Off-Grid 101

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NY’s green fashion week

Designer John Bartlett really got to the heart of the issue, with a menswear line created entirely off-grid, using tools of days gone by like foot-pedal sewing machines.…

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Off-Grid 101

Off-grid lighting competition, $200,000 prize

lightafrica1.jpg
Let there be light

The Development Marketplace team of the World Bank today launched a competition, to reward project ideas that address the various off-grid lighting needs of Sub-Saharan Africa, including alternative distribution models, new clean lighting technology, stronger production chains, and improvement of the policy environment.

Ten to 20 winners will receive grant funding up to $200,000.

The competition is open to a broad range of innovators around the world, including private businesses, nongovernmental organizations, universities, government entities, and individuals.…

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Off-Grid 101

WhisperGen

The WhisperGen
Not cheap, and not pretty

Here’s another idea for disconnecting from the mains electricity grid – not cheap to buy, but cheap to run on a pint of diesel per hour. It’s the WhisperGen off-grid heat and DC power generator sold by Volpower NZ Ltd, Auckland, distributor of Volvo Penta marine and industrial engines. The company shot to notice last year when, after a five-year product trial, it won a $300 million contract to supply British electricity and gas giant Powergen with 80,000 domestic AC units over the next four years. These will be installed in British homes as replacements for conventional hot-water boilers, running on natural gas to generate AC power and hot water. But natural gas is running out and rising in price.…

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Solar Decathlon

solar decathlon picture
Last year’s battle

Teams from 20 universities have spent the summer building enough homes for an entire solar village. The off-grid, self-powering homes will be on display for 10 days in October on the National Mall in Washington D.C., competing in the Department of Energy’s 2007 Solar Decathlon.

The point of the competition is not to create new building technologies. Entrants have to use commercially available products to prove that their sun-powered home can be commercially reproduced. For Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) university with its access to super-efficienct, NASA-grade solar panels, that was a disadvantage.…

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Jackson Browne’s off-grid ranch

Jackson Browne
Browne: saintly

In his new eco-TV series Ed Begley has just outed singer songwriter Jackson Browne as a long-time off-gridder. Browne, who used to go out with Daryl Hannah, is living on an off-grid ranch in deep Southern California.

“He’s got this big wind turbine, and his ranch is completely off the [power] grid,” Begley said. “He’s done all of it himself.” We’re impressed. But Browne is so cool and unassuming that no further details seem to exist

Browne founded Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) along with Bonnie Raitt back in the 1970s. They put on the very first Live Aid in 1979, though they did not call it that.…

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Mobile

How to get free broadband

After the arrest of a man for piggybacking on a neighbor’s Internet broadband, we are compiling a list of all known “war surfing” hot-spots worldwide. All readers are invited to add to the list by going as quickly as possible to the Off-Grid forum.…

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Land

Landmark off-grid housing victory

An off-grid community in Devon – has won temporary planning (zoning) permission after a long battle against wealthy local residents.

The group of 16 people, featured in Nick Rosen’s book, How to Live Off-grid, paid just…

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Cave dwellers of Oz

Cave at White Cliffs
Visitors at underground Motel

The tiny outback town of White Cliffs in far north-west New South Wales can now claim a place in Australia’s engineering history, alongside the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Snowy Hydro scheme.

The opal mining town, where most of the 200 residents live in underground homes, was the first in Australia to be powered entirely by solar energy, and is still a fully off-grid community.

The solar plant is now closed but it has earned a national award that will see it preserved as a piece of alternative energy heritage.…

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Utopia project update

Dylan Evans and a Utopia assistant
Trouble in Paradise

Its some time since we reported on Dr Dylan Evans, who resigned as a lecturer on evolutionary psychology from the University of the West of England in Bristol to become Director of the Utopia Project in Scotland. Dr Evans, 41, wanted to test the theory that by 2040, the warming of the Earth and ensuing climate disasters will mean any survivors will live as Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Could man survive a social breakdown, he wondered

To this end, in April he sold his house in the Cotswolds to set up a commune in the Highlands called Utopia. The first to join him was Adam, pictured here in an Airline blanket he acquired on his way to the UK. Members have to live in a post-global warming environment and find a “new way” of existing. That means sleeping in yurts, growing your own veg and developing a series of ruels and practices that others might follow.…

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Land

Eco-palace back on

Plans are afoot to prepare a $10m eco-palace” as a wedding gift for Prince Charles son Prince William,and his fiancee Kate Middleton. As they holiday in a tiny island int he Seychelles, the palace in Wales is being fitted with a range of eco-features.…

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How We Went Off-Grid

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20 x 8 Ft. Outdoor Storage Shed, Desert Sand

Order Here 20 x 8 Ft. Outdoor Storage Shed, Desert Sand