April 4, 2009

Social Housing Stimulus

Filed under: Green housing — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 12:37 am
Social housing should be energy-efficient, use renewable energy and be beautiful.

Social housing should be energy-efficient, use renewable energy and be beautiful.

To report something more creative and lasting than cash hand outs, the Australian government has begun building thousands of new homes for homeless people and low income earners across the nation.

The first round of its economic stimulus package involved billions of cash hand outs to eligible Australians, with the aim of boosting public consumption.

This is the government’s second round, involving 20,000 new social housing dwellings, with three quarters of them to be completed by the end of 2010.

The project is aiming to create 15,000 jobs nationally and protect more people from becoming homeless.

Let’s hope that plenty of such innovative, positive incentives, including solar energy grants, will flow from the G20 resolve.

Let’s also hope that such public housing projects will pay full attention to energy-efficiency, renewable energy use and weatherization. Poorer people need these things most of all.

Sources:

Social housing investment will reduce homeless numbers.

Parisian social housing goes green

March 6, 2009

Of Alternative Energy In The Classroom And Easy Hydrogen

Filed under: alternative energy — Tags: , , — admin @ 2:08 am

Gosh, isn’t the ProCon site a great one?

What? Oh, sorry, you’re yet to be introduced to it?

It’s an educational site that presents both sides of the coin of controversial social issues. If your school is not using it, look into it now.

The latest Procon issue is around the question “Can alternative energy effectively replace fossil fuels?”

AlternateEnergySources.com was delighted to be asked to contribute to it. Here you can find Pro and Con statements by various invited commentators.

For UK edicators, there’s Taecanet, bringing quality content into the classroom. Alternate Energy Sources.com is also a proud content provider for this innovative web-based learning in the classroom.

Free hydrogen?

hydrogenelement1

Anyway, I found an intriguing comment there from a representative of Genysis LLC who claim to have found, and patented a breakthrough process in renewable hydrogen generating technology. A carbon-neutral process which generates its own electricity.

This process is contrary to existing means of releasing hydrogen from water through electrolysis, where an external power source (often fossil fuels) is needed to fire the process.

The best example of clean hydrogen I can think of is that of Iceland’s hydrogen-powered fishing fleet, where the electricility to make the hydrogen comes from its own, easily accessible,  geothermal resources.

The world regularly hears from people who claim to have found the Holy Grail of alternative energy. Is this it?

Here’s a quote:

Water has the highest concentration of hydrogen of any known, stable, non-carbon substance. RET requires little energy in order to generate hydrogen from water. RET operates at room temperature, is scaleable and carbon neutral. The principle of this technology relies on the unique properties of the oxygen-hydrogen bond. By using electromagnetic radiation tuned to the O-H bond energy, RET breaks the bond with a minimal amount of energy. The rate of hydrogen production using this technology far exceeds that of electrolytic processes. The RET process generates its own electricity whereas electrolysis must obtain electrical energy from external sources, such as fossil fuels, to operate. The capital costs associated with RET are envisioned to be much smaller than with electrolysis process equipment.

Read the whole thing here.

Who knows what Google will think of this? “Why should they be interested”, you ask…  Well, Google is considered a corporate leader in this area .

But  paradoxically it has also put a kind of Big Brother stop to advertising for HHO energy-saving devices. HHO is also called Brown’s gas and is a highly combustible product from electrolysis of water. A grassroots application of hydrogen in water. Google decided it would no longer allow advertising for it, presumably because they thought it a bad product.

I don’t. Read about HHO gas and applications for vehicles, machinery and homes here. It does work.

Keep in touch! Won’t you?

Array