The penetration of rooftop solar in Australia tells the story of just how keen consumers are to generate their own electricity. But some are going a step further by managing the flow of their own energy usage through microgrids and smart grids.
“Once a household or business has a solar panel on the roof, or a home storage battery, they are no longer a passive consumer,” says Mark Coughlin…
I have a great love for small homes and portable homes, many of the DIY bus conversion homes are pretty good, but this one is tops in my books, it’s functional, it’s roomy, but it’s not too huge to drive, I could live in this.…
Winter is here, all the way down here in far west Texas, tonight it will get down into the low 20s(F), definitely wood stove fire weather, along with some good warm gear to wear and sleep in. Thermal underwear is my constant companion day and night, well more night than day, we often get up to a comfortable temperature during the day as long as the sun is shining, but I must remember, before the sun goes down to change into my night clothes, for as soon as the sun sets, the temps drop like a rock into an ice bucket.…
A Hawaiian Electricity Company is putting up huge obstacles to individuals who want solar panels on their roofs, driving many of them to go completely off-grid.
The company says it has a plan to interconnect thousands of rooftop solar energy systems on Oahu by December 2015. But that has been put on hold because of safety and reliability issues.…
Off-Gridders have been around for a long time, but it’s just been recently that technology has been available to make living off-grid as cushy as any grid connected home, not only available but affordable as well. One thing everyone needs is light, we have several different options to light the darkness, candles, oil lamps, Coleman lanterns, flashlights, incandescent bulbs, CFL bulbs and most recently, LED lights.
I think all of us have used many of these options at some point in our lives, I can remember camping as a kid and having Coleman lanterns and flashlights, but most of these are either expensive, use up too much power, or they are risky to use (specifically the ones that use fire).…
WSJ 5th Oct – There is no Moore’s law for batteries. That is, while the computing power of microchips doubles every 18 months, the capacity of the batteries on which ever more of our gadgets depend exhibits no such exponential growth. In a good year, the capacity of the best batteries in our mobile phones, tablets and notebook computers—and increasingly, in our cars and household gadgets—increases just a few percent.
It turns out that storing energy safely and reliably is hard in a way that miniaturizing circuits is not. A pound of gasoline contains more than 20 times as much energy as a pound of lithium-ion batteries. And then there’s the expense: The battery pack in a Tesla Model S costs approximately $30,000.…
Energy harnessed from the sun is predicted to displace fossil fuels by 2050 as the cost of solar cells plummets
Solar power will reach commercial “take-off” within a decade and displace fossil fuels to become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2050, according to stunning new forecasts from the International Energy Agency.
The IEA said the cost of photovoltaic panels would continue to plummet, falling by a further 60 per cent for household rooftops and 70 per cent for power companies even after the dramatic gains of the recent years.…
A new solar harvester that can provide power and clean water is in the works. Its hardly suprising that panels can overheat in the very sun that powers them, and the innovation is a way of cooling the panels.
Its manufacturers claim that the Sunflower could soon become the first “drop-in” machine to provide renewable energy, water and heat to off-grid communities in remote regions.…
Brett Sutherland built the ultimate bachelor pad on wheels to suit his need for a home, balancing cost with useability without sacrificing style, this is one of the best looking tiny homes on wheels I have seen. Brett didn’t care for the tiny homes he had seen before, he felt like they were too cramped for his liking, wanting lots of head room for air flow, especially in his bedroom loft area, the design he created looks great and is very functional, there is lots of air movement as well as light.…
Thomas “Tim” Lemieux lives in an unlikely showcase for green energy: a 1997 Winnebago recreational vehicle.
Scale a narrow ladder up the side of the motorhome, and a compact rooftop solar farm comes into view. Photovoltaic panels adorn the top, and even the front hood.
They are linked to a series of batteries that help distill and cool water for drinking. Excess water and power feed an evaporative “swamp” cooler that keeps the cabin comfy.…
2014 OCT 4 Investment Weekly News — PITTSBURGH-
Is Pittsburgh to be home of a second War of the Currents?
In the late 1880s, Pittsburgh native son George Westinghouse (using the work and genius of Nikola Tesla) won the campaign to base the United States’ electric power grid on alternating current (AC). Thomas Edison, a proponent of direct current (DC), tried to paint AC as dangerous, but as things stood at the time, an AC grid was cheaper and more efficient, could carry electricity over longer distances, and was easier to build-so it prevailed.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Bopaya Bidanda, John Camillus, and Gregory Reed think that it might be time to redirect our attention to direct current.…
* Promises more effective thermal heat storage than current methods
* Company expects quick market penetration
* Says can match fossil fuel-fired power plants on price
NEGEV DESERT, Israel, Sept 22 (Reuters) – An Israeli solar power company, Brenmiller Energy, says it has developed a new, more efficient way to store heat from the sun that could give a boost to the thermal solar power industry by enabling plants to run at full capacity night and day.…
