The Essentia Blog

Canadians set up the first solar-powered community in North America in the small town of Okotoks, Alberta. The Drake Landing Solar Community consists of 52 homes all powered by solar energy.

800 solar panels distributed through the community generate 1.5 megawatts of power in the summer and store energy for use in the harsh Alberta winters. The typical household in the community will only generate 1-2 tons of carbon per year as compared with the typical Canadian generation of 6-7 tons per year. More on the project over at ENN.

If you live in Berkeley, California, you can have solar panels added to your rooftop for no initial cost. They’ll just be an extra line item on your property taxes for the next 20 years. This isn’t an initiative that’s in the pipe or being worked on - its actually here. It’s all been arranged through a company called Renewable Funding through its product called CityFIRST. The homeowner gets to pick the installer or contractor of their choice and the city charges it through on the property tax.

California loves basking in solar power. From 1998 to 2007, residents of the state consumed a whopping $2.1 Billion in solar electric technology.

A solar car has completed a first ever round-the-world trip for a solar car without using any gas.  The trip was designed to end at the UN climate talks on December 4th.  The car chauffered the UN climate official Yvo de Boer to the talks in Poznan, Poland where 190 delegates from all over the world are meeting to discuss climate change.

Louis Palmer, the 36 year old schoolteacher who drove the car, is eager to showcase that the technology is here, it is clean and it is accessible.   Palmer’s trip took 17 months and it took him through 38 countries and 52,000 kilometres.  He only lost two days to breakdowns during the journey and claims that the car runs “like a Swiss clock”.  More on the story can be found at www.solartaxi.com.

A $1 Billion dollar project is planned for San Francisco in order to install a charging grid for electric cars.  The company incentive funded project will be put in place by a company called “A Better Place” in partnership with Renault-Nissan.  They will distribute the cars under a subscription based program which will offer the cars at a discount and people who purchase them will subscribe to a certain number of miles.

Better Place hopes to expand the plan to Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and the three highways connecting the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area.

The Green Revolution has come up with a device that fits onto most exercise cycles which allows the human power being used on those cycles to be harnessed.  The energy generated goes straight back into the building’s panel with a grid-tie inverter.  While the output from a single cycle is only enough to power a laptop for an hour, the more people that use the equipment the more power is generated.  This has the potential to save health clubs thousands a year in energy costs and reduce the carbon footprint of both the gym and its members.

If you happen to be in the Ridgefield, CT area you can test drive the device at the Ridgefield Fitness Club, a partner in developing the technology with Green Revolution.

Bolthouse Farms, purveyours of smoothies and salad dressings at fine grocery stores anywhere, have gone solar in a big way.  They announced the completion today of a 1.9 megawatt solar array that will power their farms in Palmdale, California.  The array incorporates 10,300 Mitsubishi solar panels on a new ground-mounted system that follows the sun during the day for greater efficiency.

The farm’s switch from diesel to solar powered irrigation pumps improves air quality and reduces noise.  The new array will provide 80% of the power needs of the large-scale farm operation.

Solar energy is so popular in California, solar panels are being stolen.  Tom McCalmont, president of Regrid Power, was victim to one such burglary where they took $30,000 worth of panels from the roof of his solar energy business.  A homeowner, Glenda Hoffman, has fallen victim to three separate burglaries in which a total of 16 solar panels have been removed from the roof of her home - she now sleeps with a shotgun and a .22 just in case they come back.

Thieves then try to sell the panels on the internet - one such thief was not so lucky as detectives from the police department ended up being his customers after numerous $1500.00 panels were stolen from a California toll road.  He charged only $100.00 for the panels and when he showed up to deliver them he was led away in cuffs.  Authorities are now recommending that customers engrave their driver’s license number into their solar panels for easy identification.

Garden State Offshore Energy was recently given a $1 Billion contract to construct a giant wind farm offshore in the southern part of New Jersey.

The wind farm will be virtually invisible from shore and is part of New Jersey’s Energy Master Plan, which calls for 20% of all of NJ’s renewable energy to come from alternative energy sources by 2010.  96 turbines will power tens of thousands of homes once the project is complete.