Farming: Harvest the Sun

At the Would Be Farm -- our stretch of abandoned farmland in Northern New York -- things are pretty basic. We spend a few weeks at a time at the small camper we fixed up, making frequent visits to my sister, where we raid the freezer and empty her hot-water tank with impunity.  

Still, while at Base Camp, the laptop and the cell phone need charging, and it's civilized to have electricity for lights and running water inside the tin-cabin-on-wheels.

Since part of the goal of the farm is to keep things low-cost and low-maintenance, we decided against hooking up power.  There's electric service at the road, but it's placed awkwardly for our use. We'd need to install at least three utility poles, which would make an ugly slash through the open vista of meadow and rock. Plus it seems silly to outlay more cash for poles than we spent for the farm's pickup truck...

Fact #1: the cost of solar power has come down a lot in the past ten years. 
Fact #2: plenty of not-too-expensive kits look pretty cinchy to set up. 
And what else do we know about solar? Fact #3: not much. 

Is that the sort of thing that will stop us? Heck no. 

I browsed the library, but the resources seemed either incomprehensible or too vague. So as is my habit, I signed up for a class. This one is an on-line course through EdX. Free for auditors. Classmates on every continent...

(P.S. doesn't it sound very Mother Nature-y to "design a Solar System"?) 

An eight-week course might be overkill, to be bitterly frank. 

But talk about new neural pathways --!  1 over the cosine of theta. Terawatts. Polycrystalline silicon cells. Diamond lattice crystalline structures...And "band gaps," which, in the Dutch accent of Professor Smets sounds just like "band camps." Making his discussion of how molecular bonds affect the BAND CAMP pretty darned entertaining.

Aside from having those stray three or four brain cells that remembered anything about Calculus go super-nova during the first homework assignment, I think it's going to be fine.  

A screenshot of homework. Oh yes, those brain cells burst like beluga caviar.