Category — EVENTS

Time was, the phrase ‘water powered’ meant driven by the force of a river or torrent. Lately, it acquired a new resonance with the launch of a pocket-sized charger that needs just a few drops of the stuff to make it work.

The Powertrekk  from Swedish company myFC was launched at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, with the slogan ‘Instant Power Anywhere’.

On the down side, the Powertrekk only works with devices that use a USB, but it has the potential to make being off-grid easier. The company says it needs just a tablespoon of water to work. (more…)

Ideology , security, solitude: there are many reasons why people move off-grid. Hitherto “cosmic rays” has not been one of them.

Yet fear of what has been called by NASA ‘a solar Katrina’ is precisely what prompted Larry Rodriguez, 54, and his wife Sandie to flee Florida for a former chicken coop in Pennsboro, West Virginia.

“The bad weather we are having in the world is because of the solar storms now happening because the sun is ramping up,” says Rodriguez. “We are the kind of people that want to be ready for anything and I’m hoping that it isn’t true but all of the signs are in place.”

Grid vulnerable to solar storms

It would be easy to dismiss his concerns as apocalyptic, But the ‘signs’ he refers to are detailed in a series of increasingly urgent statements by NASA, which reveal a very real possibility over the next three years of a solar storm that could knock out the entire power grid, crippling modern society for weeks or even months. (more…)

Eureka, CA is the cheapest town on the Happy list – the list of the top ten places to be happy, as reported in Sunset.com.

The average price of a home in Eureka is $207,000,compared to $569,000 in the town which takes the No 1 spot on the happy list, Salt Spring BC/ Eureka is still considerably cheaper than Creston, CO, number ten on the Happy list and one of the main off-grid centres in the USA. In Creston the average home is $250,000.

Eureka, on the Redwood Highway in Humboldt County, has a population of about 36,000, except during cannabis harvesting when it grows to about 70,000.

Here’s the full list of the happiest places to go off-grid: (more…)

NPR’s All Things Considered show ran a segment on a battle we have been following over the years – between residents of No Name Key Florida. The radio spot is a piece of pro-grid, anti-battery propaganda, talking about the dangers of battery banks and allowing an interviewee to assert it is safer and cleaner to use the grid for power, without running any counter argument to balance it. (Judge for yourself at http://www.npr.org/2010/11/23/131543151/tiny-fla-island-debates-joining-electric-grid)

No Name in Florida is an off-grid Island with 42 inhabitants, featured in my book OFF THE GRID, and some of the newcomers want to bring in grid power to boost their property values. For an excerpt from the book see below. (more…)

Off-Grid.net predicted years ago that the wedding of William and Katie Middleton would finally be announced. This settles, amongst other things, the future of the $10m Herefordshire eco-palace that Prince Charles has been preparing for the happy couple.

We first reported it in 2006.  An old sandstone quarry had been re-opened within the estate as a so urce of stone. Oak was sourced from the Duchy’s Herefordshire woodlands, and  natural slates for the roofs from Wales.  An on-site eco-sewage works will filter waste through a bed of reeds.

(more…)