10, 2008

If the day comes that oil grows so scarce that Austinites can't afford fruit hauled in from California and brownouts roll across Texas, Lester Germanio will live high, wide and cool in his West Lake Hills villa. Germanio and other Austinites who have banded together to trade information and survival tips are preparing themselves for what they see as inevitable deprivations as oil production declines past its peak. Some call them "Peakniks."

Germanio's half-finished, 2,800-square-foot limestone home, called FoodWaterShelter, clings to a hillside off Terrace Mountain Drive. When completed, it will be powered largely by solar panels, provide all his water needs out of a 40,000-gallon cistern that will be filled by rainwater, cool him with old-fashioned ventilation and shade, and feed him from greenhouse gardens fertilized with fish droppings.

"The only way to beat them is not to need them," Germanio, a 55-year-old architectural engineer, said of the oil and other fuels that he blames for what he calls resource wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His maneuvers are more sophisticated than duck-and-cover, but the anxiety is not dissimilar: As the anticipated peak oil crisis unfolds, Peakniks foresee a period in which the U.S. would devolve into the stone age. The economy would tumble; cars, even hybrids, would be useless; day-to-day goods would be hard to come by...

Germanio said he will eventually buy a plug-in hybrid vehicle to get back and forth from his house, which he is largely building himself, with the aid of a son. Germanio predicts that his water and electricity bills will be next to nothing. (He installed an outdoor hose hookup to Travis County Water District No. 10 during construction and will maintain an Austin Energy electric hookup to his garage, even as the house is off the grid.) Sewage will be pumped through an aerobic septic system, disinfected with ultraviolet light and sprinkled over a corner of the property. Nine inches of rain falling on his roof will fill his cistern, and he expects to harvest at least 20 inches in an average year. (That gives him more than 80,000 gallons a year to share with his wife and any guests in their three-bedroom, 21/2-bath house. Austin residents, by comparison, consume about 62,000 gallons a year.)...

http://www.statesman.com/green/content/news/stories/local/02/10/0210peak.html

[phantom power]

1. I wonder if he's planning to share....

with the few million Austinites who can't afford a 2800 square foot limestone mansion with PV, ultraviolet-sewage treatment plant and water cistern.

[cedric]

2. I'm sure he's not

but the more people that follow his example then the less stress upon the existing infrastructure and he's promoting the ideas.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. I wonder where he's planning on getting lightbulbs?

Presumably he's healily armed with lots and lots of ammo, but you you have to wonder about his approach.

"The only way to beat them is not to need them," says Germanio, kitting out a house with a bunch of stuff he hasn't got a hope in hell of repairing if it goes wrong...