Here are my top 10 predictions for 2012. These are less readings of the tea leaves or the entrails of goats and chickens and more simple extrapolations of patterns in progress. Altho that may be the way effective oracles. They just masked their observations with hocus pocus, mumbo-jumbo, and guts. This list runs a gamut [...]
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Tweet To paraphrase Bob Dylan,”The answer my friend, is storage of the wind.” We have long been saying that the question is not: “Can clean, renewable and sustainable energy power the grid?” It is: “How can we harness clean, renewable and sustainable energy systems to power the grid?” As Matt Wald observed in Taming [...]
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Tweet I will be presenting Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011. The festival is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott. [...]
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Tweet The Vanguard I satellite was and is remarkable in a number of ways: it’s the fifth publicly known launched satellite, the first to use solar power, and, as of this writing, the longest-lasting artificial satellite, at 53 years and counting. Six solar cells powered a 5-milliwatt transmitter (a second transmitter was powered by a battery). [...]
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Tweet I am presenting “Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes,” a discussion of the hidden costs, or “economic externalities,” of nuclear power, coal, and oil, and the non-obvious benefits of wind, solar, marine hydro and efficiency at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011. The festival [...]
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Tweet Earth Day, 2010, I looked to the future on Popular Logistics. In 2009, I wrote about water pollution and agricultural waste in the Chesapeake. Today I am looking at the present and recent past. While a comprehensive look at where we are can be found on the web pages of the World Watch [...]
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Waste Equals Cost. Less Waste Equals Equals Lower Costs. People frequently ask me about waste in Solar PV. Clearly, given that no fuel is consumed, no waste is produced from the use of a solar energy system to generate electricity. PV solar modules are not flammable (below something like around 1,000o C) so [...]
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If you think there are zero direct emissions from the production of electricity from PV solar modules, YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. There are however, indirect emissions associated with production, transport, installation and refresh / recycle are dependent on the technologies used in those processes. Most are associated with the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power [...]
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The latest news about Vermont Yankee – The leak of Cesium-137 is not a new leak. From VermontBiz.com (click here) or the Burlington Free Press (here). “In a statement issued yesterday, Vermont Yankee said that recent news reports have focused less on the tritium resolution and more on the other isotopes found in the soil [...]
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Abstract. By burning fossil fuels we have put 3.6 trillion tons of Carbon Dioxide, CO2 in the atmosphere1 in the last 200 years – most in the last 60. This has changed the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from 270 parts per Million, ppm, to 390 ppm, an increase of approximately 31%. This increase of atmospheric [...]
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Seth Woody reports from the Green Inc. blog at the Times Samsung, the Japanese conglomerate best known to Americans for its televisions and cellphones, is jumping into the American solar business. Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility serving much of the northern and central parts of the state, asked regulators last week to approve [...]
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Solar power’s incremental steps forward keep coming faster and faster, and not on a single vector: large arrays to power the grid, specific installations where wiring is inefficient or impractical, and for small devices. Cassie Rodenberg, writing at PopularMechanics.com, writes about another step forward with solar power for relatively small devices. From Solar-Powered Circuits Breakthrough [...]
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Earlier today one of my friends handed me a copy of some satire published in the New York Post, a tabloid in the tradition of the London rags, on the subject of “Climate-Gate.” At about the same time, Roger Saillant, co-author of Vapor Trails, who heads the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value at Case Western [...]
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Solar Kinetics’ Single-Element Stretched- Membrane Dish. 7 Meter diameter. Image via Wikimedia Commons. We’re trying to sort out if this is the same Solar Kinetics firm responsible for the Electric 7 electric vehicle design. (Images of and explanation of construction process here). Following are some images of a completed Electric 7: More images of the [...]
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Larry D. Moore gallery on WikiMedia Commons (including many images not related to energy). Apart from its beauty – we suspect there’s more to this PV panel design than an attractive layout. An image of the array, comprised of a larger number of similarly or identically constructed setups, can be found after the jump.
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The same messages can be communicated by signalling the letter "K" in Morse code via signal lamp. (While a proper signal lamp may be ideal, a flashlight, probably best employing red LEDs, will certainly fit the bill).
In Morse, the letter "K" is represent as Dash - Dot -- Dash.
The ICS also has a subset, the Medical Signal Code, which uses three-character phrases to communicate brief medical messages.