The easiest and harder to track way would be to hack a microwave satellite (or putting one into orbit) and make it fire some juice to a receiver far from your refuge, connected by cable and ready to blow up (or retract, dissolve or be dissassembled by a nanoswarm) if discovered. A similar trick was used in the first Honor Harrington's novel, and was quite good. Another option, of course, if you find a water course of any kind, is to use hydraulic energy. Or you can make a mega-mix: a small nuclear reactor that dissipates power by evaporating water that moves some turbines when going to a water deposit... where the water goes down in a stream to the reactor, powering another turbine, after feeding a thermal exchanger. As long as you have reactive material, you are really fed ^^.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

One of the big questions is power consumption. At present, an average American hosuehold uses about 900 kW a month. How does the average power consumption for a transhuman compare? Is it more, because of increased appliance usage (and more complex tech, like a fabber), or less, because of increasingly efficient technologies?

Wikipedia suggests around 2300 W, but that is just electricity. Overall, I would expect the typical transhuman to have far more energy-efficient devices, but heating cannot be made much more efficient (however, insulation and making good use of heat can likely be much better) and people tend to use more energy as they get more efficient, not less (because now they can afford more stuff). Going off to live on Mars and being constrained by the Fall might lead to a sizeable reduction. So I would guess the energy need is between 1,000-10,000 W, with perhaps 3,000 W per person reasonable. Fabbers are, as I have argued elsewhere, somewhat heavy domestic equipment with running power demands around a few hundred to a few thousand Watts, with peaks of perhaps 12 kW when rapidly making something energy-dense. Most of the time they will be turned off, of course. Recycling is likely around the same level, as is cooling. So the transhuman might have peak uses in the kilowatt range, but most of the time just require a few hundred watts. Servitor bots likely need a few tens of watts up to a hundred watts when working (by comparision to human metabolic needs). Since they run off batteries they need to get their full energy input during recharging, which might be 50% of the time. The real energy-hogs are vehicles, which easily run in the tens of kilowatt range - when pumping fuel into your car today you are literally pumping more than a megawatt of power, the gasoline is that energy dense. Making fuels or recharging vehicles might hence be the big energy demand on the homestead, requiring much of the energy production.