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Renewable Energy

Kylie is a local hero for sticking two fingers to the water company
Urban

“I paid Sydney Water $800 a year — now I get it for free”

Living in a city it can seem hard to kick free from the grid, but in Sydney Australia, Newtown resident Kylie Ahern will soon become the latest environmentalist to live completely off the grid.
“I am currently getting all my water from a series of tanks – one is buried in the backyard and the others are above ground,” Ms Ahern said.“I used to pay $800 a year to Sydney Water, now I get it all for free from my roof.
“I also have a stormwater absorption pit so all the water coming off the roof goes straight into the tanks and then into the pit.

“I am putting solar panels up and installing batteries and my aim is to disconnect from the electricity grid.

“I am in the process of looking for the most energy efficient appliances and I am cutting off my gas as I will be using an electric induction cooktop.

“The coal seam gas situation in this country has been really upsetting, therefore I want to make sure I am not contributing to the problem.

“We are lulled into thinking we need to pay for these services like water and electricity that we can get for free. Sewerage and plumbing is my next task as I can’t get the tanks onto my property just yet but they are something I am definitely aiming for.

“I am expecting all the work to be completed by early next year.” The Newtown resident shared her disdain at the inaction of politicians charged with reducing global emissions and encouraged other like-minded conservationists to follow in her footsteps.

“I have watched politicians over the years do very little to protect our environment and fail to do anything meaningful around reducing our emissions, so I decided that I had to do more,” Ms Ahern said.

“I think most of us want to do more to protect the environment but it’s knowing where to start that’s the challenge.“You don’t have to do a full renovation of your home; you can do little things like buy energy-efficient appliances or use a diverter so excess rainwater goes into your garden.”

The process of creating a self-sustaining property may seem like a daunting or impossible task to some, Ms Ahern insists it is a relatively streamlined process, if you have the right help.

Ms Ahern, recruited the assistance of Chippendale’s Michael Mobbs, who famously took his home off the grid in March, hopes to achieve the same results with her two-bedroom worker’s cottage by early next year.

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Editorial: Don’t hit small solar with new fees in California

Those solar panels you’ve seen glinting on your neighbors’ rooftops throughout California?  If the state’s investor-owned utilities get their way in negotiations with the Public Utilities Commission,, you’ll be seeing a lot less domestic black silicon in the future.

That’s because big utilities are petitioning to radically alter the rules about net metering, the system by which homeowners, schools and businesses that generate excess electrical capacity on a sunny day sell their unused power back to the grid, the same as the utility companies sell it to the rest of us.

Our big power suppliers have the same right to operate under a fair business model as the small homeowner who makes an investment in solar. Few of the latter, except isolated cabin owners and the like, are ever really “off the grid” entirely. They make use of electricity sold to them by Southern California Electric, PG&E and the state’s other large private firms as well, or buy it from the city-owned utilities in cities such as Los Angeles, Pasadena, Burbank and others that operate municipal, taxpayer-owned nonprofit power companies. It’s the big utilities that have to operate the grid — the complex system of power lines, from the big ones coming down from Tehachapi wind farms, Utah coal plants, dams with hydro plants and the like to the small wires that come into your own homes.

But even though those big firms still control 97 percent of the electrical power market in California, they are worried about the tiny but growing group of homeowners and businesses in the state that have chosen to generate some of their own power. So they have a proposal before the California Public Utilities Commission targeting net metering by making it more than twice as expensive for the little guy through fees and smaller payments.

netmeterprocessThose electrons are sold back to the rest of us at the same rate as electricity made by the utilities. So even though it’s true all of us have an interest in maintaining the grid, the proposals are not only not fair — the solar-panel installation industry says it would deeply harm their own business model. And this is not just about staying in business. As U.S. negotiators prepare to head to the Paris talks on climate change next month, all of us have an interest in creating a country with fewer carbon emissions that lead to global warming.

When a similar measure to the one before the PUC was approved in Arizona recently, the solar industry said it saw an immediate 95 percent decline in its business. Homeowners said that it no longer penciled out for them to invest the $15,000 or so it costs to go solar and recoup their invest- ment through energy savings over 10 or so years. Hawaii just passed an anti-solar bill after intense lobbying by that state’s largest utility, and …

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Community

Do what you love, love what you do

do what you love
What is your passion? If money were no object (and just what does that actually mean anyhow???) what would you be doing right now? Now, how can you turn this passion into your living?

Something I enjoy doing is taking pictures, I fully intend on turning this passion into a living. The first thing that makes this possible is I have to take better pictures than the average person, my photos have to be of a quality that someone will want to part with their money to posses one of my photos.

Most EVERYONE has the ability to take pictures with little trouble, nearly everyone has a smartphone and some of the those phones can take some great pictures. But not everyone knows how to take really good pictures, look on most phones and you will find dozens of selfies and mediocre shots.

I did not go to school to learn how to take pictures, what I did was I looked at other photographers to see how they take fantastic pictures, I looked at how they framed their shots, I have learned about lighting (morning and evening tend to be the best times to take outdoor pictures), framing and lighting are the 2 biggies, being in the right place at the right time, I am always making note of a particular place that would make a good shot, but knowing I’ll come back at a time of day when the lighting would make for a great shot.

I have also learned about filters, color enhancing, basically taking a good picture and making it fantastic, something special. This requires a LOT of experimenting, taking lots of pictures, lots and lots. I would say that if I would take 1 picture of a scene, I actually take 20 or more shots of that same scene, using different filters, different angles, sometimes the difference between a mediocre shot and a prizewinning shot is just a matter of a slight angle change.

I also know that some days I may come home with a memory stick full of duds, and that’s OK too. I am not at a point where I can just go out merely to snap pictures, but since the job I do requires me to drive all over west Texas in some very scenic areas, and since I have a very flexible schedule, I have the opportunity to get some wonderful pictures. Honestly I would be taking these pictures anyhow, I love doing it, it’s my passion and in the year I’ve been doing this, my skills have improved greatly.

So now I have all of these pictures, how do I get money for these images? I plan on turning my photos into postcards and such for the tourists that pass through our towns. Living in such a scenic area, much of the income that comes into these towns come directly …

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Energy

Power a house using a waterwheel

The first off-the-shelf waterwheel system which can generate a good supply of electricity from a water fall as little as 20cm

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Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government and True Independence

Meet some of the characters from my next book – Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America, published by Penguin 1st August 2010.
I traveled around America meeting these extraordinary people and writing about their lives. Above all I wanted to find out WHY they live off the grid. In this film you will find author Carolyn Chute, explaining why she lost trust in the system — because she had little money, a hospital refused to let her in to have her baby – who was stillborn as a result. Meet author Alan Wiesbecker, who wrote In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road. He is now living on a beach in Mexico.

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Flee the City – join the Field Lab

John Wells lives in a shack he has grandly titled the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy And Sustainable Living Field Laboratory.

When I visited he told me he had wanted to leave his glitzy fashion photographer world behind, a world of “mounting debt and an overwhelming feeling of being trapped in the life you have chosen.” He was looking for a simple life but a comfortable one

Tension in the world, an unstable economy, high fuel prices, and mind numbing popular culture all added to his feeling of utter futility.
“For me, the real tipping point was the death of my father last year.  That made me sit down and take a serious look at where my path has led me.”
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Energy

Renewable Energy training

Here is a listing of some of the best Renewable Energy training courses around the United States. For a more thorough list, visit the Renewable Energy Training Catalog published by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

Also, check out this blog series from Mother Earth News contributing editor Dan Chiras about finding a green job in the field of renewable energy.

Solar Education Programs

The Evergreen Institute’s Center for Renewable Energy and Green Building

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Pacific Power Seeks grid-tied Renewable Energy

From March 8 thru May, Pacific Power will accept applications for community-based renewable energy funding from its Blue Sky renewable energy program. They cover the states of Oregon, Washington and California.
To be considered in this competitive application process, interested parties must complete and submit an application form, along with supporting materials, by 5 p.m. PDT on May 14.
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