For the last few years, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing service on Energy (and Other) Events (http://hubevents.blogspot.com) that happen around Cambridge, MA in the colleges, universities, and the community.  This week, I noticed that there is a lot of practical activity around energy and the churches.  From now until Thanksgiving, there will be three energy upgrade parties at three different churches in three different neighborhoods of Boston and two “sustainable house of worship” workshops, one in the suburbs and one in the city.  

The energy upgrade parties are organized by the Home Energy Efficiency Team or HEET (http://www.heetma.com/) which for years now has been  teaching volunteers hands-on skills in lowering their energy bills and carbon emissions while making the building they’re in more energy efficient.

The workshops are organized by Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light (http://www.mipandl.org) which has been helping houses of worship reduce energy costs through energy efficiency and a heating oil buying club through MA Energy Consumers Alliance.  One of the workshops will be happening in conjunction with a HEET energy upgrade party.

I’ve always thought that this is how energy organizing should be done: practical efforts that increase end use efficiency, save people money while making them more comfortable in their own neighborhoods, and speed the transition to renewables.  Solar barnraisings, energy upgrade work parties, we should be building our energy future now, as an act of protest against the status quo and a mechanism of liberation from it.  

Power to the people, as an actual practice.

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.

This greenhouse at the former historic Fisherville Mill in South Grafton, Massachusetts, sits on the banks of a canal by the Blackstone River.  It is cleaning stormwater runoff and water contaminated by #6 fuel oil, also known as Bunker C oil, which leaked from underground tanks.  At the end of the process, 95% of the hydrocarbons are removed without the application of chemicals, using only ecological design.

The Blackstone River can rightfully claim to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the USA as in 1790, Samuel Slater built the first water-powered spinning mill in America for Moses Brown, a founder of Brown University, in Pawtucket, RI using the Blackstone River as a power source.  By October 7, 1828, the Blackstone Canal from Providence, RI to Worcester, MA was completed and became the original industrial corridor of the United States.  Some say the Blackstone was the hardest working river of 19th century America with its water powering factories all along its length.

Perhaps now it will become an example of 21st century American technology that uses ecological systems thinking to clean up the wastes industrial development has left in its wake.  

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…

The World Meteorological Organization recently released their Global Climate Report:  Decade of Extremes ( pdf alert:  http://library.wmo.int/pmb_ged… and video at http://youtu.be/qSz7U0C0bsY ) looking at general weather patterns decade by decade from 1881 to 2010.

“…it is worth noting the very large increase (more than 2 000 per cent) in the loss of life from heatwaves, particularly during the unprecedented extreme heat events that affected Europe in the summer of 2003 and the Russian Federation in the summer of 2010. On the other hand, there were fewer deaths due to storms and floods in 2001-2010 compared to 1991-2000, with decreases of 16 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively, thanks, in good part, to better early warning systems and increased preparedness.”

2,300% increase in casualties from heatwaves

189% increase from cold snaps

in the 2001 to 2010 decade.

On June 25, the world’s largest solar ship, the MS Tûranor PlanetSolar (http://www.planetsolar.org), was docked in Boston and hosted a symposium on water and climate change, “From the Alps to the Atlantic.” This 35 meter by 23 meter catamaran is currently on the DeepWater expedition, harvesting data from the Gulf Stream after a maiden voyage around the world on the equator.  From Boston she is bound for St John’s, Newfoundland, Reykjavik, Iceland and finally Bergen, Norway.  After the transatlantic DeepWater expedition, the PlanetSolar will work with the Waste Free Oceans Foundation (http://www.wastefreeoceans.eu) to clean up European waters.  The research team from University of Geneva is headed by Professor Martin Beniston and consists of climatologists, physicists, and biologists.  

The PlanetSolar has 512m2 of PV cells and the largest civilian mobile battery in the world providing 20 kW of electricity, 17kW for two 60kW electric motors,  with 3 kW for life on board, for an average speed of 5 knots and a maximum speed of 14 knots.  The PlanetSolar is a traveling experiment laboratory and sampling station working on water issues around the world with room for a crew of nine.

The symposium included talks on the global water cycle including river systems (http://www.globalrivers.org), glaciers and mountain water resources (http://www.acqwa.ch), ocean ecology, acidification, phytoplankton and zooplankton biology, and other issues.