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[Luck]

Dan Price of Houston, TX says:

I am developing a transportation alternative that holds out the possibility that the future may be better than some believe. I have developed a basic package describing a system that may be:

    3 times faster than alternatives

    3 times cheaper than alternatives

    3 times less energy.

The basis is:

    Light enclosed climate controlled vehicle highways built over the top of city streets.

    Non-stop 30 mph design 6' lane width using traffic circles.

    500# electric powered vehicles self guided 2-4 wheels.

Much more work needs to be done to validate the benefits but initial estimates potential to do as well or better than the claims. I will be happy to email a copy of a presentation which describes the proposal in more detail. Have interest of local planning department within local university.

wolfgang.dawson@yahoo.com

[Luck]

Amory Lovins: energy visionary sees renewables revolution in full swing
2014-02-17, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/17/amory-lovins-renewable-energy
Amory Lovins last year harvested from his small garden more than 30 pounds of bananas, along with guava, mango, papaya, loquat, passion and other exotic fruit. Nothing remarkable in that, except that the energy analyst and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) - http://www.rmi.org - does not live in the tropics but in an unheated house 6,500 feet up a mountain near Aspen, Colorado, where the temperature falls to -44C and where last week more than two feet of snow fell in less than 24 hours. The fruit is grown in a greenhouse that is part of the sprawling, experimental, super-insulated house at Old Snowmass, built 30 years ago for $500,000 (£300,000) and an inspiration for a generation of energy thinkers, designers and sustainable builders. Visited by 100,000 people, it was the archetype for the European Passivhaus movement. "Heating systems are so 20th century," he says. "We have found you actually save money by not putting in a heating system. It's cheaper. The monitoring system uses more energy than the lights." Lovins has always maintained that energy conservation not only pays for itself, but that energy-saving technology can lead to higher quality of life at lower cost. He has advised many of the world's largest companies and dozens of countries how to reduce bills with renewables but has also challenged the giant car, aviation and construction industries to rethink the way they operate. Renewables have scaled up incredibly fast, he says. "Worldwide it is faster than mobile phones. More Kenyans now get first electricity now from solar than the grid. China got more generation from wind in 2012 than from nuclear and it added more generation from non-hydro renewable energy than fossil and nuclear combined. It is now the world leader in seven of the 10 renewable energies and wants to be top in all 10.

[Luck]

I'm stealing this item from the Statist News Blog.

California drought: Solar desalination plant shows promise
2014-03-18, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-Solar-desalination-plant-5326024.php
Quietly whirring away in a dusty field in the Central Valley is a shiny solar energy machine that may someday solve many of California's water problems. It's called the WaterFX solar thermal desalination plant, and it has been turning salty, contaminated irrigation runoff into ultra-pure liquid for nearly a year for the Panoche Water and Drainage District. It's the only solar-driven desalination plant of its kind in the country. Right now its efforts produce just 14,000 gallons a day. But within a year, WaterFX intends to begin expanding that one small startup plant into a sprawling collection of 36 machines that together can pump out 2 million gallons of purified water daily. Within about five years, WaterFX company co-founder Aaron Mandell hopes to be processing 10 times that amount throughout the San Joaquin Valley. And here's the part that gets the farmers who buy his water most excited: His solar desalination plant produces water that costs about a quarter of what more conventionally desalinated water costs: $450 an acre-foot versus $2,000 an acre-foot. That brings Mandell's water cost close to what farmers are paying, in wet years, for water from the Panoche and other valley districts - about $300 an acre-foot. And that makes it a more economically attractive option than any of the 17 conventional desalination plants planned throughout California. If Mandell can pull it off, the tiny farming town where he is starting his enterprise could be known as ground zero for one of the most revolutionary water innovations in the state's history.

[Luck]

[See previous post for Solar Desalination.]

This company is providing cheap electricity by installing solar panels on people's homes and connecting them to the power grid. The home owner rents the solar panels at a price below what they would pay for normal electric bills. All home owners in NH who have land line phones are eligible.

http://www.citizenre.com

Here are the first two paragraphs from their home page. They show how much you would save with their panels.

Citizenre Home

Welcome

The Citizenre Corporation is an energy company preparing to compete in the 21st century energy landscape. We have entered the market as a developer of decentralized, customer-directed electricity infrastructure, using highly standardized business processes to deliver residential photovoltaic (PV) systems to customer homes at an industry-leading installation pace. PV is our entry product; products to follow will strengthen the customers' ability to save money, manage their energy use, replace polluting with non-polluting fuels, and place their own needs -- not those of their utilities -- at the core of their energy purchase and/or production decisions.

As we begin building out our national footprint, we are already offering renewable energy to the marketplace on a cost competitive basis. This positions us well to address the energy challenges of the 21st century - to truly minimize dependence upon foreign and fossil fuels, to install more environmentally friendly electricity generating assets, to deliver a higher degree of energy surety, and to realize a 21st century quality of life.

[MaineShark]

Nothing special about that.  Equipment leasing is a common offering among installers.  What they don't mention is that, since they own the system and are just renting it to you, they get all of the tax benefits, and you get none.  Their business model is obviously revolving around collecting those tax benefits.  If you purchase a system with a loan, and get the 30% Federal tax credit (which may mean that you pay no income taxes for several years), you're likely to be in an overall better economic situation than signing a long-term rental agreement.

If you use a home equity loan or mortgage-type construction loan (or bundle it into a mortgage during the purchase or building process) to pay for a system, then the interest would even be tax deductible.  Overall, loans tend to be better than rentals, and particularly in the realm of taxes... and most things we can do to pay less to the government is going to have a positive impact on liberty.

[Luck]

BlackLight Power, Inc. Announces Sustained Production of Electricity Using Photovoltaic Conversion of Millions of Watts of Brilliant Plasma
2014-04-03, Yahoo News
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/blacklight-power-inc-announces-sustained-201700863.html
BlackLight Power, Inc. [has] achieved sustained electricity production from a primary new energy source by using photovoltaic technology to transform brilliant plasma, with power comprising millions of watts of light, directly into electricity. By applying a very high current through its proprietary water-based solid fuel in BlackLight Power’s breakthrough Solid Fuel-Catalyst-Induced-Hydrino-Transition (SF-CIHT) technology, water ignites into brilliant plasma, a ... bright flash of extraordinary optical power that has a power density of over 1,000,000 times that of any prior controllable reaction. BlackLight Power has now successfully converted the brilliant plasma directly into electricity using photovoltaic cells (solar cells). Simply replacing the consumed H2O regenerated the fuel, and the fuel can be continuously fed into the electrodes to continuously output optical power that can be converted into electricity. [This] safe, non-polluting power-producing system catalytically converts the hydrogen of the H2O-based solid fuel into a non-polluting ... lower-energy state hydrogen called “Hydrino,” by allowing the electrons to fall to smaller radii around the nucleus. The energy release is 200 times that of burning the equivalent amount of hydrogen with oxygen. Using readily-available components, BlackLight has developed a system engineering design of an electric generator that is closed, except for the addition of H2O fuel, and generates ten million watts of electricity, enough to power ten thousand homes. Remarkably, the device is less than a cubic foot in volume.

Note: How strange that the major media are not picking up on this story of major proportions. For a 2008 CNN article showing Blacklight had attracted $60 million and was no longer seeking funding, click here: http://www.wanttoknow.info/newenergyinventionsnewsarticles.
For more on Blacklight Power, click here: http://www.blacklightpower.com/whats-new.
For more evaluation of this development, click here: http://pesn.com/2014/04/04/9602466_BlacklightAnnounces_Sustained-Production_of_Enormous-Electrical-Power-from--Water.

[Luck]

[Does anyone have comments on this? Anyone going to the conference in Idaho?]

Eric Dollard creates a 2000% energy return from standard wall power.

http://energyscienceconference.com/2014/05/05/2000-cop-20-0-reactive-power-as-energy-demonstration/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDjWwoD83Rk#t=95

Energy Science & Technology Conference
JUNE 27-29, 2014
HAYDEN, IDAHO

Only 58 OF 150 SEATS REMAINING!

[MaineShark]

[Does anyone have comments on this? Anyone going to the conference in Idaho?]

Eric Dollard creates a 2000% energy return from standard wall power.

http://energyscienceconference.com/2014/05/05/2000-cop-20-0-reactive-power-as-energy-demonstration/

Nope.  The discrepancy between real and reactive power exists, but shifting it around decreases efficiency.  Reactive power is something that you want to eliminate, not increase.  There are capacitative devices which will improve the power factor of the reactive loads in a system (the power factor is the ratio of real to apparent power - 100% PF means that all power is real, and none is reactive), which will reduce your energy usage.  But, even if you could actually get a system to a 100% PF, you would still have the load of the real power.

Imagine a 100W light bulb and a 100W electric motor.  Both draw the same power rating, but the light bulb draws solely real power, while the motor is a reactive device, so it draws some real and some reactive power (in reality, even the light bulb has some inductance, so it draws some reactive power, as well, but we'll pretend the light bulb is a perfect resistor).  So, because it's partially-reactive, the motor might actually draw 120W.  A power factor correction device will bring the motor closer to being non-reactive, so maybe it will only draw 105W - it will still have some reactive component, but that will be reduced.

Reactive power is the bane of AC power, and one of the few advantages of DC is that it eliminates the reactive power issue.  It certainly does not offer a magical source of free energy.  It is good at wasting energy and burning things out.

[Luck]

Thanks much for the explanation, Joe.

A German company is printing food for the elderly
2014-04-10, USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/04/10/a-german-company-is-printing-food-for-the-elderly/7546313
- 3D-printed food extruder that creates food that literally melts in your mouth, helping elderly patients with dysphagia

[Luck]

EnerVault unveils 'flow battery' for solar energy storage
2014-05-22, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/EnerVault-unveils-flow-battery-for-solar-energy-5499718.php

In an almond orchard outside Turlock in the Central Valley, two large tanks hold water, minerals - and more importantly, energy. The tanks ... are part of a "flow battery" that stores energy from nearby solar panels. It's the largest battery of its kind in the world. And it could play a role in California's push to develop bigger and better ways to store large quantities of energy. This particular flow battery ... was built by EnerVault of Sunnyvale, part of the Bay Area's fast growing energy-storage industry. Like most of its competitors, EnerVault is young, founded in 2008, with about $30 million in venture funding to date. Some companies try to perfect the lithium-ion batteries found in laptops and electric cars. Others, including EnerVault and Primus Power of Hayward, specialize in flow batteries, which store energy in tanks of electrolytes. The fluid is then pumped through the battery's cells when power is needed. In contrast, the batteries found at a grocery store contain the electrolyte, cathode and anode all in one package. "Flow batteries are batteries turned inside out," said Jim Pape, EnerVault's chief executive officer. His company's flow batteries use iron and chromium, blended into the water inside its tanks. Both materials are safe to handle. Iron and chromium also have the benefit of being cheap. "That's our special sauce," Pape said. "Iron and chromium are very, very abundant, and abundance equals low cost."

[MaineShark]

Flow batteries are great technology (nothing particularly new, but under-utilized for years).  Unfortunately, they don't (yet) scale down well, price-wise (eg, a 10kWh flow battery is barely less expensive than a 50kWh flow battery).  Looks like they're going for the utlity market, but there are flow batteries that are sized for residential and light commercial applications, as well.

Definitely my favorite battery technology for those applications where the size/cost combination is right.

[Luck]

There are numerous videos you can see about this at
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Jean+Pain

[Luck]

I've read lately that shale oil is not likely to be a profitable enterprise, which sounds true offhand. I'd also read that fracking for shale oil or whatever does contaminate drinking water sources in ground water, but the article below shows that that claim is apparently untrue. It seems that it should be a simple matter to test drinking water that comes from ground water to see if fracking has contaminated it, so, if there are no studies that confirm it, it now seems likely that fracking does not contaminate ground water. Some seem to say that's implausible in the first place, because fracking is said to occur miles underground, far below the level of any aquifers. So, until I hear of actual studies to the contrary, I'll have to go with the claim that fracking is okay. But that doesn't mean shale oil will prove profitable.

How Anti-Fracking Activists Deny Science: Water Contamination
http://energyindepth.org/national/how-anti-fracking-activists-deny-science-water-contamination/

[Luck]

http://ecowatch.com/2014/11/24/fracking-wells-guzzle-water/
'Monster' Fracking Wells Guzzle Water in Drought-Stricken Regions 24 Nov 2014 2014 The fracking industry likes to minimize the sector's bottomless thirst for often-scarce water resources, saying it takes about 2-4 million gallons of water to frack the average well, an amount the American Petroleum Institute describes as "the equivalent of three to six Olympic swimming pools." That's close to the figure cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well. But a new report released by Environmental Working Group (EWG) located 261 "monster" wells that consumed between 10 and 25 million gallons of water to drill each well.

Waste Water from Oil Fracking Injected into Clean Aquifers
2014-11-14, NBC News (San Francisco Affiliate)
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Waste-Water-from-Oil-Fracking-Injected-into-Clean-Aquifers-282733051.html

Dutch Company Powers Streetlights With Living Plants; Will Your Cell Phone Be Next?
2014-11-21, Yes! Magazine
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/dutch-company-powers-streetlights-with-living-plants-will-your-cellphone-be-next

[Luck]

Cardboard Bikes
Blurb with Video showing high quality bikes made from cardboard: http://www.commondreams.org/further/2012/11/30/cardboard-also-entirely-recycled-water-and-fireproof-and-dirt-cheap

Floating Islands
I think I'll repost some info on making floating islands cheaply here next time. It's from: http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?topic=26558.0