Category — ENERGY

Obama praises Nellis - unaware of flaws

Off-Grid.net has written many stories over the years about the US military’s early-adoption of off-grid energy strategies.  But some army and USAF bases are stymied by the big energy companies when it comes to readying themselves for a big outage caused by anything from solar storms to terrorist attacks.

A recent report from Nevada by Greenwire focuses on a base that carries out some of the Air Force’s most advanced work, including testing and flying drones.The 140 acres of solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base’s 14.2 megawatt array are useless when commercial power is out, thanks to a provision in the agreement with the local utility that lets NV Energy turn off the array if the grid power goes down.

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There are a lot of things you or a professional handyman can do around your home to help cut back on energy use.  That’s something that will benefit both your budget and the environment.  

Small Do-It-Yourself Jobs

Not all green projects are major undertakings. There are simple ways for you or a professional handyman to make your home more energy efficient. Switch out light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs throughout the house. Install occupancy sensors so lighting will come on when people are in the room and automatically turn off when they leave the room. Clean or replace furnace filters once a month. Clean the air conditioner filter regularly. Add insulation to hot water pipes. Install a water filter and quit buying bottled water. Replace your showerhead and faucets with low-flow versions. This won’t reduce water pressure but water consumption and energy costs can be reduced by up to 50%. Insulate the water heater and turn it down to 48 degrees and cut your water-heating bill in half. Install ceiling fans. Weatherize your windows and doors with caulk, weather-stripping and sealants. The average home can lose 30% of its heat or air-conditioning though the windows. Replace the thermostat with a programmable one with a timer.

Watch “the Online carpenter” Mitchell Dillman as he shows off this “green” home improvement project located at 1011 E. Yampa in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (more…)

While US stalls, they're eating our lunch

Beijing  - After a rash of wind turbine malfunctions, China is to “revise” (ie raise) its standards for wind turbine production.

China’s wind power capacity surpassed that of the U.S. in 2009 and the country is planning to further raise the proportion of renewables in the nation’s fast-growing energy consumption, according to Shi Lishan, deputy director of the New and Renewable Energy Department of the National Energy Administration (NEA).

Chinese wind power has long been half the price of Western competitors, but also less reliable.  However, even the best Western small turbines are relatively unreliable, so if China raises its standards, it will become competitive.

China currently has more than 2 billion kilowatts of inland wind power resources and more than 500 million kilowatts offshore.

However “a rising trend of wind turbine breakdowns has been witnessed since 2010,” says a State report.  There were 193  accidents in wind farms in the first 8 months of 2011, according to the report released last week by the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC). It also announced decision to double the solar subsidy forthwith. (more…)

LaMar's off grid cabin

I just love learning how other people live off grid, especially when they are doing it in a very similar way to how I live. LaMar Alexander has done all of this and more, we may be in different places, but we both started out with small and simple systems, cobbling together this and that, building an independent life one piece at a time.
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Solar newbies beware

Don’t believe the awful ads which promise you “free power for $200″, or “build your own solar panel for $200″. Several of them appear on this site from time to time, despite that we are doing everything we can to stop them.  Many are from Chinese spammers, and a particular bunch of conmen called energy4free, or earth4energy or Get-Cheap-Solar-Panels.com, amongst many other aliases. These slimebags ask you to pay for an e-book which directs you to some other sites and offers to sell you components for a solar panel that will never work. Of course it would be quite wrong and immoral to suggest you should click repeatedly on their ads whenever you see the Earth4energy logo. We do not recommend that. (more…)

Time to wrap up warm and get hands dirty

Its time to start culling woodland,scavenging fuel from dumpsters and wearing warmer clothes

Start foraging in Granny’s closet — if forecasts by Deutsche Bank are true, we are heading for =higher energy prices very soon. The bank’s researcher estimates that prices will rise a further 25% by 2015, meaning that the average  household will be spending more than 4% of their disposable income on fuel bills, back to the levels seen following the oil shocks of the1970s. (more…)

The head of one of America’s biggest Utility companies has forecast that it will soon be cheaper to harvest energy from your roof rather than from the grid.

David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, is not your typical power company executive, as becomes clear from his interview with a Yale University  student magazine, e360.

NRG is a Fortune 500 company producing electricity for up to 20 million U.S. households. Crane is still neck-deep in hydrocarbons, with more than 90 percent of NRG’s electricity production coming from natural gas, coal, and oil. Crane  believes the electricity market is about to be transformed by the widespread adoption of solar panels on residential and commercial roofs, and electric cars in garages, (more…)

Utilities can't handle universal solar

Further evidence in favor of Micro-grids and against the so-called Smart Grid.

The runaway take-up of rooftop solar panels in Australia has undermined the electricity supply system, feeding so much power back into the network that it is causing voltage rises that could damage household devices such as computers and televisions. This means we should either rewire every home and every street, to suit the convenience of the big Utility companies, or rethink the way the nation’s energy delivery is organised. What applies to Australia is true elsewhere in the world. (more…)

Less is more

A call for more “microgrids” in America from Amory Lovins, one of the country’s leading thinkers on renewable energy.

Lovins issued a plea for a cellular approach to energy  – and so do we – where mini-grids around the country make it impossible for a vast outage like the ones in the NorthEast last month or the mega-outage in 2003.

In Time Magazine this week, Lovins calls this idea (proposed last year in my book OFF THE GRID) a way of saving the US Grid.  I prefer to see it as a way of superceding the grid, and the whole business model that goes with it.

Lovins does not get into who would own the tiny microgrids that we and many others think should be built.  (more…)