I’ve been adding articles to this site from time to time and I think I ought to make a plug for the company I work for, which is working on making renewable energy available to everyone. Hey, Mark okayed it, so plugging your company must be cool! ; )

Shameless Plug for BeUtilityFree

Take the idea of energy sustainability and apply it to what are probably your largest energy uses: your home and car. That’s the approach of BeUtilityFree. Take a look at what we do at www.beutilityfree.com. (I’m the webmaster as well as a renewable energy installer, so I’d love to hear feedback on what you think of the site at brett_s AT BeUtilityFree.com.)

The grand plan is to start out by reducing the amount of energy you use through replacing your current fixtures and appliances with more efficient ones, or designing your new home with efficiency built right in. Then you can buy a much more affordable renewable energy system that will cover your modest needs.

Once you own your means of production, you start getting paid back through avoiding the ever-rising cost of fuel, selling renewable energy credits for your production, taking tax breaks and utility incentives and maybe even selling excess energy.

We sell energy-efficient appliances and lighting and renewable energy systems like solar electric, solar hot water, wind power, hydrogen cogeneration and ethanol stills. We’ll design renewable energy systems, install them or just sell the components to those who have the skills to set them up themselves.

Our special, can’t-find-them-anywhere-else items are Nickel-Iron batteries, the Superior Solar Storage Tank and our 3″ and 4″ column Ethanol Stills.

We are hoping to unveil a few exciting things in the near future. Among them are:

• A turn-key ethanol plant. Just put feedstock, water, enzymes and yeast in one end and watch the fuel pour out the other. We’re currently testing enzymes for cellulosic production so that making ethanol can be as inexpensive and sustainable as possible.
• A Purchase Power Agreement plan that lets anyone get solar energy from their rooftop without any up-front investment. We’d retain ownership of the solar system and sell you the energy at a rate lower than the utility company’s.

If we can get everyone to pump renewable energy into the grid or unplug and make their own energy sustainably, we’ll have taken a huge step toward getting this climate problem licked. And if everyone owns the source of their energy, we can all get out from under the thumb of the utility company and the US Oil War Machine and get back to making a poistive difference in the world.

Brett

One of the most surprising things about this new invention is that it was (in a roundabout way) inspired by the SuperSoaker. Lonnie Johnson, the man who made “squirt gun” synonymous with inadequacy, is currently working on a prototype heat engine which would use heat from the sun to force hydrogen ions through a molecular membrane from a lower-pressure hydrogen chamber to a high-pressure one. If that made total sense to you, then you clearly have a lot more engineering under your belt than I do! For a more detailed explanation try this page.

The engine will be more efficient as the difference in temperature between the heat source and the heat sink goes up, reaching 60% at about a 600-degree-to-room-temperature differential. Achieving such a temperature is no problem for parabolic mirror solar thermal collectors, which can easily reach 800 degrees.

Johnson is hoping that a variation of his heat engine could generate electricity from the heat of an internal combustion engine or even from human body heat! Sounds like The Matrix could come true!

Nanolsolar Inc. has been talking big lately about making a leap in solar panel technology that will drop the cost to under $1 a watt. The current standard for solar panels has been hovering around $4 a watt (wholesale cost) for a while.

Well, on December 18th Nanosolar announced their first shipment of solar panels that are profitably produced at $.99 a watt. Batch 1 went to a solar electricity utility in Germany and residential panels won’t be available for at least 12 months.

The big jump down in price was due to their new no-silicon method of printing a copper-indium-gallium-diselenide nanoparticle ink onto a metallic film substrate with inkjet technology. And, fortunately for us, this new type of panel will maintain the current 15%-20% standard of efficiency found in crystalline silicon panels!

Because of their ease of production and short-circuiting the current silicon shortage, I think this announcement will herald in the age of a flood of cheap solar power for everyone. And with the advent of new batteries for home energy storage like the nanosilicon wire lithium-ion cell (technical paper for the true geek here) in development now, the power grid may just become one more way to date films and old photos.

In late November, Google announced that it plans to spend somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars to support the development of renewable energy infrastructure in 2008 and hundreds of millions in the near future. Their plan is to spur the development of high-altitude wind generation (a technology as yet untested), solar thermal electricity generation and geothermal power first, then other technologies later, with the final goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal. Take a look at TheDailyGreen.com article for more.  And here’s Google’s webpage on the project.
I can’t wait to see where this goes, especially what with being employed in the solar industry. Now, if only the federal government would follow suit…

The Renewable Energies Heating Law just passed in Germany requires all new homes built after January 1st, 2009 to provide 14% of their heating and hot water energy with renewable sources. The German government is promising $517 million dollars a year in grants to help make this happen. Then, starting in 2010, existing homes will have to be remodeled to include renewable energy heating systems. There will be a lot of new solar thermal panels, heat pumps and wood pellet stoves and boilers installed over there in the coming years!

Israel and Spain began this trend (Spain also required photovoltaic energy systems in new buildings as of 2005–Wikipedia) and I sure hope we’ll be continuing the trend here in the U.S.!

Take a look here for more on the new law.

Yes it’s true! You can convert your VW into an electric car with the kits available at e-volks.com. It’s pretty amazing really. I read about this website in Make magazine, and it looks really cool. The guy in the article made his car not only electric, but solar as well, by putting a $350 solar panel on the roof. You won’t get the range that a factory-made solar would get (if they existed) but you can get enough range for most people’s daily needs.

Maybe it’s time to find that old VW and make it into an awesome car of the future! The site says that you can use the kits with other cars as well, it just takes a little more work.

It seems to me that with the new battery technology from this post you might even be able to make a car with better range than the one in the Make magazine article. By the way, the article is available online, but you have to have a subscription to read it. You might as well just join up if this kind of thing interests you; it’s an awesome magazine.

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I have been against nuclear power for as long as I have given any thought to the issue.  I hate to say it, but I have just changed my mind.  There is a great article in a recent Discover Magazine that lays out the important details, and is the first comprehensive comparison I have seen of the pros and cons of nuclear vs. wind, solar, and coal.

Of course I strongly believe that we need to put massive effort into making solar power and other renewable energy sources viable, but the truth is that wind is not constant and solar is not yet very efficient.  When compared to the massive amount of coal we as a nation (the United States of America) burn, nuclear seems to be the lesser of the two evils until we can get renewables to cover a greater percentage of our energy needs.  To be sure, I ONLY see nuclear as a stop-gap measure, but we need to take action now to decrease our national carbon emissions.

Read the Discover Magazine article here.

A company called Solar Electric Vehicles has put out what Prius owners have been waiting for: a solar roof panel. It apparently costs about $2000-4000 and will pay for itself in 2-3 years. Read a very nice article at TreeHugger.com.

Photo from TreeHugger.com

Also, check out the Solar Electric Vehicles site for more information.

photos: Michel Zumbrunn

The Venturi Company from Monaco is hitting the renewable energy vehicle market full-force. They have three different models already: The Eclectic (a golf-cart looking super eco-car; below), the Astrolab (in between a sports car, and a an eco-car; above), and the Fetish (all-out sports car).

Only the Fetish is in production at the moment, but all of the cars will be limited productions even when they are in full-swing. The Eclectic will have a run of only 200. This seems to be the first time that a car has used more than one renewable energy source at once: both wind and solar in the same car.

The ranges are still small, and the top speed of the Eclectic is only 31 mph, but I think all three cars have arrived as the first practical, production, renewable energy vehicles. Of course the top two models will cost a pretty penny (and have awesome performance to match), but that’s how it is with any new technology.

You can read more, and get all the specs at the Venturi website.

The Discovery channel is 3/4 of the way through their four part series on the car of the future, appropriately called Future Car. The most recent episode was about fuel and hit on everything from ethanol, bio-diesel, hydrogen and solar all the way to having a car powered by air.

A few of the finer details are a little off, but all in all the shows have been great. It’s really cool to see what the designers are thinking about, and what is on the way. Perhaps the most interesting thing for me in this episode on fuel is that a lot of the future is already available now. Of course they showed prototype cars that can do some amazing things, but really the near future of fueling our vehicles is not so much about bringing in new technology, as it’s about getting more people on-board with the advances that are already commercially available like ethanol, biodiesel and hybrids.

One of the great things about cable is that you get more than one chance to see a good show. If you missed any of Future Car, check out the schedule for your second chance.

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