Micro Hydro Power Improves Local Communities

A village with 58 households who had never seen a light bulb in their house filled with light. Children no longer studying by candlelight or burning wood.

Source: ecopreneurist

Installation of the micro hydro plants has multiple impacts on the lives of rural population. In rural areas
where people typically depend on forest wood for fuel, micro hydro power can diminish the environmental degradation caused by cutting trees as well as reduce health risks such as respiratory and eyes infections. Micro hydro plants also give economically and environmentally sound options by creating green jobs in the areas where people have scarcity of income generation.

Northern parts of Pakistan are good examples of the viability of these projects or rural and hard to reach locales. They are especially suited to area with plentiful sources of water but which lack facility of electricity connection from the national grid due to extremely hard terrain. Experience from installation of micro-hydro power plants shows that investments in this field are not only economical, but also exciting in terms of new jobs for local communities and service providers. The micro hydro power plants can provide small scale business opportunities for both the local companies as well as to local communities.

A small 15 KV capacity plant can easily provide hydro electricity to 60 to 80 households in a hard, hilly location. A locally made turbine costs 200,000 to 300,000 PKR (2,381- 3,571 USD) to install. The small project also needs distribution lines and polls to supply electricity to the households. In addition, two people can be easily trained to maintain the plant locally. A village with 60 to 80 households can collect monthly cash saving of 4,000 PKR (48 USD) by collecting 50 PKR (less than 1 USD) from each household, which will be enough to pay the monthly salaries to two local persons @ 1,000 PKR (12 USD) in a village. There are no expenses on recurring costs such as fuel or monthly billing, so communities are able to net up to 24, 000 PKR  (286 USD) per year. A small shop for electricity appliance such as light bulbs, switch boards, radio and even television, etc. can also provide income generation opportunities at local level.

Farming communities are also able to utilize the water of hydro power plant in number of ways. Water can be diverted from the plant to fields for activities like kitchen gardening, multi cropping and fish ponds. This is particularly beneficial in areas which mainly depend upon rain water for conventional crops production. In Pakistan, where unexpected monsoon rains and flooding result in lose of human lives and precious assets every year, micro hydro power plants give an excellent source for disaster mitigation through storage of rain and river water, particularly in the northern parts of the country. Experts are of the view that due to a lack of water storage and rain water harvesting arrangements, excessive rains triggered flash floods in Pakistan this monsoon season  that gave less time to the people in KPK province to evacuate from flood inundated areas.
Micro hydro power is one of the best means of enterprise development for local communities and investment for green investors. Investment in micro hydro power production can be seen as a means to produce green and sustainable entrepreneurs and reduce the risks of investment losses.

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Replace Your Plastic Bags and Water Bottles with Reusables

We can reduce load on our current energy system by recycling and cutting down on disposable products.

Plastic water bottles and bags are one of the most consumed disposable items. We can cut their demand by adopting reusable bags and reusable water bottles.

THE PROBLEM WITH PLASTIC

Plastic bags and water bottles are damaging to the environment for several reasons. First of all, it takes a tremendous amount of energy, water, and resources to produce these single-use items. Even paper bags--which, unlike plastic, are biodegradable and compostable--are damaging to the environment because they use so much energy to produce and require trees to be cut down for their production. A good article about the pros and cons of paper and plastic bags can be found here (although the best choice is always reusable!).

Even though plastic bags and water bottles can be recycled, the vast majority of them end up in landfills or as litter in our neighborhoods, parks, and waterways. According to reuseit.com, 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year. Anywhere from 3 percent to less than 1 percent of these bags are recycled. We do a bit better with water bottles, recycling about 20 percent of them in the US. According to treehugger.com, Americans buy 50 billion bottles of water each year, and this number is increasing. That means that even if the percentage of bottles that are recycled remains consistent, the total number of bottles going to the landfill will still go up.

Plastic that is thrown away instead of recycled can have myriad negative consequences on the environment. Plastic doesn't biodegrade, so when we throw it away, it never decomposes into an organic substance that can be absorbed into the soil. Rather, plastic photo-degrades, meaning that after it is exposed to the sun for a very long time, it breaks into millions of miniscule particles that go into the soil and release toxins, harming ecosystems and contaminating plants and animals. This is in turn harmful to humans who eat these plants and animals.

Plastic bags are 100% recyclable, as are plastic water bottles. And while recycling is a better alternative than sending those bags and bottles to the landfill, the process of recycling takes up a lot of energy too. So what's the solution? Go reusable!

REUSABLE SOLUTIONS

There are tons of great options out there for replacing your plastic bags and bottles with reusable versions. Always forget your reusable grocery bags at home? Find a good selection of roll-up reusable bags that easily fit in your purse, briefcase, or backpack. These bags can last for years and save hundreds of bags from the landfill each year. Most grocery stores sell reusable bags as well, and you can keep of few of these sturdy bags in your car so you always have them on hand.

For water, carrying filtered tap water in a reusable bottle is a much better option than buying bottled water. The Environmental Working Group recently released their 2011 report of various brands of bottled water. They found that the vast majority of bottled water brands don't provide information about at least one of three important questions: where does the water come from; is it purified, and if it is, how; and have tests found any contaminants in the water. Nine of the ten best-selling national brands of bottled water didn't answer at least one of these questions, and only filtered tap water got the highest scores for purity. Plus, bottled water costs up to 1,900 times more than tap water, so drinking filtered tap water from a reusable bottle is the obvious choice for the environment, your health, and your wallet!

When selecting a reusable water bottle, choose a stainless steel bottle, which will not leach toxins into your water. If you do choose a plastic bottle, make sure you buy one that is BPA free.

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Solar Powered Stirling Engines

The sun is the Earth's most abundant and primary source of energy, light and heat. It powers and shapes our ecosystems, natural cycles and seasons. In short, it sustains the world around us. Even the way the sun’s energy interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere determines our weather patterns, rainfall, plant, and vegetation growth. Solar energy is at the root of most forms of energy that humans use for power. Scientific American magazine states, “The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for one year. Solar energy’s potential is off the charts.” The sun’s energy, known as solar radiation, can be converted through technology, into forms of power, such as solar-thermal (or heat) and electricity.

Stirling engine an age old technology integrated with latest technology made it a great green energy source. Stirling engine is traditionally classified as an external combustion engine, as all heat transfers to and from the working fluid take place through the engine wall. This is in contrast with internal combustion engine where combustion process takes place inside of piston. Stirling engine invented in 1816 as an industrial prime mover to rival the steam engine, its practical use was largely confined to low-power domestic applications for over a century. Stirling engine lost its popularity because of weight and efficiency.

In recent era it became use full again with a genius idea. If input energy, to heat up engine, comes for free efficiency doesn’t matter. If solar energy concentrated at a point and supplied to stirling engine coupled with and alternator can produce free electricity. Biggest issue for this kind of systems is keeping focus on engine.

Placed at the focus of a parabolic mirror a Stirling engine can convert solar energy to electricity with efficiency better than non-concentrated photovoltaic cells, and comparable to Concentrated Photo Voltaics. On August 11, 2005, Southern California Edison announced an agreement with Stirling Energy Systems to purchase electricity created using over 30,000 Solar Powered Stirling Engines over a twenty year period sufficient to generate 850 MW of electricity. These systems, on an 8,000 acre (19 km2) solar farm will use mirrors to direct and concentrate sunlight onto the engines which will in turn drive generators.

The Stirling Energy Systems SunCatcher™ is a 25kW solar power system consisting of a dish-concentrator that tracks and focuses solar energy onto a Power Conversion Unit, which utilizes a Stirling engine to convert solar energy into grid-quality electricity. SunCatcher™ has several unique and differentiating attributes including zero water required for power production, modular and scalable system architecture, and terrain flexibility up to 10 percent.

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Get Rewards for Saving Money on Your Energy Bill

source: mashable
Giving people free stuff is a great way to convince them to do something, especially when they get that free stuff just by cutting down their energy bills.
Earth Aid is a web app that operates a lot like Mint.com for your energy bill. Signing up for the free service will allow it to read your meter and track your output over time, giving you an online energy budget. The more energy you save on your electric, water, and gas bills, the more points you earn. These points can then be redeemed for rewards from local businesses and big brands such as Starbucks and Dove. The goal is to help you decrease your energy use and save some cash month-to-month.
Earth Aid recently received more than $4 million in Series A funding and has partnered with major institutions like the U.S. Green Building Council. The council uses the web app to make sure LEED-certified buildings continue to maintain their eco-friendly standards.
But the app doesn’t just rely on outside funding. “We’ve been making money,” said Earth Aid CEO Ben Bixby. “We’re really serious about finding a sustainable way — not just environmentally but economically, to deliver these solutions and this opportunity to people.” Bixby explained that Earth Aid gets paid when it helps people save energy. It earns a commission when users choose certain rewards products or when the company’s partners get new customers through the app.

Earth Aid is in the midst of launching a new version of the web app that also works on mobile browsers. New features include ways to break up your energy bill so you can read it by calendar month or in smaller increments. By moving away from the convention of seeing an energy bill once a month, Bixby hopes that usage becomes a daily conversation rather than a monthly headache.

The app also includes group features, where you can challenge and converse with friends or take advantage of the “automated bragging” feature, Bixby’s affectionate way of referring to social network integration. Depending on personal proclivities, users can share all of their usage updates or just share when they show improvements.

One major problem with Earth Aid is that rewards are based on a personal baseline calculated from your own energy usage history. This means rewards are given based on personal performance as opposed to overall output. Someone who maintains a low output won’t get rewarded as much as someone who cuts back, even if they still use more energy. It’s a problem that Earth Aid is working to fix.

There is also the question of intent. If someone cuts their output just to win rewards, isn’t that sending the wrong message about sustainability? Bixby understands there are some people that will use Earth Aid just for the rewards and others that are actively trying to monitor their ecological footprint. “Whether it’s important for you to save energy and the rewards are a bonus, or if it’s important for you to just win awards, the outcome is the same,” Bixby said. “We’re trying to build an app that serves all people. Those that are green already and people that are just trying to save money for the fun stuff in life.”

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A Twin-Cell Solar Panel

Source: technologyreview
A start-up called Stion will receive $1 million from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop a new type of low-cost, high-efficiency solar panel. The company will use the new funding to make solar panels that combine two types of solar cells, which will allow the panels to efficiently convert a wide range of the solar spectrum into electricity.
Stion already makes thin-film solar panels, a type of solar panel that is generally less efficient than conventional, crystalline silicon solar panels, but that can cost much less to manufacture—in some cases half as much. The new panels are meant to be just as efficient as conventional silicon ones, but still significantly cheaper to manufacture. The funding is part of the Obama administration's recently announced Sun Shot initiative, which has the goal of reducing the cost of installed solar panels by 75 percent, to make solar power competitive with fossil fuels.
Stion's existing panels convert 12 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity. This is a high figure for thin-film solar panels, which typically have efficiencies that range from 6 to 11 percent. The new panels use a tandem-solar-cell design to increase efficiencies to 15 to 18 percent, says founder and chief technology officer Howard Lee.
Lee won't say exactly what it costs Stion to make its first-generation solar panels, but he says the company is now "close to being competitive" with First Solar, the world's biggest thin-film solar-panel maker. First Solar's low costs and relatively high efficiencies have made it the only thin-film manufacturer to rival the production capacity of the largest conventional solar-panel makers. (The panels are cheaper than conventional silicon panels, but less efficient.)

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Nanosolar

The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.

Cost has always been the burdening factor weighing down the mass application of solar technology at nearly $3 per watt. In order to compete with the energy produced from coal solar has been in need of finding a way to shrink its costs down to $1 per watt. Nanosolar's cells use absolutely no silicon as is the standard for current solar production and the efficiency of the PowerSheet cells are competitive with the traditional systems as well. The golden kicker, the cost to produce these solar coatings is a mere 30 cents per watt!!

Nanosolar coatings are thin layer of paint that can tranfer sunlight into power quite efficiently. Imagine the possibilities, from solar coated shingles to solar lined windows to solar powered cell phones and ipods. Solar powered buildings and homes might just become standard in the future thanks to this innovative technology by Nanosolar Inc. The almighty dollar will launch these thin-film solar cells into worldwide applications thanks to the fact that it's actually cheaper than burning coal. The underlying technology for these solar cells is nothing new, having been around for decades, but Nanosolar has created the actual technology to manufacture and mass produce the solar sheets. The solar cells are produced by a solar printing press of sorts rolling out these aptly named PowerSheets rapidly and cheaply. The machines apply a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil reducing production costs to a mere tenth of current solar panels and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute.

Nanosolar has built what is soon to be the largest solar plant in world in San Jose and once full production begins early next year the facility is capable of producing a whopping 430 megawatts per year, more than the combined total of every other solar manufacturer in the U.S. The biggest problem for Nanosolar is keeping up with the impending solar boom. California recently launched the Million Solar Roofs initiative providing tax breaks and rebates to encourage the installation of $100,000 solar roofs per year for a solid decade. Thanks to the innovative approach Nanosolar is poised to launch the solar revolution and we the consumer stand to benefit greatly as the result.

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