Our electricity company advertises a personalized energy audit service where they supposedly come to your house to identify areas where you can improve your efficiency. With the spike in my bill the last months I thought Id give it a try. In my mind I thought they’d come over and evaluate things like the doors and windows, the attic insulation, AC ductwork etc and give me a rundown of the things it would make sense to upgrade. Instead I just received a phone call telling me I could try turning the thermostat up to 78 and run my pool pump for fewer hours.
this is the farm in the swiss alps. some of the pics of the trucks hauling the sections up the switchbacks (including the huge blades pre-assembled) are incredible.
There is more and more resistance here against this kind of installations. Ironically, a lot of nature-protecting associations are hell-bent against it, and make life very difficult for developers. It’s a miracle that they managed to build this one in such a high area, probably before real resistance rose among the population against this stuff. High mountain areas like this one are usually very protected.
One of the major problems with wind installations in mountains is that the same channels that can make a spot work all but lock any bird flight paths into the same flow. At a Great Lakes installation, you can identify a migratory path and simply relocate 4-5 km, same wind, problem solved. But in places like that it is a zero sum trade off between the green energy and many of the environmental impacts.
Wind in general has reached a point of NIMBY problems in many areas, often because the industry has been inconsistent in dealing with those concerns.
well the tipping point is now here for renewable energy. No, they’re not pretty to look at. But they have to be installed somewhere if we’re going to try and harness those resources for electrical generation. What better place than the top of a mountain away from people’s homes.
Personally, I want to buy a piece of properly with water running through it. a well-created sluice gate and water turbine with the right flow of water can generate up to 40A of 120V power consistently to be totally self-sufficient.
There is surprisingly little use of run-of-the-river hydroelectric in the UK, which is one of the generating sources where there may be a real need for an environmental compromise. Compared to the alternatives, run of the river can be fairly benign
I’m not following this, thinking that’s supposed to read “drought”?
most of the hydroelectric projects here are done by damming rivers in remote areas. That said, there’s a few within 50km of my home in Greater Vancouver that were built in the 20/30’s during expansion into this area.
This has created some very user-friendly lakes in the area that are quite popular during this time of year. Also helps manage the water levels of the Stave and Alouette rivers during freshet…
Happens every year, the difference is the lack of planning for the controls and rust I mentionned before. (I can not remember a year when Tricastin hasn’t been cut down in the summer).
I’d love to be able to do something like that. Environment agency are pretty hot on it though especially if you get into the realms of dams or diverting flow, even temporarily.
There’s a guy at work who bought a mill. The wheel generates when there’s enough flow. He’s now installing solar to back it up further. Battery storage too. A big middle finger to paying for energy.
Definitely been worst here but I’m down stream to the nuclear plants so what I experience doesn’t weight very heavily. July was very dry pretty much everywhere but I can not say about the spring (here it was very dry and strange).
I was expecting earlier cuts and pipe bans.
Being from Devon reservoirs are always down by now in that region, Wales normally does a lot better.
I have a 1500W solar panel and controller on top of my little 19ft RV. dual 12V batteries inside, more than sufficient for charging devices and operation of the RV including the furnace during cooler temps. I’ve converted all of the lights in the RV to 12V LED, about 3W each when running.
I’ve seen the WaterLily online, neat little invention…
Fridge and stove run off LPG, as does the 5.7L engine.
Cool device. One dry bag for the device and a USB battery pack, which it was able to keep charged to full. Really useful for a canoe trip, where of course you are travelling on the power source.
Solar Energy would be the best but the land needed is one drawback. Singapore is buying 15% of our energy needs with the huge Solar project in Australia. And while it seems ridiculous to be transporting solar power from thousands of KM away but even if Singapore has money to build the infrastructure ourselves, we just don’t have the land, there was an unofficial calculation that to cover Singapore’s energy needs, at least 1/3 of Singapore’s land need to be use for the panels.
