Jim Mason: Stickin’ It Green to the Man
This deep article highlights Jim Mason of the Berkeley Shipyard, the upcoming Escape from Berkeley race, and the Mechabolic fame and how regulatory and electrical power disputes with city officials has led to all kinds of innovations including gasification cars, high-capacity and portable combined heat and power (CHP) and solar power in shipping containers, and other intriguing green ideas.
Power From the People by Brian Doherty
[Jim Mason:] “I wanted to take up power not from a Luddite ‘the world is being destroyed’ mentality that we should all do nothing, sit in a corner, and not consume at all, or since we can’t, just do a little and feel guilty anyway,” Mason says. “I wanted to take it up as a culture of potential abundance, of doing and engagement.”
So he and some of his pals experimented with living large off the grid. Tea, shmea; they needed to operate three-phase industrial power tools. So they scrounged transformers and off-the-shelf generators from junkyards, bought inverter arrays on eBay, assembled solar panels and switching stations. It took them many months and many failures along the way, but they ended up cobbling together a system that successfully supplied their workshop with electricity, controlled by a snazzy computer program that made it possible to trace all operations online. Though it tended to trip out at least once a day, Mason hopes eventually to offer a version of the power system bundled together in one shipping container as a “powertainer” for off-grid use in the Third World and elsewhere.
