Energy

An eco village where canine excrement is converted to power and heat is to go before planners in Leicestershire,UK.

An outline application for the 49-home village off the A607 at Kirby Bellars has been submitted to Melton Borough Council. The plans include an anaerobic digester which converts waste into electricity.

According to the local landowner behind the scheme, it would involve taking waste from the nearby Defence Animal Centre in Melton, which is home to up to 300 military horses and 200 dogs.

The publicly funded animal center currently spends thousands of pounds each month transporting dog and horse droppings to Norwich, 114 miles away.…

The NSA “almost certainly” uses Utility company records to routinely snoop on American citizens says an expert in the IT systems of Power and Water companies.

““If the NSA are scraping data from Facebook and Google searches, then they would almost certainly be interested in the data that smart meters can provide them,” said Stuart Ravens, Principal Analyst of Utilities Technology at Ovum a respected international firm of analysts.

“There are tens of millions of smart meters already installed,” said Ravens. But they are still a minority of America’s 140 million households. Now he fears, consumer opposition to smart meters will skyrocket – and quite justifiably so.

“The (electricity) industry so far has done a fairly good job of reassuring customers their data is secure,” said Ravens. But security is an issue in the public mind. “The Prism project, the NSA has destroyed the trust citizens have in government agencies – and in smart meters, …

Help may be at hand for off-gridders who want to see an alternative to the power grid. It is provided by Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, who is no fan of off-grid living as far as we are aware, but his needs happen to coincide with those who live outside the power Utility networks.

“Tesla needed to solve the problem of long-distance travel and we can’t wait for others to agree with our strategy,” says Musk. “If we wait for some sort of consensus, it’s going to take too long. We just need to get going and other manufacturers can either copy us or join us.”

Musk, founder of PayPal, and owner of SpaceX, isn’t a guy to wait around and hope technology adapts to his product. No, Musk would rather adapt and invent technology to support his product.…

Tosh Szatow has been campaigning for years in Australia to build systems that can scale and make sustainable living possible.

Tosh recently joined the Cape Paterson Eco-village, near Phillip Island in Victoria, attracted by the holistic approach to sustainability adopted by developers Brendan Condon and Mike O’Mullane.

He said the project aimed to find ways to make clean energy more affordable than the alternative and his hope was that it would “catalyse innovation across the property sector.”

Key features will include large scale revegetation of natural habitat, re-establishing wetlands, new walking and cycling tracks, high performance housing, on site power generation, electric vehicles, community gardens and community workspaces. “Somewhere amongst the site will be 220 residential lots.”

Tosh’s recent report by the “Department of Energy Transition, Efficiency and Enoughness” shows a dramatic shift to localised, renewable energy production, made possible by radical improvements in efficiency. One in every three Australian households supplies its own electricity – whether individually, in clusters or small communities.…

This web site tends not to write about new technologies until they are commercially available, but a new breakthrough from Stanford prof Shanhui Fan, reported in the Journal of Engineering seems worthy of a heads-up. It taps the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet.

Once its perfected, homes and buildings will be chilled without air conditioners, car interiors won’t heat up in the summer sun.

The team of researchers at Stanford designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.

“People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place,” explained Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper’s senior author. “We’ve developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time.”

The trick, from an engineering standpoint, is two-fold. …