Canadian solar project wins top environment award
Canada has scooped a top prize for environmental protection awarded by the Austrian foundation Energy Globe for a community project that uses solar-powered heating to warm local houses.
Canada has scooped a top prize for environmental protection awarded by the Austrian foundation Energy Globe for a community project that uses solar-powered heating to warm local houses.
The Energy Globe World Award for Sustainability was handed to the Drake Landing Solar Community project in Alberta, west Canada, in a ceremony late Friday in Wels, Austria.
In the Canadian town of Okotoks, where temperatures drop well below freezing in winter, residents have devised a huge communal heat storage system.
Solar energy is collected in underground tubes during the summer and then used to heat 52 local homes in the winter.
This solar power currently meets 80 percent of the community's energy needs and the project is on track to meet a target of 90 percent in 2012.
Projects in more than 50 countries competed for awards from Energy Globe, which supports around 1,000 projects in some 100 countries.
The Water prize went to a Nicaraguan charity that has used solar energy to pump and filter drinking water in rural communities since 2004.
In the Air category, judges honoured the Swiss supermarket chain Migros for the energy conservation policy it has had in place for the last 30 years and a project in the Swedish port of Gothenburg where an onshore power supply is provided using energy from wind turbines.
The Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia, won the Earth award for a "passive energy" scheme that uses solar power to heat even the coldest Siberian living room.
(c) 2011 AFP
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Nov 26, 2011
Rank: 1.2 / 5 (21)
How the F*** do you store solar energy in tubes? Do they trap the light and keep it bouncing around in these tubes for 6 months? lol
Nov 26, 2011
Rank: 3.7 / 5 (32)
If the tubes were as large as a cave could cave man figure it out?
Doubtful.
Nevertheless....
https://www.cdea....2007.pdf
Note that these are R2000 homes. 6 inch thick walls, well insulated, low E windows, very well sealed with managed ventilation systems to reduce interior humidity.
Also note that Alberta is a damn cold place in the middle of winter.
If constructed at typical U.S. latitudes, this system would provide in excess of 100% of the heating needed.
It isn't rocket science. Although Libertarian Traitors and Republican fools would have people believe that it is impossible.
The time has come to extinguish their voices.
Nov 26, 2011
Rank: 4.4 / 5 (8)
You need to examine costs and all of the other factors totally before anyone considers moving ahead with anything---then we don't end up with Solyndras who remind me of Chicago(you would be amazed at how much money is vomited away on the simple things in life there). Sony had LCD screens 30 years ago and only in recent years has it begun to handily replace glass cathode ray tubes..
Nov 26, 2011
Rank: 3.3 / 5 (23)
Nov 26, 2011
Rank: 1.6 / 5 (19)
Vendicar DeMoron, aren't you a PennState Alumnus?
Nov 26, 2011
Rank: 3 / 5 (10)
This is not the path to knowledge. You display a distinctly clumsy thought process.
How, exactly, does stifling debate help spur innovation? When has it ever? How many billions will you burn through because your group think nonsense went without public debate?
Has it never occurred to you that "Libertarian Traitors and Republican fools" act out of good faith and have concerns which--though they don't make sense to you--have real validity?
These technologies do not in any way appear ready, as they use resources which we do not have the wherewithal to supply broadly across the economy. Will your being snide make rare earth metals readily available?
Human technology has run on combustion for a half million years. Solar power is subsidized out of hope, not out of any real expectation that we can run a civilization using it any time soon.
The problem is not politics. It is physics, metallurgy, and a knowledge gap.
Grow up.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 2.4 / 5 (5)
@Vendicar - Although you possess some scientific knowledge, you do not have the mind of a scientist. You detract more than you add to this forum.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 3.7 / 5 (21)
It is the path to progress.
"Has it never occurred to you that "Libertarian Traitors and Republican fools" act out of good faith " - Cave-Painter
Not relevant. I do not care about that the motivations of a cancerous tumor might be benign. That tumor needs to be cut out and burned ASAP lest the body die.
Conservatives are vectors of the cancer known as willful ignorance. Their extermination is paramount.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 3.8 / 5 (18)
I am the enemy of ignorance.
Why aren't you?
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 4.5 / 5 (2)
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 2 / 5 (7)
of life environment to its original state before implementing of particular technology. Or we are just transferring this problem to the further generations.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 1.2 / 5 (18)
- Troll of all Trolls
You seem about as blood thirsty and fascist as the Third Reich was in exterminating the Jews because they were different.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 4 / 5 (2)
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
It's simple. really. The solar-heated water is pumped through tubing buried in an array of deep wells. Over the course of a summer, a huge mass of underground earth and rock is slowly heated up. During the winter, this stored heat is removed from the wells (using the same buried tubing) and used to heat the houses.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (4)
Oh look... The disease is complaining about the cure.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 1.8 / 5 (5)
You are the enemy of ignorance? You have no discipline! You would, if offered by "god," snap your fingers and change the very nature of reality. And we'd all go extinct.
You are a narcissist and a fool. A "thinker" totally lacking in seriousness, and the only reason I'm bothering to respond to your foolishness is... I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to your foolishness. Go memorize something realized of by the careful thought and discipline of your betters, and completely misunderstand it. You ass.
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 3 / 5 (4)
Nov 27, 2011
Rank: 2.7 / 5 (96)
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Lots of paid for astro-turfing on the green issues today. They must be trying to create a talking point.
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 2 / 5 (4)
Burrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuuupppppppp!
Ahhhhhhhh...
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
MrLewish, you do yourself a disservice by kidding yourself that the war against knowledge is a left/right thing. The left often and actively pushes back against knowledge which is either psychologically or politically unacceptable to them. All human beings suffer from cognitive dissonance.
Stop congratulating yourselves. And for the record, I'm an effing opera singer,an atheist, and a high functioning autistic.
This tired old argument that, but for the interference of some hated group, ie conservatives, Christians, Jews, libertarians, etc, "we," the anointed liberal minded progressive enlightened thinkers, would have long ago solved all of the world's problems and brought forth an new utopian, green energy age.
Get over yourselves. "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Physics!
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
If you really disagree with my argument, then argue back. How am I a coward? I'd tell you the same thing to your face, and I'd then call you on it, in person, when you refused to address the substance of my assertions.
The main hindrance to solar power taking a lead role in powering civilization is inherent in the physics of extracting energy from sunlight.
People who claim to be "fighting ignorance" should show some indication in their argumentation that they take their thought processes seriously.
All thinkers need to be concerned with the effects of cognitive dissonance in themselves.
My word! What controversial stuff. And yet I see not a word in these responding comments that any of you has ever given a moments thought to these matters.
But you don't have to think about it. I'm a right-wing astroturfer. Your side is smart and good. Me bad coward.
Nov 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
http://www.dlsc.ca/