Zero Fossil Fuel

One World Future Farm is dedicated to making the transition to zero fossil-fuel as quickly as possible, I'm thinking in just a few years, five years maximum, two or three much better.
It's a big challenge... I was interested to see how much energy I was getting in human terms when I bought a gallon of petrol, so I did some sums. This is what I came up with:

• a gallon of petrol holds the equivalent of roughly 200 hours of human work
• last time I bought petrol it was £5.75 a gallon
• so that's the equivalent of roughly 200 hours of human work for £5.75
• so that's like having someone work for you for for £0.03 an hour

Petrol - modern slave rate at 3p an hour?

The sums are a bit rough because, for example, it's difficult to put an exact value on how much work you get from the average human, and whether he's going to have holidays etc. but it's still got to be an amazingly good deal. Which is why it's going to be difficult to replace as a resource... Some interesting sums here and here.
In all my eco travels I never worked on a project that was fossil fuel free, though there's at least one in the UK, Tinkers Bubble, their mobile wood-fired steam engine is becoming world famous. The engine powers their sawmill which provides them with some income and materials for their buildings.

Note the belt drives - there was old belt driven machinery in the workshop at Treflach

For alternatives to coal, oil and gas at One World Future Farm we'll be looking at all the small scale fuel sources we can, wood of course, and also solar, wind turbines, biogas and hydro. It's time to be super-frugal with energy, and to be clever with our designs for all our systems. I heard of a nice bit of ingenuity a while ago, a guy who heats his house with the heat generated by rotting leaves. I'm hopeless withe horses myself, but one of my horse-loving friends said that if a horse could be ridden it could be trained to pull a trap... or sawn-off car?

Because of the way the units were established by James Watt and others, a horse's power output can actually be reckoned at 15 horse power.