Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Great piece on solar powered plane that travelled 13 hours at a rate of 50 kilometers per hour, or 31 mph. 

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/06/solar-plane-takes-flight-with-first-international-trip?cmpid=SolarNL-Thursday-June16-2011

This new Berkeley Lab report is a must read for PV installers and homeowners considering PV, specifically those in California.  The report found an average and fairly new solar installation increases an average home’s value by appoximately $17,000. 

Interestingly, the report also shows the existing homes that add PV have more than twice the additional resale value than that of newly constructed homes with PV.  Regardless, the report found new home builders may consider adding PV to all of its new homes and be willing to accept a lower premium in exchange for faster sales velocity. 

Read the Full Report Here

It’s that time of year in New England – beautiful fall foliage, frosty mornings, vistas that take ones breath away. It’s also the time to put the gardens to bed and hope that we have enough food stored to last us through the winter. Who am I kidding? I, unfortunately, am not that good of a farmer. We’d surely starve if we had to live off my garden. Luckily, we can rely on local farmers to keep my family fed through the winter.
But there is one type of farming our family has excelled at – growing electrical energy at our home. Speaking as someone who works full time, this type of farming can’t be beat. I don’t need to put it away for the winter, I don’t need to mulch it, I don’t need to build a barn to shelter it from the winter winds. With the generation of solar electricity, you plant once and enjoy the harvest day after day, year after year. There is nothing we have found quite as satisfying as watching the electric meter spin backwards. We have managed, over the years, to conserve enough and “plant” enough to generate all the electricity we use each year.
We even grow some forms of heating energy too, the passive solar and solar hot water panel forms of heating. We have yet to fell and split our own fire wood – we get help from our neighbor with that. We stick to and recommend highly the no maintenance energy garden. It is an investment in the next quarter century of energy, with a great return on the investment both from price stability and environmental perspective. I sleep better at night knowing I am doing what I can to leave this planet a little greener for the next generations. 

As I wrote in the children’s song “What’s a Watt?”:
What’s a Watt? It’s what I’ve got, growing in the open air.
Out on a pole, or on the roof, raising them without a care.
They’re incredible, hardly edible; Watt’s don’t do any harm.
What’s a Watt? It’s what I’ve got, growing out on the farm.

We started out small, just a panel that’s all, added some more when we could.
They don’t need watering, no messy stalls. They don’t need any food at all.
What do you need to raise a Watt? Sunshine certainly helps.
They don’t pollute the environment. Energy that heaven sent….

What can you do with a bunch of these Watts? You might be curious to know.
Light up the night, keep computers bright, they can actually run the whole show.
We watch our Watts and how we use them. Conserving certainly helps.
No matter where you live or work, you can be an energy farmer too…

So if you care about keeping the New England landscape pristine and the maple trees beautiful, take action, small or large, but do something to reduce your use of fossil fuels. Become a farmer of energy. Whether you start with simple conservation measures – buying food locally, making a home-cooked meal using minimal packaging, weatherizing your home or whether you take the plunge into a renewable energy system or an electric vehicle, positive actions heal in more ways than one.
Now a word of warning – farming energy, while clean, quiet and non-polluting, is addicting. I confess – I am happily addicted to growing my own energy and then using as little of it as I can. There are a lot of addictive habits out there to lure us and ensnare us. Getting hooked on energy conservation and renewable energy production is the best. I encourage one and all to joining the quickly growing ranks of energy farmers. You won’t regret it.

Dori Wolfe
Co-Founder and Treasurer, groSolar
Strafford, VT Resident

Our very own Jeff Wolfe was named one of the Top 12 Clean Tech Twitterer’s (or is it Tweeters) by BostInnovation. Check out the article here.

And of course, follow Jeff on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jeff_grosolar

This is a great story

Bonnaroo Carbon Shredders – Promotional Video (2009) from Corey Drayton on Vimeo.

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Creating a clean energy future will require a lot of innovation and people taking responsibility. All summer I’ve been working toward three goals: clearing trees to enable a PV system on my roof’; putting in a large garden; and building an experimental hot-water system by collecting heat from composting wood-chips.

The “Brown Mound” is a densely packed mound of wood chips, with 400 feet of water line coiled throughout. As the chips decompose, the anaerobic bacterial process puts out heat. Anyone with a compost pile will tell you that if you stir it up, even in the winter, you’ll see a lot of steam.

So with that in mind, and some research I did on a frenchman named Jean Pain, we created our own version of a compost-powered-water-heater.

And, it’s working! We’re getting 1-gallon per minute of 95-degree water from the system, only 2 weeks after it was built.  The temp should increase to 120+ as the composting process kicks into high gear. This should mean we burn very little propane to heat our domestic hot water, and we might even be able to heat the house a little by cycling the water from the mound through a radiant-floor loop.

The video below is a “making of” that shows how we build the mound, with the help of lots of friends and people involved in the Carbon Shredder organization. (Carbon Shredders are also co-sponsoring the KickGas Festival with groSolar in San Diego which includes a solar-power sweepstakes/drawing on Oct 24).

Cheers!

GB, otherwise known as, An Energy Optimist

We’re really excited because our television commercials are finally running in NY, CA and soon CT, PA and MA. See one of the versions of our commercial below.

Now check out what went into making that commercial!