Passive Geothermal Heating Reduces Fuel Bills Anywhere
Posted on August 3, 2009
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While active geothermal energy that produces steam for electric production is restricted to unique environments where magma reaches near the crust, passive geothermal heating can be used anywhere. It works by using the heat of the Earth to lower the amount of heating required in your home or business. This is possible because the mass of the entire planet is kept at a constant 50F/20C or so.
All that’s required is a long length of pipe and excavation equipment. Usually this snakes through a residential yard in a “closed loop” configuration. Here water or anti-freeze is circulated within this closed system that allows a lot of surface contact with the subsoil. The other end is attached to the foundation of your home or business. The heat is then radiated up through the house itself. Open loop systems are less commonly used and cycle water from the bottom of a pond. This requires less pipe and digging, but may be subject to local environmental regulations.
Solar Power Innovation: Cheap Electric on the Horizon?
Posted on June 22, 2009
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Since people are going to need energy, eliminating carbon dioxide emissions will require adopting renewable energy. However, the cost has been prohibitively high for most of the commonly used and available methods. Home generation has many possibilities, including getting a check from the power company for excess power that you’ve sold back.
The best and only way to make its manufacture as cheap as possible. Several recent innovations in solar technology have brought humankind to the brink of affordable solar power that can be used anywhere. Flexible film solar can be built into just about anything, from awnings to bikinis. New advances is how to put the flexible sheets together has recently come from an American company that literally prints the solar cells onto a substrate at dizzyingly fast rates. Even solar paint is on the horizon.
The next step to really getting solar everywhere as it should be it to have similar revolutionary advances in storage technology.
Islands in Danger of Climate Change Destruction
Posted on May 29, 2009
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One of the direct consequences of climate change is the rise in sea levels. Observations since the mid-19th century, though convouluted, show a global average of about 20cm/8 inches in that time. Some coral atolls in the Pacific Island nations of Micronesia are already disappearing. This is demonstrated by the Maldives, Kiribati and Tuvalu – all nations that may disappear beneath the waves .
With the onset of increasingly frequent and fierce cyclones or hurricanes, the islands are physically weakened and begin to sink a bit. Even a .5cm/1/8 inch increase in the level of the seas could half of some small islands to disappear by 2012. The most populous island threatened by 2020 is New Guinea and it’s mirror twin Papua New Guinea, home to many of the last “undiscovered” tribes. Because of climate change, that first contact may be an evacuation of the island observed after inundation with rising sea waters.
Hello Everybody!
Posted on May 22, 2009
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Welcome to our blog. Please help us make sustainable development a reality.