Power to The People

Yesterday I spent another day at a public park south of Saugerties called Glasco Town Park.It is on the Hudson and recently has been renovated with benches,swings,fishing pier and a pavilion.A beautiful spot to do some reading.I'm still reading "Power Trip" and I'm going to bring you some of her findings.Amanda Little wrote about a community that is inTennessee 75 miles from her house.It was a new tract of houses that were "Zero-energy homes"(ZEH).The houses were built by Habitat for Humanity for under$100,000.Jeff Christian,researcher at D.of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory,is the designer and has been working on ZEH for a decade.These houses are like little power plants that sell electricity back to the grid.The houses have solar panels, heavy insulated walls,ultraefficient lighting and appliances,special wiring to allow for back and forth exchanges with the grid,exterior paint made with light-colored materials,a geothermal heating and cooling system,a mechanism that captures the heat from shower water as it goes down the drain and a device that captures the warmth that comes off the coils behind the refrigerator.The local utility company buys electricity from the house during the day when the children and parents are gone, the lights and appliances are turned off and the solar panels are producing a surplus.The grid needs this peak energy and it is a perfect symbiosis.

Eventually,millions of people will live in ZEH homes.One crucial factor must change first:clean power has to get cheaper.Experimentation with solar panels are going on at a quick pace today.The cost of solar panel capacity has decreased 30% from 1998 to 2007.A company called Energy Innovations is developing panels that use optics technology that concentrates the rays to levels that are a hundred times more powerful than diffused sunlight.Another company,Miasole, is working on cheap,flexible photovolatic materials that could be mounted anywhere.The material can be directly embedded into shingles or produced in adhesive sheets that can be pealed off and attached on top of metal roofs.A northern Cal. firm,Nanosolar, uses the science of nanotechnology to create a product that increases efficiency five to ten times more than thin films.The "nanoink" can be painted on
.It could be integrated into rooftops of cars and trucks,suspended in liquid and painted on house exteriors,a coating for windows and into fabrics.This is amazing.

Solel,BrightSource and Solargenix have attracted billions of dollars to build more than 500 megawatts of solar-thermal installations. Concentrating solar power(CSP) is a process to capture the suns energy not it's light rays.It is a process that magnifies the effect of the sun to very high temperatures(700 degrees)that heat oil or molten salt.This fluid circulates in pipes that boil vats of water that create steam that drive turbines.Solar thermal plants in the Southwest(92 square miles) could in theory generate electricity for the entire country.

More from this book tomorrow.

Field off Rt. 212 going to Phil Jackson's house