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.

Wakawaka ( http://us.waka-waka.com ) makes a

super efficient, sustainable, lightweight, sturdy and compact solar phone charger and lamp. It enables you to charge virtually any type of (smart)phone or small electronic device within just a few hours and will provide you with up to 80 hours of safe light.

They are offering a buy one/give one program which provides their solar lights and chargers to Syrian refugees:

http://www.solarforsyria.org/e…

Perhaps a way to promote the Christmas spirit of peace on Earth and goodwill to all.  (Bah Humbug!)

hat tip to http://inhabitat.com

Cambridge, MA has been debating a net zero energy and/or emissions standard ( http://www.netzerocambridge.org ) for new buildings over 25,000 square feet since the Spring of 2013, partially because of an ecodistrict plan with MIT and others on a large parcel in East Cambridge (a plan MIT refused to make net zero even though they are rumored to be building a net zero project with some of the same partners in Basel, Switzerland).

The City Manager (Cambridge has a city manager form of municipal government, along with proportionate representation so city politics get weird fast) has established a “Getting to Net Zero” Task Force to study the issue.  Cambridge Community Development Department produced a fine overview of the state of the art in larger buildings for zero net emissions at (pdf alert) http://www.cambridgema.gov/~/m…

As the national Ecodistrict Summit was in town recently, the Community Development Department and Sustainable Performance Institute ( http://www.sustainable-perform… ) hosted experts from Integral Group ( http://www.integralgroup.com/ ), a deep green engineering firm to present lessons from the more than 40 net zero buildings they’ve worked on.

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…

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.