Solar flare activity has increased significantly in recent days. There have been a total of four X Class solar flares since Mother’s Day last Sunday. While none of the coronal mass ejections (CME) were Earth-directed, NOAA now expects the active region to be facing Earth by this weekend. The first X Class solar flares of 2013 went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media. If just one of the CMEs had been directed at Earth, the power grid would likely have gone down, ended life as we know it, and resembled a scene from Rob Underhill’s
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The vulnerability of the power grid is one of the primary motivations for thousands of Americans who have become preppers or opted for a homesteading lifestyle. Secret Garden of Survival-How to Grow a Camouflaged Food-Forest author Rick Austin recently talked about what life would be like after the lights go out with Off The Grid News. Austin’s homesteading advise is designed to help his fellow man not just survive a natural or man-made disaster, but to thrive in the face of adversity. Mainstream media outlets are leading the evening news with a plethora of North
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Despite the political scandals, the failed promises, and the general difficulties that new energy technologies face when trying to break the stranglehold of fossil fuels, the field of solar energy has continued to advance and expand. Past disappointments aside, at the end of the day the sun is potentially a limitless source of power, and
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March 18, 2013 I built a solar water heating system. In this video I show you how I built the water heating solar panels. My current system of twenty panels have the capability to collect 500,000 BTU per sunny day. typically I collect about 300,000 BTU, Still that is enough to easily heat our house
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“To boldly go where no one has gone before” – through its various incarnations, this was the continuing mission of the starship Enterprise, as its intrepid crew traveled the lengths and breadths of the universe in the star vessel that doubled as a cozy permanent home for all. As cosmic citizens, Captains Kirk and Picard
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An energy production system that relies almost completely on the incineration of fossil fuels is wasteful, inefficient, unreliable, and unclean. Burning coal to make electricity is a crude and outdated approach, but alternative energies have still not advanced far enough to allow the old nineteenth century methods of producing power to be fully phased out.
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In Washington, scientists developed a model home that not only avoids energy bills, but it actually produces net additional energy that the homeowners would be able to sell for profit. The National Institute of Standards and Technology created the “Net Zero Energy Residential Test Facility,” a home that uses an exciting combination of solar panels,
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There are of course many different brands of solar energy panels out there on the market. But there are actually only three different types of solar panels, classified by the materials used to make the solar cells they contain and the manufacturing processes involved in making those cells – monocrystalline silicon, polycrystalline silicon, and thin-film (the latter category features three subtypes that are currently available: amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium gallium selenide). Naturally, each type has its strengths and weaknesses, and the potential solar panel consumer will want to do some careful research
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Like many other alternative energy industries, solar energy companies suffer from one major problem: the cost of production is simply too high for solar energy to take place on a large scale. Federal subsidies exist to alleviate some of the cost associated with solar, but these are largely misguided subsidies that favor a few companies
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Building styles designed to minimize energy use by providing plentiful amounts of natural light, passive solar energy for the purposes of heating, and free and easy ventilation to facilitate cooling in summer are the “in” thing these days. But while these “new” construction methods have been receiving a tide of favorable publicity, and leaving “green”
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