World Water Day 2021 (in the rear-view mirror): Valuing Water. World Water Day (March 22, 2021) is past (www.WorldWaterDay.org)… By now you should have taken the Water Day Quiz at SustainZine. It’s been about 10 years since I developed such a quiz. I had to work to improve and update the original quiz… It is still tricky to get good answers to some of these water-critical issues. Often the water usage is available to the…
It’s World Water Day, March 22, 2021 (www.WorldWaterDay.org). Time to test your water knowledge with a World Water Day Quiz. Some days we wish it would rain. Some days, we wish it would stop. But every day, not just March 22, we should stop and appreciate the importance of water. How important it is to out our being, to our lives, to our living and to our existence. Here is my Water Quiz for…
A lot like a perpetual motor: no fool’n. As a kid, college really, I was intrigued about the idea of a “perpetual” motor. A motor that ran forever. My idea seemed like it should work, but I had a hard time getting someone to explain why it wouldn’t. My idea was based on the flywheel of the single engine Briggs & Stratton where a magnet on the flywheel creates the spark for the ignition on…
You may already have a backup generator for the house. In fact, you may have the backup generator with you just about everywhere you go. Plus, it might be totally quiet, for hours. Yep, we are talking about your hybrid gas-electric vehicle. Hybrids have been selling like crazy on the farms because they can easily be used to generate 120-volt electricity to run hand tools and generally provide backup power. Most newer vehicles offer a…
Babcock Ranch aims to be first solar-powered town in US | USA News | Al Jazeera: This is in partnership with FPL (Nextera) for the power. The powerplant is already up and running that will support an almost 200,000 home community. FPL has extended the solar to include 10 megawatts of battery, thus allowing the solar power plant to offer more flexibility to the power grid and on-demand peaking power. The 440 acres for the…
California Becomes First State to Mandate Solar on New Homes – Bloomberg: California is 1/3 of the US economy and probably 1/3 of the US housing market. So, when California voted today to have mandatory solar on most new construction houses, this blows the top off of the non-solar rooftop. Headlines read that the CA house will now cost about an additional $10,000 to build with the energy efficiency and solar roof mandates. This Bloomberg…
