In my quest to continue finding items of interest I believe Linda would love to see posted during her absence, I came across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and it’s Solar Decathlon’s solar power housing submission from Team China.
Solar Powered Housing Simple Affordable
The U.S. DOE “contest” poses the question, “How to design, build and operate solar powered housing” with emphasis on cost effectiveness and energy efficiency, all the while being pleasing to look at and live in.
Team China has stepped up to the plate addressing the affordability question with excellent, potential results.
As you can see by the video, their solar powered housing provides plenty of outdoor living area, collects and filters rainwater for personal use, all the while using energy efficient, super insulating materials. Their solar power housing naturally ventilates itself and is most definitely a “sustainable design.”
Now to Get Team China’s Solar Powered Housing to Washington
The next step that is vital to competing will be for Team China to disassemble their six recycled shipping containers and get their entry to Washington. This should be a breeze for their team since, conveniently enough, their solar powered housing Y shape use of shipping containers makes for a super simple shipping solution.
The Ability of Light to Produce Electrons, and Thus Electricity, Has Been Known For Over 100 Years.
At the Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratories, scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used. (more…)
MIT researchers have a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.
Daniel G. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, developed a simple method to split water molecules and produce oxygen gas, a discovery that paves the way for large-scale use of solar power.
The researchers developed a new catalyst, consisting of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode. When the catalyst is placed in water and electricity runs through the electrode, oxygen gas is produced. When another catalyst is used to produce hydrogen gas, the oxygen and hydrogen can be combined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power a house or an electric car, day or night.
With Daniel Nocera’s and Matthew Kanan’s catalyst, homeowners could use their solar panels during the day to power their home, while also using the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for storage. At night, the stored hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined using a fuel cell to generate power while the solar panels are inactive.
More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the process into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.
Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.
The Princess Elisabeth Station has been officially inaugurated in Antarctica on February 15th, 2009.
This station is the only polar base operating entirely on renewable energies. It has eight wind turbines from Proven Energy.
It marks a major change, as most stations rely on diesel generators – because no wind turbines, until now, were thought to be robust enough for such extreme conditions. The turbines will endure the most severe weather conditions on Earth.
They will be operating in average winds of 53 mph and winter gusts of over 200mph, while still providing 230V electricity for the stations heating, computers, lights and scientific instruments. The electricity generated is expected to be the highest output of any small wind power system in the world. (more…)
Just as there are huge wind farms now providing backup power for conventional
electricity generation, central solar power towers will likely do the same in
the future. The facilities generate electric power from sunlight by focusing
concentrated solar radiation on a tower mounted receiver. Hundreds of
thousands of small sun-tracking mirrors reflect sunlight to the receiver. In
some technologies, liquid salt is pumped and heated through the receiver and
then stored until power is needed from the plant. The molten salt is then (more…)
In one hour, the Earth receives more energy from the sun than the entire human race
uses in a year.
In 1904, Albert Einstein proved that light was composed of tiny packets of energy
called photons which could be converted to electricity.
Photo Voltaic cells first became essential during the 1950′s Space Race. The first
two Sputniks that went up, died in a little over a week because the transistors were
powered with flash light batteries. The U.S.’s solar powered satellites were an
instant success. Photo voltaic panels still power nearly all satellites and space (more…)
