Appliances to make energy instead of use it
photo credit: Caveman 92223
The other day, several on Twitter floated an article from EcoGeek on the fact that Ace Hardware will be selling micro wind turbines for family homes. Around 6 grand will get you one of these suckers installed on your roof right next to all the bird poop. The idea is fascinating. We would certainly go to the hardware store to buy an oven or electric mixer. Why not buy something that created energy? We’ve been trained to think that the current electric grid is the most efficient way to create and move energy. Perhaps this conventional wisdom can be proven wrong. One thing that people don’t realize is that some energy is lost from the time the power plant makes the energy and the lines deliver it to your house. I would have to research more to find exact numbers, but heat, voltage, storms and other factors can figure in.
The word you never hear anymore “Conservation”.
Perhaps the biggest thing that irritates the shit out of me these days is people who complain that the current system can’t ‘fit our power needs’. This also gets applied to alternative energy all the time. I’ve heard silly old men say, “That will never be enough to power a whole city.” The thing is, you have to think about problems in parallel. There is a two part solution or more to many problems, especially with energy. We need to use more alternative energy and at the same time, use less energy to begin with. Take this new turbine. EcoGeek is saying the thing will generate up to 2,000 Kwh for the year which is about 166 Kwh for the month. They say it’s about 18% of the average household’s needs. That’s probably based on somewhere between 800 to 1000 Kwh’s per month. What if you could buy 3 turbines and reduce your consumption by 1/2.
I know my wife and I burn around 800+ Kwhs per month. That’s even with us doing the things we can to conserve, like using compact florescent light bulbs, notebook computers, filling the fridge with liquid and turning down the hot water heater to 120 degrees. We live in a crappy rental for the moment because of my wife’s work. I know for a fact that half of our problem is the inefficient window based air conditioners, the hot water heater, dryer and a house over 50 years old. The house has so many holes in it that we only bother to heat the area we are currently in, not the whole house.
Then there’s another whole basic book of common sense conservation. Anybody can practice this whether you rent or not.
- Sponge all your dishes with sudsy water first, then rinse them all at the same time.
- Run ovens and dryers at night to lessen strain on cooling systems.
- Don’t put hot food in the fridge.
- Shut off air conditioners when the sun goes down.
- Avoid heavy cotton clothes that take much more energy to dry than wool.
Now if we were home owners, we could invest in some insulation, central heating and air, and possibly solar hot water. At the very least, we would install an on-demand hot water heater. If we we were building a home, we could design a home much better with passive solar aspects and so on. It’s not hard to believe you could get your electricity consumption down to 500 Kwh per month.
Even Condos, which are by design, very efficient, could make use of turbines on the roof. Many people in the middle floors of condos, hardly have to adjust the heat and air because of the apartments on bottom and top.
So how do you store the power?
Of course the new wind generator from Honeywell is only supposed to ’supplement’ your power for now. In the future, it may be able to fully power you house. The biggest problem is that wind does not blow all the time. The same goes for the sun. There are interesting solutions to this. Probably one of the most fascinating is the ice air conditioner. It’s a simple idea where ice is made at night when the sun is down. During the day, the machine makes use of the ice to cool your home. In other projects, especially solar, they are using huge vats of synthetic oil or steam filled salt vats to store energy for later use. The examples I use are to show that some energy can be harnessed when available, and used later. Other times, you realize, that you can afford to wait for the energy you need. For instance, you could put cloths in the washer and wait for the wind to blow if needed (if you had enough extra cloths). Other things are much better accomplished without electric like heating your water, food and house. There are many technologies that should be used instead like solar and geo-thermal.
In the end, with a little wind and solar, my belief is that each home or even condo complex will have it’s own independant energy source. This will depend of location of course. The huge cities like New York will likely still depend of huge power plants, but the homes past suburbia strung together by an ugly patchwork of powerlines will soon be all by thier lonesome with solar arrays and wind turbines. You’ll simply go to the local hardware store and pick up a unit to create electric energy for the whole house