Germany’s solar energy success story

In Germany you get paid a bit above market rates for the electricity that you feed the grid. This is paying off in different ways.

1. They produce over 50% of all solar energy in the world, despite the fact that the country is covered in clouds very often.

2. CO2 reductions are huge, for different reasons. An obvious reason being that people buy solar panels to feed the net. Another one being that consumers will probably start thinking greener as they will be more aware about their consumption.

3. Germany is building a huge solar panel industry with factories and the knowledge that goes with it.

Read the story here: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/11/27/catching-rays-cutting-emissions/

Passive homes

Today I heard a news article about passives homes on the local radio. Passive homes look a lot like conventional homes but they are super-isolated and use technology like heat exchangers to minimize heat loss. This way they there is very little need for heating during the winters.

http://www.passiefhuis.nl/

http://www.mijnpassiefhuis.nl/

Earthship Florida

On the Facebook page of Earthship Florida I discovered some more photos. I placed them in chronological order.

Ready for concrete. The vapor barrier is down and the red you see is PEX tubing for a hydronic system; water will be pumped through the thermal mass of the large concrete slab to help regulate temperature inside the home.

Also in one of the facebook discussion I found out why there is a giant concrete slab.. surprise surprise… the government made them do it!

Jonah Reynolds

too bad they made you do a giant slab... they made us do that in Japan too... its funny because it doesnt make it stronger, in fact if an earthquake hits (not that it will) then the concrete cracks and the rammed earth in tires dont crack... ;-) we have to do something similar for the retrofit project in Long Beach...

June 2 at 6:07am

Earthship Florida

Yea Jonah, we even had a structural engineer look everything over who said concrete footings weren't necessary. Thing the building department was insistent upon was tying the roof to "the foundation" because of hurricane codes. The fact the walls are earth bermed to the roof didn't matter. It's down now and on to the walls though!

June 2 at 3:16pm

Another Earthship in Florida

While googling for more information about the Florida project I found another near finished earthship in (central) Florida.

The photo is made of snapshots from the video on Vimeo, as you can see it is a big building. It has multiple bathrooms and a garage.

The looks of it are much more conventional than the other earthships that I’ve seen. From the outside you cannot even tell it is an actual earthship. It is clear that it is not circular and there are no roof domes.

The guy who made the video does not tell much about the earthships specifically, except about the tires and cans in the walls. So this leaves the viewer unsure about the use of solar water heaters and solar panels for electricity. I do think they use a rain catch,  a large water container is visible in the video.