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Juliette Smith

by Juliette Smith on April 14, 2009 · 4 comments

in ENERGY

dept-of-agriculture
Small beginnings There has been a rush of government announcements for loans to bring off-grid power to both rural and urban areas.

The Department of Agriculture has issued two schemes and the Public Health and Welfare section of the United States code calls for the Energy Secretary to favor projects which include “designing a local distributed energy system that incorporates renewable hydrogen production, off- grid electricity production….in industrial or commercial service.”

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Bullies on the grid

June 3, 2008
Bullies on the grid Ripped-off Britain The top six British energy companies are "failing to compete" and some are stockpiling cheap North Sea gas in summer so they can sell it back at twice the price in the winter months. As a result prices are rising faster in Britain than almost anywhere in Western Europe. Many of the companies holding British gas consumers to ransom are foreign suppliers rationing the country's own gas, and the reason they can get away with it is that the same companies were never ordered to build large strategic gas storage supplies within the UK.

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Danger from the water grid

March 11, 2008
Danger from the water grid Thanks GSK, Pfizer etc. Drinking tap water in America is unsafe. Associated Press has uncovered a massive scandal over pharmaceuticals in the nation's drinking water. “A vast array of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans,” AP found. In fact the figure is far higher – this is all they have been able to prove.

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Masdar – off-grid or off their heads?

February 12, 2008
Masdar – off-grid or off their heads? Where's the car park? The rulers of UAE know better than most that the world's oil supplies are running out. That's why they committed $37 billion to build a city that is totally self sufficient for energy and water, plus a range of other alternative energy projects in the desert outside their capital of Abu Dhabi. Residents are due to start moving in next year, but is it greenwash?

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Green is the new mean

November 19, 2007
Green is the new meanIts not just Prime Minister Gordon Brown who is trying to convince Brits there's money to be made from going green and adopting renewable energy. The Queen recently announced she was installing a ground source heat pump on her Windsor Estate, and she prowls the long corridors at Balmoral switching off lights. Then she changed her mind, because it cost too much. Now Britain's aristocrats find their mean old ways made newly fashionable by the trends towards ecology and recycling. Queen: green or just mean? Frito-Lay's plan to take its Arizona snack factory off the grid are driven by projected energy savings, plus the marketing advantage of being able to say its snacks are solar powered. In New Hampshire, off-grid householder Jay Flanders built his entire house from wood harvested on his property. All over Britain and America, locals are forming Carbon Reduction Action Groups to impose previously agreed penalties on those who save the least. "We used to call it make do and mend " said 91-year-old Edie Churchill who lives on a housing estate in East London, consumes little electricity, still scavenges for wood for her fire, and spends only 10 pounds sterling on her weekly grocery shop.

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Guy Grieve’s survival tips

November 9, 2007
Guy Grieve’s survival tipsPrepare to Survive In The Guardian today, Guy Grieve describes how he lived for a year in Alaska to escape the stifling clutch of a life commuting and paying a mortgage. Unlike Chris McCandless in Into the Wild , Guy survived to tell the tale in his new book Call of the Wild. His approach rings very true to others like him who want to leap from a soft consumer lifestyle to a face-off with all-powerful mother nature. He unerstands his own limitations. That's why he survived. Tips for surviving the wilderness 1. Be realistic about your capabilities. If you are not able to take physical hardship and a degree of pain, don't go.

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Top tents

October 3, 2007
Top tentsSo many tents, so little time The real thing is often exotic - a native American tepee, for example, or Mongolian yurt - and borrowed from nomadic cultures. The top-notch version is usually hand-made from traditional materials to provide room-sized spaces, big enough for beds, or even bathrooms. Some have windows and doors, decorative poles and printed linings (the tent equivalent of wallpaper); a decent tent is dry, waterproof and tough enough to withstand a semi-permanent outdoor life. The versatility, the magic, of the posh tent, is encouraging campers to swap the standard-issue, two-man dome for a spacious tepee or an Indian Maharaja's shikar (the latter forms the basis of Camp Kerala, Glastonbury's 72-tent ...

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The Battle of the Benders

August 15, 2007
The Battle of the BendersBuy it now The Off-Grid web site is serialising Nick Rosen's book, How to Live Off-grid: Journeys Outside the System In this excerpt Nick visits an off-grid community in Devon which is fighting a planning permission battle - on behalf of all of us - for the right to buy some land and build off-grid, low-impact houses. The public enquiry has just finished and the residents of the Benders are awaiting the fateful decision later this year. Now read on. Land Matters: a question of permission I contacted the Land Matters commune in Allaleigh, Devon, via an activist group that helps off-gridders and others win planning permission for their living spaces. I spoke to Charlotte, one of the main organisers,

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Big Water

November 29, 2005
Big WaterThey spray. We pay

TV and papers emphasise what individuals can do about global warming save energy by energy savings method, save water, walk to work. But if industry would mend its profligate ways, we wouldn't have an environmental problem in the first place. Government joins in the chorus, blaming voters but not themselves, and never once criticising industry. The water industry is a case study of waste on a grand scale. All those rotten 19th century water pipes leak around 25% of household consumption every day in the UK, and similar amounts in other advanced economies. The electricity generation and distribution industry is no better, with 50% of all electric power supply lost in the system according to the London Sunday Times.

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