Imagine a personal heating system that works indoors as well as outdoors, can be taken anywhere, requires little energy, and is independent of any infrastructure. It exists – and is hundreds of years old. The hot water bottle could save a great deal of energy and money without sacrificing thermal comfort.
Hot water bottles work both indoors and outdoors. Illustration: Marie Verdeil.
Going off-grid? Think twice before you invest in a battery system. Compressed air energy storage is the sustainable and resilient alternative to batteries, with much longer life expectancy, lower life cycle costs, technical simplicity, and low maintenance. Designing a compressed air energy storage system that combines high efficiency with small storage size is not self-explanatory, but a growing number of researchers show that it can be done.
Continue reading "Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage" »
The steadfast rotating fan has been employed to keep people cool since the eighteenth century, and it remains highly effective, requiring much less energy and providing more comfort than air-conditioning. Cooling people by increasing local airflow is at least ten times more energy efficient than refrigerating the air in a given space, and it also adds the benefit of a personally controlled thermal environment.
If used in combination with air-conditioning, fans could lower energy use by 30-70%, even in incredibly hot climates or during heat waves. Circulating fans, which have become very energy efficient in their design, can be readily and cheaply applied in both new and existing buildings. Recent changes in international comfort standards have paved the way for their comeback.
Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat, which solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce efficiently. To power industrial processes like the making of chemicals, the smelting of metals or the production of microchips, we need a renewable source of thermal energy. Direct use of solar energy can be the solution, and it creates the possibility to produce renewable energy plants using only renewable energy plants, paving the way for a truly sustainable industrial civilization.
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Energy hungry America teaches the world how to build ecological houses.
A dirt cheap and 100 percent ecological house that has all the comforts of an ordinary home, without being connected to the electricity grid, waterworks, sewer system or the natural gas network. It does exist, but in most countries, building one is not allowed.
An Earthship is a completely self-sufficient house that has a natural temperature regulation, without the use of a heating system. The building also generates its own electricity, collects and filters its own drinking water and cleans its own effluent water. The house is partly buried into the earth and is constructed mainly with waste materials; car tyres, aluminium cans and glass bottles. This low-tech building approach is ecologically as well as economically advantageous.
This autumn, the British coastal city of Brighton approved the construction of 16 Earthships. It’s the first time that a European city council has given builders the green light to mass construct this radical ecological housing form. In the United States nearly one thousand Earthships have been built, most of them in the desert of New Mexico. (Pictures: Michael Reynolds)
Continue reading "Heat your house with car tyres and earth" »