Switzerland came to the Boston area a week or so ago.  There was a conversation with one of the political leaders of the country, Doris Leuthard, Councillor of the Swiss Federal Department of Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications, at MIT on “Future Energy Supply and Security in Switzerland” and the next day a seminar on Watt d’Or, the Swiss award for the best energy projects in the country ( http://www.bfe.admin.ch/org/00… ), at Northeastern University to celebrate the opening of an exhibit that will stay up at Northeastern’s International Village until September.

I attended both events and learned quite a few exciting ideas from the Swiss and, inadvertently, something more about the limitations of MIT’s view of the energy future.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sailing-for-solar-bringing-workshops-to-caribbean-communities

Help empower coastal Caribbean communities with a solar sailboat that will provide workshops and materials for solar electric modules, solar cookers and phone chargers.  Campaign now going on at Indiegogo:  $18,000 over the next 40 days.

This is a project of Dr. Richard Komp, a solar scientist who has worked since 1977 empowering rural communities with solar energy projects around the world, providing both hands-on teaching and renewable resources.  

Susan Murcott, Bob Lange, and Richard Komp are three grassroots environmental activists who are changing lives all around the world.  Susan is a water researcher whose work on simple water filters has benefitted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Ghana.  Her latest project is building a block of toilets for a school in a village in Ghana, the second project of this kind she has been involved with.  Bob is a physics professor who has been doing science education in Africa for many years, an activity that morphed into installing small solar systems for villages in Tanzania and now into designing, building, and installing efficient cookstoves with the Maasai people.  This year, his work is expanding into Uganda.  Richard is a solar expert who has worked on everything from the physics of solar electricity to building solar stoves from scrap.   He has been teaching people all around the world how to do solar as a cottage industry for about three decades now.  His latest idea is to outfit a sailboat as a floating solar workshop that can teach people throughout the Caribbean how to better their lives with simple solar technologies. You can read his reports on his international work at http://www.mainesolar.org/Komp…

I consider myself immensely privileged to know all three of these remarkable and remarkably effective people.

I publish a weekly listing of Energy (and Other) Events at the colleges, universities, and in the community around Cambridge, MA ( http://hubevents.blogspot.com ) and have been doing it consistently since the end of January, 2010 ( http://hubevents.blogspot.com/… ).  This is the second iteration of the idea as I published a similar listings service plus reviews and articles from February, 1995 to February, 1998, “A List of Environmental and Telecommunications Events and Issues” or “AList….” for short ( http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AL… ) {The issues from April 1997 to February 1998 are available at http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AL… but you have to click on the weekly issue heading first before you can read any of the articles.}

My original idea was to have a searchable calendar of all the public lecture information at all the colleges and universities around the Boston area, something like 70 of them, so that anyone could take the opportunity to gather in all the free learning they want.  Imagine the resource for anyone from high school kids to retired people.  I’d been availing myself of the privilege for a number of years already, meeting in small seminar rooms with distinguished experts and famous names that normally you’d only see on TV.  And I even got to ask them questions.  What a gift!  As an experienced autodidact, I took notes at the events I went to, when something of actual note occurred, and thought that the next step would be to invite others to contribute their notes from the events they went to that I couldn’t attend so that all that wealth of information could be captured, a community commonplace book.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sier…

7 of the 162 Sierra Club “Green Schools” were in MA, in order of standing:

Harvard 16

UMass Amherst 27

BU 88

Hampshire 89

Mount Holyoke 124

Worcester Polytechnic 125

Suffolk University 148

It was the seventh year the Sierra Club has asked colleges and universities to fill out their questionnaire.  According to one source, MIT didn’t participate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

How Many Solar Devices Can You Make from a Plastic Bottle?

A clear PET plastic bottle can help disinfect water.

6 hours of sunlight’s UV-radiation kills diarrhoea-causing pathogens in water making it safer to drink.

A clear bottle full of water and a little bleach can become a solar skylight, providing the equivalent of a 50w incandescent light to a windowless shack.

Cut the bottom off a clear plastic bottle to make a mini-greenhouse, a hot cap, to protect seedlings from frost.

Surround that bottle hot cap with a circle of other bottles full of water for solar heat storage to extend the growing season.

Here’s a bottle inside a bottle inside a bottle to heat water in the innermost bottle

and a variation of this design using a clear bottle, a dark can full of water, and a set of reflectors.

They illustrate the essentials of solar thermal energy:

light reflects

dark gets hot

clear keeps the wind out

With that knowledge you can move, concentrate, and store energy.

This clear plastic water heater is much larger and more practical for household use. It is made almost entirely from recycled packaging waste.

You can make a window out of plastic bottles, too,

and a south-facing window is already a solar collector.

But that’s another story.

previously published at http://solarray.blogspot.com/2…

Solar water disinfection

http://www.sodis.ch/index_EN

A two liter plastic bottle can be made into a water treatment system simply by filling it with contaminated water and exposing it to the sun.  Sodis is an organization that promotes this technology around the world.  

The disinfection process can be speeded by turning aluminized mylar snack food bags inside out and making them into reflectors as two young students in Belo Horizonte, Brazil discovered:  http://calais.phase2technology…

Solar bottle bulbs for daylighting

http://www.elliottlemenager.co…

In 2002, during a long electrical shortage, at Uberaba, São Paulo, Brasil, Mr Alfredo Moser discovered a way to gather sun light in the house through plastic bottles hanging from the roof. First shown at the Globo Reporter in the 25th May 2007.

Alfredo Moser was pressed by a scarce electricity substitution and found out that he could light his house with a bottle of water filled with water and a protection cap made of camera film.

The bottle is just refracting sunlight very effectively and produces an equivalent light power compared to a 50/60W lamp. In a rainy day, even without much light and direct sun, one still have some light. Scientist have now visited Moser and are looking into ways to take this concept to maximize its potential.

Straw Centrifuge Pump

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

A lot of modern junk – plastic bottles, cups, refills, rubber slippers, pens etc can be reused in many creative ways to make joyous learning aids.  Children could make more than a dozen delightful pumps using all kinds of odd stuff.  For instance, push two film cans on the ends of a 15 cm piece of old bicycle tube to make an air pump.  The opening/closing valves are made using bits of sticky tape.  This high quality pump can easily inflate a balloon!  Or else make a scintillating sprinkler within a minute.  Poke a broom stick in the middle of a plastic straw.  Make two half cuts 2 cm away from the centre.  Bend the arms and secure them in place with some tape to make a triangle.  Twirl this triangle in water to make a most delightful centrifuge or sprinkler.

Arvind Gupta has been building science teaching toys from trash materials since 1978 and for the Children’s Science Centre at Inter-University Centre for  Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune University, Pune 411007 Maharashtra India since October 2003.

On his website

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com

you can find hundreds of toys children can make for themselves with easily available materials

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com…

He even has video demonstrations of many designs

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com…

“The best thing a child can do with a toy is break it !”

“And somewhere there are engineers

Helping others fly faster than sound.

But, where are the engineers

Helping those who must live on the ground?”