Shifting Solutions

For those of you who are still looking for that special gift to give this season!

Why not a gift of solar?

Solar gift giving solutions for Do It Yourself home solar systems can make a fun weekend project for any home handy person to accomplish. The directions included in both video and manual forms are easy to follow and include such things as showing where to buy the materials you need locally and cheaply. It tells you step by step how to assemble those materials and install the completed project on your homes roof and hook it up to your buildings power grid. What a way to save money, both in the home solar panels and in your monthly utility bills…. a PERFECT gift! Check out the highlighted link for more information on this and other gift giving ideas!

Click this link HOME SOLAR POWER SYSTEMS AND RESIDENTIAL WIND POWER. DIY Kits, books and home solar products

Other gift giving ideas are good resources in reading materials!

We have a whole library of books and articles on home solar power systems, residential wind power, sustainable living, green construction and renwable energy.

Learn how to make your home, energy efficient, build green project around the home, and a lot more on this up coming wave of “going green”!

Click the link above for more information and details

Give the gift of Illumination !

We have so many solar products to choose from for in and around a home, such as solar garden lights, christmas light strings, back packs, battery chargers for cell phones and GPS units, shed lights and security lights. Many mopre items too numerous to mention here! Click the link above, for more information on these perfect gift giving ideas!

Yeh I know, totally on the wrong section for health, what can I say, I get distracted easily. Just so many interesting things in sites like that.

Any of you understand what this paper is trying to say?

Well, it’s all kind of nano this and nano that. Read the article and check it out yourself if you wish, all it’s saying is they are developing the technology for micro particles that can capture the sun rays and convert that to energy that is so small, you could spray paint a building with it.

However if you have ever bought anything electronic these days, you know it’s outdated the day you take it home. Soon it’ll be the same with solar, but we all have to make a beginning. There are kits available that can show you how to build a solar panel in a weekend. You can begin saving energy costs within days. Click the link and find out more on renewable energy systems and wind power generator systems. Also the library here has great reading material for all kinds of sustainable living ideas, check it out.

The essence of this batteries breakthrough is that high energy density

The inside of Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal that is mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. Ceramatec calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

You may not be startled, but you should be, I was, it’s totally amazing. These are the most energy-dense batteries available today,

Compare these to the previous huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Did you really get that? Read it again….. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. Now that’s pretty darn cool….

And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles — one per day for a decade — you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they’re finished in a year or so.

How do you recharge? By tapping your renewable energy system such as home solar panels or wind power generator ( like a windmill) . It’s just like plugging in your cell phone or iPod, only you plug in your house.

Wow, I’m just getting started…… more on this exciting development tomorrow…tune in.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewable s,”

It’s well known that Solar Energy has been around now for a very long time. However it has been very expensive to purchase, setup and utilize. That is until now! The cost are tumbling, dr4iven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. First Solar, an Arizona based company can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., has plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic. Lately there has been a new surge in funding for new technology and far more interest in alternative forms of energy as world markets of oil prices continue to climb and supply is becomes very unstable.

So now we can bring together these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — which will have a deep and profound impact for oil-strapped America.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables,” said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. “They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward.”

President Obama proposed, in his economic stimulus package; “Why not just upgrade to a so-called “smart grid” ? Well…there are complications, Nocera said.

“First you have to rebuild the grid because the one we have now is a creaky machine from the 1920s, and we keep trying to retrofit it,” he said. “Then you’re going to have computers trying to manage the energy, which brings up issues like security. You have to make it really secure so you don’t have people hacking into things. And then politics. Just wait until you try to run power lines through someone’s backyard.”

“I can’t imagine anything more secure than generating my own energy with the sun at my house, and now I’ll have a way to store it. It’s the ultimate in security, and the ultimate in control.”

But as home owners, we the people need not wait for the Fed’s to come up with and implement a new plan on a national level. We can begin this new energy revolution by ourselves, individually, doing so with with small-scale electrical generation like a wind power generator or a home solar solar system, Imagine this taking place in millions of individual homes, as opposed to say… today’s large-scale power generation from a handful of giant power plants…. We could worry a lot less about what’s called “point failure” on the grid. That’s when a single component gets knocked out and shuts off power to a whole region. California-style rolling blackouts would be history.

The threat of terrorism has heightened the worry. But wide distribution of batteries in homes would virtually eliminate it.

OH…. there is so much more…. tune back tomorrow!

The U.S. Electrical Grid is Like the “Third World,”

Mr. Bill Richardson, the former energy secretary, at one time compared the U.S. electrical grid as “third world,” and he wasn’t so far off the truth of it. I find it an aging relic of a century-old approach to providing inefficient energy and at the same time a security risk nationally that could tempt any fool with an adverse agenda on his or her mind.

As individual home owners, we CAN, each of us, make a difference and BEGIN a new era in how we generate and use ENERGY for our ourselves. We can start by helping to take a bit of the load off the U.S. Electrical Grid through electricity production and storage at home with such use of DIY residential wind power or home solar power systems. Consider this an effort on your part to not only provide your own electrical, store and save your own energy and save a lot of money by replacing your utility company, but reducing the eventual cost the Feds, might eventually spend on repairs and upgrading this antiquated system, which we’ll all end up paying for in tax’s anyway, when they do!

BUT BACK TO THE BATTERY : This new battery design has come from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. This innovative design, according to the developers, promises to reduce dependence on tour antiquated power grid system, by allowing us to have installed or install our own renewable energy systems! As well, now with this battery, we can store the energy we produce for longer periods of time, and will not need to replace the batteries near so often as the traditional batteries system currently used.

Oh there is so much more I can say about this new find! Tune back tomorrow for more………

You ask, how is Google using Google Earth to better the environment?

What Google has done is create a converted version of Google Earth for those in the renewable energy industry. This new version still gives us, the lowly, all the same fun features, but where they changed it is how it now also incorporates all protected areas. In the ingenious way, the developers of these renewable energy systems should be able to see that the 50,000 square acre plot that looks like a barren desert but would be a perfect site for a solar farm is actually the habitat of some endangered species. O my, won’t the environmentalists be happy with this news!

This new tool is they now call “Path to Green Energy”. It is available to anyone, at least for now, and it’s still FREE, which means, yes, you can use it.

This tools value is really rather simple in that it creates a very clear profile of the land to help the developers in their decisions as to where they should put up their renewable energy system platforms without drawing any criticism from anyone. Oh and there is more…. It can also help the government agencies and our utility companies map out areas for electrical lines and any other thing their imaginations can come up with.

Go figure … why is it then that the huge and often funny online fights between Google, MSN and Yahoo has been such a lopsided fight for so long? The “Path to Green Energy” tool just confirms why it is that Google still controls the online markets.

Ah well…. check out the resource section a the link above, and find some better reading material than this! Mean while, you all have fun!

All Road’s Lead to Google , including Green Energy.

How many of you think that Google is the Pre-eminate online search engine? Google has tremendous resources, including wealth. Even right now while we all struggle with the economy and many business’s face declining revenues, Google has reported huge profits, Does this tell you anything about Google?

In no need to slow down, then, Google continues to pump much of it’ vast financial resources into free tools for you and me to play and have fun with, and waste a lot of time with too!

One such free program Google has come with is Google Earth, possible not earth shattering news, it’s been around for a little while already. What it does is use a composite database of images to let you look at various places in the world. Most folks always check out their own home first , then check o0ut their girlfriends or Ex wife’s place, their place of work and the whatever. Now blasting away time surfing Google Earth can be hugely entertaining, the company now has decided to make real, honest to god, good use of the program as it relates to the renewable energy debate.

Gosh, darn, time slips away, gotta close Google Earth, it hampered my time, now I can’t finish this article…

Tune in Tomorrow, to find out what Google is doing with Google Earth and Green energy!

In the mean time, check out some books on Green Energy and what the government is currently doing to bring us environmentally friendly energy and how that might affect the homeowners renewable energy systems.

All Roads Lead to Google, including Green Energy !

One of the great things in working in the renewable energy systems field, is you get to hear a lot of stories about the POWER OF SUSTAINABLE THINKING. Google must have read the book you see to the left here too! We all know by know, and if you don’t you soon will, that Google Earth is a very popular and very free online tool that’s available for everyone to use and enjoys playing around with. Oh, and did I say it was free? Umm, I did didn’t I? Well it’s true, there ARE still some free things in this world and that’s one of them. It’s a lot fun! .

Now, Google is spending some of it’s vast resources to map sites for solar and wind farm developers. Why? They are trying to be peace makers I guess, they wish to use it in an effort to cut off disputes.

How ironic is it that the renewable energy expansion finds itself having to sort out some unusual conflicts that keep showing up. For those less informed, the renewable energy projects are frequently opposed , quite lamentably by…can you guess? You got it, the environmentalist! Just look at what happening to many of the wind farms, they consider the wind mills to be harmful to birds. Another argument is that solar farms break up the local ecological environment for the amount of acres they require. The ones laughing , I am sure are the oil, coal and nuclear industries. But what gets me , is that all these industries have a similar impact on our environment, and often much worse!

Now I say that that is short term thinking! If the environmentalists were thinking straight, they would realize that, Passive solar or wind farms do far less damage than pit mining, say, and would soon displace, oil rigs, coal pits and nuclear facilities, all of which produce harmful environmental conditions. Ask you self this, if they are concern about birds, how many birds die in the pollution infested air, because they can’t breath? Come to think of it, how many of us, will soon die too early because of the toxic air we breath?

Well, I kind of strayed there a little didn’t I? Now I have run out time , so tune in tomorrow, I’ll tell you what Google is spending their money on….

Wind Shear

Towers are most commonly used to install the wind power generator. The biggest reason is due because of the height where there is less turbulence, due to decreased friction of the moving air mass and the earth’s surface. The higher it is placed means that the surface effects decrease and the wind speed increases. Wind shear is the factor between the increase in wind speed and placement height. The equation most commonly used to represent the wind shear model is a power law relationship.

V2/V1 = H2/H1 a

The, “V” represents wind velocity, the “H” represents height, with the subscript numbers representing a specific height and the wind speed. Alpha (a) is the wind-shear coefficient (wind speed increase with increased height and the subscript numbers representing a certain height and its wind speed). Alpha (a) is the wind-shear. Installing wind power generators on a taller tower, then, exposes them to increased wind speeds and also reduces turbulence-induced wear and tear-and associated maintenance costs. Just as carpet creates more dragging friction. Compared to a polished hardwood floor, rough terrain causes more friction with the air than a field that is smooth. A flat and smooth topography such as open fields or a body of water has a low wind-shear coefficient (a = 0.1 to 0.15), while a hilly, wooded, or developed region with lots of buildings will have a higher wind-shear coefficient (a = 0.3 to 0.6). So in a real application, your wind power generator will have higher wind shears if you don’t adhere to the 30/500 siting rule. You will need to know the wind-shear coefficient at the sire where you place your tower , for it is key to evaluating tower economics. Read Paul Gipe’s book, Wind Power ( listed on my web site at the link above, under reading resources), or Mick Sagrillo’s article in HP40 for help in estimating your wind-shear coefficient (see Access). The Wind-Shear Coefficients table (above) gives general guidelines for estimating wind shear.

Wind-Shear Coefficients

A Description
0.1 Perfectly smooth (calm water)
0.2 Flat grassland or low shrubs
0.3 Trees or hills, buildings in area
0.4 Close to trees or buildings
0.5 Very close to trees or buildings
0.6 Surrounded by tall trees or buildings

Next Article is about Tower types, please check back