Soaring utility costs and power blackouts are pushing more and more South African homeowners to find new ways of living.
Warnings earlier this month that power utilities would be implementing rolling blackouts in light of collapsed coal storage depots prompted communities to consider installing power-saving devices or arrange their own power supply.…
PANAPRESS & D Tel: – What does New York City have in common with London? They are both threatened by ageing power plants and failing Nuclear reactors that might plunge the world’s twin financial centres into darkness if there was a cold snap.
What makes us think the City that is so great they named it twice could be on the edge thanks to a power plant some 300 miles away on the shore of Lake Ontario?
The answer lies in a little-noticed, highly technical document filed in August with the state Public Service Commission.…
A SURF centre in Easter Compton near Bristol is launching a £150,000 crowdfunding campaign that will help fund some of the site’s sustainability plans.
The Wave Bristol’s campaign got underway Monday, November 24 and Chris Hines MBE, head of sustainability for The Wave, said: “We want this project to be sustainable in all senses, including socially and environmentally. We have ambitious plans to sustainably power the site and eventually take it off-grid.”…
WWF South Africa is hoping for more entries into its annual Climate Solver Awards. The competition is a chance to show off innovative technologies geared towards reducing carbon emissions and boost energy access. Entries to the competition are open until January 30.
One of last year’s winners was SolarTurtle. The brainchild of company Ugesi Gold, which operates out of Stellenbosch, the aim was to give people affordable electricity off the grid. Packaged in a shipping container, the container unfolds during the day to charge numerous battery packs via solar power. These battery packs can be taken to where they are needed to provide electricity to power lights or appliances.…
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.…
