We’re often told that little things can make a big difference. Change your light bulbs, recycle, walk, buy local food, unplug things when you’re not using them - etc. But what BIG things are people doing? I’ve picked out five of the coolest “big” projects that I’ve come across in the past year or so:

1. Solar-Powered Paint

Solar-powered paint is a material that is thin enough to fit on any surface, any surface that was being exposed to sunlight would essentially generate energy. These solar “panels” are made out of semiconductors that are one thousandth of a millimeter think, all weather proof, colorable and washable. Your shirt could be powering your cellphone. Your roof could be powering your television and microwave. The downside of it is that solar panels are only 8% efficient, and this spray on paint is only one tenth that efficient.

2. Sewage to Fuel our Cars

Already used in Sweden, Argentina, Pakistan, Brazil and Italy this big idea is going a long way. A form of “gaseous” sewage become fuel for buses all over the cities. The fermentation of the sewage creates methane, known as biogas, and is collected from treatment plants, landfills and abattoirs. In Sweden there is a train connecting Peter Forsberg’s home town to Vastervik, 80 km away from it. Buses, taxis and garbage trucks are all running on this biogas. If the gas is produce locally it costs 1$ per liter. The problem is that since this is such a new technology, it isn’t available everywhere. So cars have to be made with two separate gas tanks, just in case. It has also been found that the cars have a more limited driving range with biogas.

3. Whiting the Clouds

John Latham of the United States government’s National Center for Atmospheric research in Colorado has proposed spraying water into the sky to white the clouds. The sunlight then hits the droplets and refracts its bum back to where it came from. Less light then makes it to the earth surface and ocean, with a low cost of $1 billion in set up costs! Woo! …If you can’t find a problem with this idea, then man… no comment. There are obviously a lot of problems, the biggest one being that water is going to be our next sacred resource, should we really start shooting it into the air instead of taking responsibility for our actions in the first place? Also the clouds could end up reflecting TOO MUCH light, the sunlight being essential in the production of hydroxyl, an important cleaning agent.

4. Hybrid Cars

I guess this one is a pretty huge and obvious topic, but the advances in hybrid technology is astounding. It seems like everyday someone else is releasing a new hybrid car that is sexier and more efficient. The newest and most amazing to me is the zero emission commercial car, Modec. One of the big things that I’ve found people hating is how much pollution goes into shipping food across the country and around the globe - well a vehicle such as the Modec could obviously cut a lot of that problem down. There on one end of the spectrum is super efficient and useful, but we know in this age people aren’t always excited about useful - well the new Velozzi Micro-Turbine Electric Hybrid is completely useless and completely sexy.

5. Artificial Trees

Weird. The earth is going to end up like that one simpson’s episode where it is in the future and the person at Lisa’s college goes and kicks a round circle on the ground where a holographic tree appears accompanied with a sign that says “in memory of a real tree”. These synthetic trees absorb carbon dioxide faster than real trees and their “leaves” are covered in a chemical that reacts with the C02 removing it from the air and turning it into liquid. A 10 x 10 meter tree would cost about $30 000 USD a year to run capturing 1000 tons of C02 which is equal to 204 cars. The trees do need energy to work and there isn’t really a place for all the C02 to be stored… Minor details.

(cross posted at appletree)

I made a pretty stupid decision sitting out on the deck for 4 hours in the bleeding hot sun without sunscreen. I can’t move without it hurting. I can’t go 1/2 an hour without covering myself in aloe spary. As a new development I’m starting to get dizzy at random times. I’ve found a lot of stories that I wanted to blog about - but I can’t bring myself to really *do* it. …I don’t have the energy, I’m all dehyderated and I can’t really think. So instead, I’ll just throw them all together as a link post.

First up - solar power amazes me and I can’t wait to go live in my private cabin up north with my hermit husband and our dog while sleeping on hammocks and growing carrots in the back yard. But first - advances in solar power because we have to have a solar powered roof that will power our entire house - and speaking of solar power a new farm has opened in Spain that will eventually give power to 600 000 people.

In my sustainable house with the hammocks and the home grown carrots there will be no copies of the bible, but instead environmental books and DVDs - just as a California Hotel is doing. That’s probably one of the best ideas I have ever heard of - trading all the bibles in hotels for copies of Silent Spring, The Sacred Balance and An Inconvenient Truth. Cool.

Hopefully in the back yard of my sustainable Northern house there will be some dinosaur bones. A teenager in Australia found an extremely important dinosaur bone on his family’s farm.

That “rock” turned out to be the biggest dinosaur bone ever found in Australia.

Weighing 100kg and measuring 1.5m, the bone was identified as the right front leg of a titanosaur, the largest land dwelling animal identified.

The animal would have been 26 meters long and the finding in that area really gives off the impression that Queensland is about to erupt in dinosaur finds. …Maybe I’ll move my sustainable house to Australia. Except that the chances of getting a sunburn in Queensland Australia have increased by 75% over the past 64 years.

The Sun gives off a lot of energy. I’m sure you could have figured that out without me saying it, at least I hope you could… 6% of that solar radiation is reflected and 16% is absorbed. At the equator this will make up 1 020 watts of energy per meter squared. The atmospheric disturbances usually reduce the radiation by another 20% of reflection and 3% of absorption. Despite these disturbances the amount of energy hitting the earth from the sun every minute is great than the amount of energy the would burns up in fossil fuels in one year.

That’s a whole lot of energy just sitting around waiting to be used while we continue to use oil and crap that is ruining our earth…

Solar energy is wicked. About 89 petawatts of sunlight reach the earth. We use 12 terawatts as a collective species. It is completely renewable and pollution free. The facilities, once they are set up, need little maintenance and virtually no intervention. It’s easy to collect solar energy anywhere on the planet, and we have a lot of empty space. It may be deemed as highly expensive, but once it’s in place… It’s operating costs are extremely low.

So Katie, why aren’t we using solar energy!?

Well, mostly because people are cheap bastards. The cells cost a huge initial capital investment that people aren’t willing to get into… You may notice we’re more of a short term gain, long term pain kind of society rather than the opposite. Also, the solar cells are pretty inefficient right now, and they take up a lot of space. It also needs to be put into something like a battery to be transported, which is gross and costly. My first reaction to this was “well then just cover the desert in solar panels.” and then in first year I took a biodiversity course and realized “oh… right, the desert isn’t dead, its just a different ecosystem than what I’m used to.”

However, a Mr. Mattias Loster… took a map of the world showing the distribution of solar energy globally, and then plotted, in empty areas, where we could put solar panels that would meet the 12 terawatt demand that we’re having… these little black dots are all it would take:

That’s all it would take. AND this is only at 8% efficiency. That’s 144 231 km2 of the Sahara, 141 509 of Great Sandy, 178 571 of Takla Makan, 138 889 of Arabian desert, 136 364 of Atacama and 170 455 of the Great Basin in the US… but really, we could just cover Alberta for that last one. Voila 910 019 kilometers squared, covered in solar panels… and our energy consumption would be entirely met.

But for some reason, I don’t see it really happening… However, the largest thin-film solar panel plant in the entire world opened up in Germany… It is built on an old army base and covers 16.5 acres of land. It will produce 5.7 million kilowatt-hours of power every year. That is enough to power just under 2000 homes. The creator is already starting another plant that will be comprised of 550 000 thin-film solar panel, in comparison the 16.5 acre plant has only 90 000. So this next one, expected to be completed in 2009, will be great. Here is a picture of the plant:

These thin-film solar cells may be the key to the future. Anil Sethi of Flisom makes them in Switzerland and believes that their solar cells will be completely competitive in price against fossil fules within five years. Within ten years to expects solar power to take over by at least 50%. Currently solar power is 3 - 4 $ per watt, Sethi sees the thin-film solar cell reaching $0.80 per watt in five years and $0.50 per watt in ten years. The solar cells they’re producing don’t use the same silicon as the commercial solar cells that we’re used to hearing about.

Instead the cells use Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) technologies, and are extremely flexible… Thus they can be put just about anywhere. …We could all start sticking solar panels on the outsides of our cars and fuel the vehicles that way… Hopefully we’ll see an increase in the amount of research being put into sustainable energy, it seems like solar power has a lot of potential it just needs a lot more attention.