Bill Isely and his wife create a homemade hydroelectric plant that powers their homestead using only 1 kilowatt of power. Originally published as "Happy on One Kilowatt" June/July 2000 MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
Everything we do has an impact on the environment. The questions are whether it is less damaging than the alternative, and how sensitively it is implemented. If you run a micro-hydro system on a creek and are using a small percentage of the flow in that creek it is arguably much less damaging than buying electricity from the grid with all of the impacts associated with that (cleared land for transmission, mining for copper wires, potentially coal etc, etc)
Everything we do has an impact on the environment. The questions are whether it is less damaging than the alternative, and how sensitively it is implemented. If you run a micro-hydro system on a creek and are using a small percentage of the flow in that creek it is arguably much less damaging than buying electricity from the grid with all of the impacts associated with that (cleared land for transmission, mining for copper wires, potentially coal etc, etc)