Aaron talks with Rob Avis, an engineer and permaculture designer who walked away from a career in the fossil fuel industry to found 5thWorld. Rob and his team design food, water, and energy-autonomous homes, acreages, and farms.
If you’ve ever wondered if you could sustain yourself on even a small plot of land, today’s episode is for you.
Listen to this episode here, or on:
Connect with Rob on LinkedIn here.
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Why Rob pulled a 180 and left his fossil fuel career for good.
How anyone can build food, water, and energy resilience on as little as a third of an acre (and the $2 book that’ll teach you everything you need to know).
What we can do with “waste” heat from data centers.
“We’ve over-educated in the white-collar system and under-educated in the blue-collar system. We’re all really good at working with the bits, but there aren’t enough of us anymore who know how to work with the atoms.”
— Rob Avis
Aaron Nichols: Rob, I reached out to you because you made a LinkedIn post saying that you were in the fossil fuel industry for close to a decade, and then one day just said, “Enough — I don’t want this to be my legacy,” and left to travel the world before designing something much better for yourself. I’d love to hear you tell that story.
Rob Avis: Yeah — well, it actually starts before the fossil fuel industry. I grew up in a cake factory. I’m Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. And the reason that’s important is that I come from industrial food — that’s what my dad did. We made 100,000 cheesecakes a day. Then I moved to industrial energy as an engineer. And I ended up getting ready to cut down a massive swath of trees to bring in a pipeline.
I felt really conflicted by it, because I didn’t want to cut them down — but I’d driven to work that day, and natural gas heated my house. So how could I criticize the very industry that I’m supporting as a consumer? And as I brought those concerns up to my colleagues, the only answer I ever got was, “We’re never moving away from fossil fuels. This is the forever resource. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.”
As I was getting ready to cut that forest down, I got sent a three-minute video — it’s still on YouTube today, called Greening the Desert. It described a man who turned a five-acre parcel of land in the Dead Sea Valley — the lowest place on earth, hyper-saline soils — into a self-regenerating ecosystem. And I said, “That’s what I want to do.” I took out my calculator and worked out that I had about 600,000 hours of life energy on this earth, and I’d burned through a third of them. What did I want to spend the next 400,000 hours doing?
Nothing against the oil and gas industry, per se — I mean, it’s the reason we’re on Riverside today. It powers so much of the world. It’s really catapulted humanity forward. There’s something like 400 billion invisible energy workers working behind the scenes, which is equivalent to about 100 million barrels a day. So we have a lot to be grateful to fossil fuels for. But the time is nigh. The transition has to happen for about a bazillion reasons, which we won’t have time to discuss all of today — I know you hit those. I loved your post the other day, actually, on the solar refinery versus the oil refinery.
Aaron Nichols: That was this morning.
Rob Avis: I think I saw it up there twice. But anyways — there’s so much hypocrisy in both spaces. We have to find that common ground, which is energy. And energy is the foundational layer of civilization. So, anyways — that’s the story in a nutshell.
Aaron Nichols: So would you introduce yourself to our listeners and talk about Fifth World?
Rob Avis: Yep. My name is Rob Avis. I started Verge Permaculture in 2008. Then I met some interesting crypto investors and co-founders who loved the concept of distributed energy, water, and food systems. They said, “How do we scale this up?” And I said, “Well, if we had the resources of the U.S. military, we could regenerate Earth’s ecosystems in 10 years.” Think about the U.S. military — it’s highly funded, it’s highly coordinated, it’s got tons of equipment, engineers, staff. They deal with some of the most complex issues on planet Earth. And we actually know how to regenerate ecosystems. So they said, “That’s an amazing vision. Let’s start this company.” Fifth World was born out of that idea.
We started as a venture studio, and we’ve done more research than you’d realize just looking at our website — which we can get into in a bit if you’d like. Right now we primarily build autonomous homes, acreages, and farms that are food-, energy-, and water-autonomous. I’d say we’re in the Model S version of our trajectory — we tend to build a higher-end product, with the intention of creating a Model 3 as we go. But the long-term ambition is large-scale ecosystem regeneration, looking seven generations into the future to make sure that spaceship Earth is still intact.
Aaron Nichols: So how long have you been doing this? When was that transformation from the fossil fuel industry into what you’re doing now? And when you saw that video and made the change, how much permaculture experience did you have?
Rob Avis: I had zero experience.
Aaron Nichols: Amazing. I love stories like this.
Rob Avis: And I left — yeah, I left when oil was hitting $157 a barrel, which was maybe a bad financial decision. My wife and I were making about $300,000 a year, and both of our parents thought we were committing career suicide. We traveled to Denmark and studied at the Folk Center for Renewable Energy, which was the birthplace of the first Vestas turbine. We learned about small wind, medium wind, large wind, solar, biogas, biomass, biochar, hydrogen, district heating loops. I worked on a project at the Folk Center that’s actually in service today. I’m not going to claim full ownership — it wasn’t entirely my idea; in fact, it wasn’t my idea at all, I just worked on the thermodynamics of it.
At the Folk Center, we built a pure-plant-oil diesel engine as the mimic, or proxy, for the district heating loop systems in Denmark. Most small towns have their own district heating system — they send hot water out to the community and cool water back in, and they can use municipal waste, biomass, even surplus wind energy. So the Folk Center was a microcosm of one of these small communities. We had this pure-plant-oil diesel generator in the middle, which had a combined heat and power operation. We had the small wind field off to the west, a solar array, a biomass combustor, and solar thermal — and all of them fed unified electrical and thermal grids. From there we thermodynamically modeled how Denmark could go to 100% renewable, using the district heating loop as one of the backbones for either improving the Carnot cycle or improving the efficiency of solid municipal waste gasification.
One of the problems with wind — back then especially — was that we didn’t have cheap battery technology. So dealing with the intermittency of renewables was a real issue that nobody had a good solution to, other than pumped hydro and maybe mass flywheels. So Denmark said, “Well, we can just dump the energy into our district heating loops, convert that electricity to thermal energy, so we don’t have to pay Norway.” They were literally paying Norway 40 or 50 cents a kilowatt-hour to send the power north. They still use that concept today — now, of course, they have more grid flexibility with batteries. But Denmark made that decision as a country in the ‘70s: do we go nuclear, or do we invent something that’s never been done before? Vestas was born out of farmer infrastructure turned up into the wind — it was like an Apollo project for Denmark to avoid going nuclear.
Aaron Nichols: And how long ago was all that, when y’all made the switch?
Rob Avis: 2007, 2008.
Aaron Nichols: Wow. Okay, so coming up on two decades. Renewables were in a very different place back then.
Rob Avis: Very different, yep.
Aaron Nichols: Now, your LinkedIn bio says you “design autonomous, regenerative properties for people who want land that produces, protects, and lasts.” What does that mean?
Rob Avis: It can be interpreted in different ways. Some people get a bit defensive about it and say, “Well, why are you creating islands off in the distance that only benefit one group of people?” It’s actually the exact opposite, if you think about it. Because your audience understands renewables — when we look at how the grid’s likely to grow going forward, there’ll be some transmission growth, but probably not at the scale we’re seeing in China. In North America, we’re more likely to see distributed solar and battery systems deployed en masse, which means the grid basically turns into more of a trickle-based system, instead of always providing real-time energy to every structure connected to it. Every structure becomes a bidirectional opportunity to support the grid and itself.
So autonomous buildings, or autonomous properties, take that same philosophy that’s likely to be deployed in the electrical grid and apply it to the food and water space. We also help our clients think about microgrids, which your audience will know a lot about. The food grid is actually almost the same as the electrical grid — we have a very small number of people, less than 3% of the population, that farms. And we’re going to see how fragile that system is this year, as global fertilizer supply gets massively disrupted. Some people are calling for a one-third reduction in food supply this year just due to that disruption in the GCC. So instead of depending on one central source, having lots of islands of production distributed turns the centralized system into a distributed one.
And the benefit is that, as more people do this, the system actually becomes more stable — the chances of a disruption, which a lot of people are concerned about, go down. In the period between right now and when this decentralized future becomes the norm, the folks who work with us can see the fragility in the food, water, and energy systems. They’re putting their money into what I call insurance policies — ones that benefit them when times are great, and benefit them even more when times are not. And as those early adopters do that, and more people follow, the concern about times not being great starts to diminish really rapidly.
The fragility we have in the world right now is because we’ve all become so dependent on a very, very small number of suppliers. That concentrates the economics, and it concentrates the risk — and you end up with Lehman-style failures. Imagine what happens with a Lehman-style failure in the food system. It’s not something people really like to think about.
Aaron Nichols: So to summarize as succinctly as I can: the more resilient people are, the less need there is across the population — and therefore the more resilient the whole population becomes in some disruption or emergency.
Rob Avis: Exactly.
Aaron Nichols: So let’s say the average person — me — doesn’t have a ton of experience growing their own food, lives on a third of an acre, has a small backyard, just put in garden beds for the first time this year and is growing their first crop of stuff. Or doesn’t even know where to start with becoming more resilient. What are some things you recommend to just gain some resiliency in your life?
Rob Avis: You live in Colorado, I think? Whereabouts?
Aaron Nichols: I do — Longmont, north of Denver.
Rob Avis: Okay. So Colorado’s an interesting edge case, just because of the strange rainwater harvesting laws you’ve got there. I think that’s changing a little bit, but it might actually get more strict this year — as the eastern slopes, I think you guys have record-low snow in the mountains this year, which could be very challenging. But one-third of an acre is more than enough land to grow pretty much all your vegetables through the summer, and even have enough to store well into the winter if you’re growing root crops. And it’s way easier than you think to get started.
Where consulting can help is to skip some of the errors — but we live in a time now where there’s YouTube University, there’s so much content out there for somebody who wants to start slow and small. In-ground or raised beds are great places to begin. There’s a book called Square Foot Gardening — it’s had, I don’t know, a million copies printed; it’s $2 at every used bookstore. It takes a super-reductionist approach to planting vegetables, and you just literally follow the recipe. That’s the first place to start with gardening. And ironically, always start small — start with a couple of boxes. Women get this better than men do; they tend to be a little more—
Aaron Nichols: [laughs] That’s — yeah, that’s completely true. I get a lot of justifiable flak from my wife for going way down rabbit holes.
Rob Avis: Yeah. So if you start with, I don’t know, 20 square feet — call it two or three raised beds — and build off of success, have a really great 20-square-foot year, then you go to 40 the next year, and 80 the year after, you’re building off of strength. Versus going straight in with the whole backyard, having it be a disaster, and never wanting to touch it again. It’s better to start with small successes and then build.
Then, if you live in a state where rainwater harvesting is legal, harvest it. If you live in a state where it’s illegal, advocate for it to become legal, because it’s super important — it’s the cleanest drinking water on earth. As we end up in drier periods, we need to be stewarding every drop that falls. About 5,000 liters, or 1,800 gallons, is a really good place to start around a small homestead — typically distributed across a couple of tanks off your downspouts. And if you live in a dry place like California, New Mexico, or Arizona where greywater is legal, that’s a great source of water — especially if you change the products inside your house. One thing that happens to people who harvest greywater is that their personal health improves, because you stop using all the garbage on your body — you don’t want that garbage ending up on your land. So it gets really personal. You start buying soaps that are actually fertilizers for the plants, and you get a second use out of the product: a head of lettuce, or a couple of leaves of kale, every time you take a shower. A nice feedback loop.
But literally — just start growing some food. A couple of quick stats for you: in the 1980s we reached peak global calories per capita. We’ve never had higher calories than the 1980s, so we’re actually going down. There’s about 18 months of food on earth at any given time, and about three days of food in any North American city at any given time. So food is one of those things that shouldn’t be just-in-time just to make it more efficient. The finance math on food should be different from other industries, in my opinion.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Going back to resilience — I was very lucky to be selected for the Peace Corps in Nepal, but I was only there for seven weeks before we were evacuated due to COVID, out of my two-year commitment. And I remember just thinking, “Wow, these people know how to do things. Wow, are they competent.” A lot of that was out of necessity — in what we call first-world countries, you have specialization because you have so many more resources, so the average person specializes in something rather than being a generalist who knows how to build their home and grow their own food. And I remember thinking, “If something happens, these people are going to be okay.” They’ve been growing their own food, building their own shelter, and stewarding their own land for way longer than we have — and they haven’t lost touch with it like we have.
Rob Avis: Yeah. I really think this is one of the course corrections we need to take — and I think AI is forcing it right now. We’ve over-educated in the white-collar system and under-educated in the blue-collar system. We’re all really good at working with the bits, but there aren’t enough of us anymore who know how to work with the atoms. As AI replaces more — I don’t think AI is going to replace our jobs, but I do think there’s going to be less need for junior engineers, for example. As an engineer using AI, it’s equivalent to having probably five intermediates underneath me when I deploy resources there. For my kids, I’m telling them, “You need to get into things where you use your body,” because humanoid robotics is still a ways away. Maybe that’ll change faster than I anticipate, but food production especially is one of the hardest things to automate. It’s going to reach limits in terms of what we can actually do with robots. Maybe those limits will be surpassed 10 years from now — certainly AI has moved very quickly — but we definitely need more people out in the fields, for sure.
Aaron Nichols: And speaking of AI — you mentioned something in your LinkedIn bio called the Atlas Loop. You said: “The Atlas Loop is our most ambitious project to date — a 40-acre integrated development where data center waste heat cascades through affordable housing, a year-round greenhouse, a wellness center, a fermentation facility, and biochar production. One energy input and five outputs.” How did you make this happen, and what can we learn from it as we’re building data centers everywhere now? Also — where is this amazing thing?
Rob Avis: I can’t say where it is, but I can tell you what it is. It actually isn’t yet — it’s in the ideation phase. The property exists. The intention for affordable housing exists. But as data centers propagate across North America and consume the resources of a region, two things are happening. Cultural sentiment is starting to become aware of the consequences of that resource vacuum, so there’s a bit of competition for those resources.
One of the reasons we’re seeing this is that AI is kind of the next expression of how humans develop, and financiers specifically like very simple projects — simple in that you build a box, connect it to a plug, connect it to a pipe, put all your stuff in there, and then treat the atmosphere as a dumping ground. We know where that goes; most of us are aware. You end up with an overheated environment, carbon issues, really expensive power prices, and waste thermal heat. One watt of compute is one watt of thermal energy.
We have a project up here in Alberta called Wonder Valley — Kevin O’Leary is talking about it. It’s a 12-gigawatt data center, and they’re specifically positioning it 100 meters, 100 yards, from the TransCanada natural gas pipeline so they can tie it to simple-cycle turbines. If you do the math on 12 gigawatts of simple-cycle turbines and then 12 gigawatts of compute, you’ve got 24 gigawatts of thermal energy at a minimum. That’s enough energy to heat the city of Edmonton — a million and a half people. We get to minus 40, where Celsius and Fahrenheit are friends — minus 40 Celsius is the same as minus 40 Fahrenheit in my neck of the woods. That data center and its simple-cycle turbines could literally heat all of Edmonton through the winter, just with a district heating system off the heat coming off that compute. It’s more expensive. It’s more complex. But last I looked at the natural gas reserves in North America, at our current rate of consumption, it’s 20 years. So we have to start looking at entropy in our calculations — we have to look at energy flows and reevaluate what waste streams look like.
The Atlas Loop is a concept where the AI data center and humans are not mortal enemies. To the data center, waste is just an unused resource. So how do we capture the waste products of compute and turn them into the things humans actually need, so both parties benefit from their co-location? That requires vision. It requires city planners who want to facilitate both activities. It requires financial risk mechanisms that allow developers to take a little bit of risk. So we’re trying to figure out how that marriage of those two spaces can work. We’re talking to a data center developer, we’ve got the affordable housing developer, we’ve got the property, and we’re looking at using the heat for car washes, for indoor farming. The building façade can be covered in solar-electric. EV chargers — all of this actually meets the climate change plan for that region perfectly. So I think if we can start to reorient how we integrate things at a design level, the world can evolve and work better than it does right now.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah — and like you said, it takes a little bit of imagination and a shifting of what we think is appropriate. Just a little imagination beyond the big-box smokestack, where waste heat gets radiated out and we don’t use it. How does solar energy factor into what you do? I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about solar, considering this is This Week in Solar.
Rob Avis: So I’m a huge advocate for 80% of Tony Seba’s work — there are a few things in there I disagree with. But I’ve been in the renewable space since 2008, advocating for it. On pretty much every project — it depends on the person I’m working with. Some people are more environmentally driven; the environmental conversation doesn’t even need to happen if they’re not. It can be liberty and freedom, it can be any number of motivations. As the cheapest source of energy on earth, and getting cheaper — I call it the software of energy — in my opinion every project should have its own solar generation. And more and more now, as batteries have their precipitous decline in price, it’s about creating the proper energy management system with batteries now, or expandable into the future, and — depending on how aggressive they want to get — possibly adding some sort of backup generator, then connecting that to the grid.
I’m a huge fan. As an engineer — energy is the foundational layer of civilization. So if you’re not thinking about energy in the next 30 years, that’s probably one of the best investments you can make. You use after-tax dollars today to save pre-tax dollars for the next 30 years. You lock in your price today. As we see Hormuz continue to get backed up — five kilowatts of solar in your state, and it’s almost equivalent in mine, is enough to drive close to 20,000 miles a year. So now you’re not just offsetting 16-cent kilowatt-hours, you’re offsetting very expensive fuel. It feels great, it doesn’t make any noise. I don’t see any downside to it.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I joke about this a lot on this show, but I think solar is too good at what it does — so it’s boring. It just lays there and makes power. It doesn’t whiz-bang, it doesn’t flash, it doesn’t move around.
Rob Avis: Yep. I love it when people try to cast shade on solar and I’m in the conversation, because I just go back in time to how the oil industry started. Most people don’t know this, but we literally used to drill holes in the ground, dig ponds in the earth, and just dump the oil in there — and from there it got spilled everywhere. When they first started producing, I can’t remember which fraction it was — whether it was gasoline or diesel — we were producing oil for paraffin, or some other product that comes off the fractionation tower, and we were literally dumping gasoline into the creeks. So how can you criticize a fledgling industry like solar, which is hugely cleaner? People will say, “It’s not recyclable.” It’s like — yeah, it is. We’re figuring that out, and it’s much more recyclable than the 420 ppm in the atmosphere that’s going to take a century or more to pull back out of the environment.
Aaron Nichols: Right — and, you know, we’re actually trying. There’s a difference there.
Rob Avis: Totally. Yeah.
Aaron Nichols: Well, Rob, I could talk to you all day, but we’re coming up on time. I end every episode with the same question. It has to do with the fact that I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party last year, and while I was speaking I realized that 80 years means my grandma was born into a world where renewable energy as we know it didn’t even exist. She was born before the first PV cell was invented — we knew about the photovoltaic effect, but the only way we knew how to generate electricity on a large scale was to dam up rivers, or dig up fossil fuel, burn it in a central location, and send the electricity outward. So everything that’s happened — everything your career has been built on — has happened within my grandma’s lifetime. So if you’re going to play us out and just moonshot here: what do you think energy is going to look like 80 years from now?
Rob Avis: Such a hard question. I’ll just state my bias: as I watch the solar rampage — in a positive way — across the earth right now, I keep wondering, are we going to overcome the Jevons paradox? Are we going to continue to burn everything that’s in the ground while we also add tons and tons of solar and wind capacity? Or are we going to actually evolve as a species to work within the constraints of what we can capture in a diurnal cycle? I think there’s going to be more—
Aaron Nichols: Can you define the Jevons paradox and the diurnal cycle?
Rob Avis: Sure. The Jevons paradox is easiest to understand in your car. Every year we improve the internal combustion engine by about 1%, and then we add heated seats, or heated mirrors—
Aaron Nichols: Mmm.
Rob Avis: —so instead of benefiting from the efficiency we’ve gained in the combustion process, we find ways of consuming all of that efficiency. So the net energy consumed on earth perpetually grows bigger, as opposed to saying, “You know what, we’re going to have a hundred million barrels consumed this year, and we’re going to start decreasing that amount, and solar is going to fill that wedge.” The Jevons paradox is something we’ve never beaten. Another example: when we discovered coal in England, we stopped burning wood for fuel — but we actually cut more trees down to shore up the coal mines. So wood consumption didn’t go down, it actually went up, even though we were using it for different things.
Diurnal means the daily cycle. One of the issues people love to hate solar and wind for is that they’re intermittent — solar based on the solar cycle and the time of year, wind based on how much the wind blows.
Aaron Nichols: Right.
Rob Avis: That’s being solved with batteries, of course. But that’s the question I ask. And I know there are lots of people working on moonshot ideas, some of which are terrifying — like reflecting the sun from space back onto earth. I think that’s going to exacerbate climate change, because now you have thermal energy entering the atmosphere in a part of the earth where normally it would be radiating back out to space. So even though we can technically cover the whole earth with solar, at some point we’re going to reach a limit to what makes sense—
Aaron Nichols: Yeah — quality of life, too. Imagine a world where you can’t see the stars.
Rob Avis: Yeah. So my question is always: do we have the capacity to evolve as a species? Or are we destined to continually grow and grow and grow, without limits? We know that indigenous people of the past, when they lived on islands or constrained land masses — if you read Jared Diamond’s work, he talks about how the successful indigenous groups who lived for millennia had mechanisms to manage their population. And the question is not just, can we manage our population — but can we manage the amount of energy that we each individually choose to consume on a daily basis? Can we set a limit to that, and continue to live modern lives, without needing to cover the entire planet with whatever energy technology we choose to develop?
Aaron Nichols: Well, Rob — where do you like to be found, if you do like to be found?
Rob Avis: I post pretty prolifically on LinkedIn. You can find me at fifthworld.com, and I’ve got quite a few videos up on YouTube under Fifth World as well.
Aaron Nichols: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on today. And for everyone listening — that’s been This Week in Solar.
Rob Avis: Thanks, sir.
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