All Blog Posts Tagged 'solar' (90)

Looking around my little desk, 4 different little electronic devices stare up at me: a cell phone, digital camera and two music players. I love these little gadgets and almost everyone I know also have their own arsenal of personal electronic devices. The downside is always how much juice these things use up! How many times have you called someone on their cell and left a message expecting them to get back to you in due time, only to hear back from them more than a day later saying their… Continue

2009 Solar Decathlon, Washington D.C.

Many of you probably already know about the Solar Decathlon, but for those of you who do not I’ll give a brief introduction here and provide some links so anyone who is interested can follow up. I am a veteran of two decathlons (2007 with Texas A&M and 2009 with Rice University)…

Continue

This is Dale Vince OBE. He has started the world's first green electricity company called Ecotricity here in the United Kingdom.

The system works like this:

- You change over your energy supplier to Ecotricity with no extra cost to…

Continue

Sustainable Energy Technologies is a company that has developed a technology, called SUNERGY, which allows an extremely parallel configuration of solar panels, which then allows every module in the configuration to operate at maximum efficiency regardless of other modules.

Problem? This is a proprietary technology and as such is probably not available to those that would need it the most. Still, it shows a further advance in solar power, making this energy source even…

Continue

A few years ago, an australian miner told me over a few beers that he did not like being a miner and that he just 'did it for the money'. That was kind of funny, because this fellow looked like he was built to be either a miner or a professional wrestler (he later told me his real passion lay with writing short stories - which is tough if you spend your time working in a copper mine).



Because I knew Australia to be a very coal-dependent country, the conversation quickly turned to the… Continue

I've been using affordable solar electricity in my life for the past four or five years. My bedroom is essentially off-grid with solar LED lights that charge in my south-facing window and a solar/dynamo radio that I had modified to charge AA batteries as well. My backpack has two solar LED lights that I use when riding at night, a flashing red LED and a steady white LED that velcroes to my helmet. Continue

The Portable Light Project combines textiles and solar panels to bring renewable light and power to folks in remote locations, the developing world, and even more industrialized places. Basically, small and very flexible solar panels can be sewn onto clothing or other easily stored textiles. This non-profit research group is bringing the panels to different locations to see what people can do with them. They've also worked up a… Continue

Appropriately, I am shadowing a light.



Solar Sister is an organization dedicated to bringing simple, solar-powered light to women and girls in rural Africa. This by-women, for-women service means things like:

• Girls don't miss out on study time. As they normally attend to domestic chores after school, unlike their brothers who do their school assignments immediately when they get home from school, so the girls fall behind in school and…

Continue

with this solar oven my partner javier (the guy with short hair) and I (the guy with long hair), we won the first place in the national competition in my country (chile) solar cookers.

I leave here the steps we take to create this solar oven:…

Continue

"Any illiterate woman - including

women who have never left their villages - from any part of Africa can

be trained to be a confident and compitent solar engineer."



That kind of confident and prejudice busting attitude is what pushed me to select the team behind "Barefoot Solar Engineers" project as my hero. I know that they aren't an individual, but I like that because it also shows that this work we are all doing is less about single… Continue