Monday, July 16, 2012

Renewable Energy

Just saw a documentary from "Modern Marvels" produced by A&E Television Networks in 2006. entitled
"Renewable Energy". Ok, so it's not quite as current as I would prefer, but it sure boosted my optimism towards renewable and sustainable forms of energy.
It was only 50 minutes long and was available at the local public library.
It's ISBN is 1-4229-1581-6

It describes in simple common terms the most basic forms of renewable energy that
modern man is exploring and currently utilizing successfully.
Some of the energy forms discussed in this documentary are:
Wind Energy, Solar Energy ( including photo voltaic forms as well as solar thermal power,
geothermal energy, biomass energy from crops such as Switch grass, bio diesel, ocean wave energy, ocean current energy, and I'm sure there's a few more that I can't recall at the moment.

In particular, I found the discussion of using biomass quite intriguing. Those who are working in the field and research of biomass were trying to figure out which crop would produce more power with as little effort and expense to grow. Their discovery was an easy-to-grow grass called "Switch grass". Apparently this type of grass is easy to grow in a variety of climates and produces a much higher yield than is retained from using biomass sources like corn or sugar cane.

There was quite a long section about wind energy. I find the wind turbines to be amazingly powerful, but wonder if it isn't a bit of an eyesore to be putting up more than a modest amount of these wind turbines in public places. But I am sure that smaller wind turbines could be added in smaller versions for smaller uses even on top of our homes and they wouldn't have to reach unsightly heights to be effective in a windy city like mine.
Perhaps we need to stop insisting on energy "superheroes" and accept smaller helps, such as personal home sized solar power water heaters, such as are now mandatory in Israel.
I learned earlier this week that Israel has also issued a  very progressive water saving toilet design for all it's households. Apparently each household toilet has two buttons for flushing. Therefore the user can choose one button for liquid flushes (urination only) and another button for larger flushing (feces ). This change in toilet choices saves gallons and gallons of water consumption in only one week and could so easily be adapted for use in Canada and elsewhere and save our nations millions of dollars in water costs.

If any of my wonderful blog readers have some input on these matters I would greatly enjoy your comments which you can leave by pressing the comments tab.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
blessings.
Carla

4 comments:

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  2. There are a number of different companies now offering this service. We went with the Green Home Company and would recommend them to anyone.

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  3. Hope more people will join the renewable energy movement, one small step at a time. Kudos to Israel for making it mandatory to use personal home sized solar panel water heaters. Thanks for sharing such an informative post.

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