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

My quest started with trying to learn more about wave power. This is an area of renewable energy that is really in a frontier stage. Looking around the web at all of the different designs feels like what it must have been like in the dawn of the era of human flight. There are so many designs, and so many approaches, and at the moment it’s not clear which ones could work, and which ones are just another crazy guy strapping cloth wings on his back and jumping off a cliff to an early grave. Admittedly, today’s wave power designers have history and computers on their sides, but the variety of approaches is really impressive. Here’s a list of what I found: Salter’s Duck, CETO, Wave Dragon, OWC (oscillating water column), Pelamis, and the Mighty Whale. The last three are discussed in an article here.

It seems that most experts believe that wave power has not yet arrived. There is no debate that there is immense power available in waves and in the ocean in general, but due to the difficulty of operating in the harsh ocean environment and the limited availability of qualified on-shore sites, wave power looks like it’s a resource for the future. There is hope though. Quite a few prototypes of varying designs are in real-world testing right now, so clearly some people think they are on the right track. The prototype of the Wave Dragon is scheduled to finish it’s test run mid 2007, and I can’t wait to see the final results.