With the doom and gloom everywhere we look, energy crisis, environmental crisis, climate change crisis, etc, i thought i’d do a nice positive blog about the current developments and progresses in renewable energy!
‘Renewable Energy is just a few years away from reaching grid parity with fossil fuels’
(Parity = n. the state or condition of being equal) After i looked up what parity meant i realised what welcome news this was that had emerged from the World Economic Forum the other week in Switzerland.
It encouraged me to have a snoop around the current advances and steps that have been made recently to help renewables take over the world!
First up is Bio-photovoltaic paint. What a truly phonetically gorgeous word to say. Biophotovoltaic. Mmmm. My friend here below in the video will do a far better job of explaining than i can, but basically the idea came about from Biomimicry. And Biomimicry is fucking awesome. Again just say that word slowly… Biomimicry. Mmmm.
‘Through the course of 3.8 billion years, nature has gone through a process of trial and error to refine the living organisms, processes, and materials on planet Earth. The emerging field of biomimetics has given rises to new technologies created from biologically inspired engineering and technology.’
Basically as nature doesn’t copyright it’s ingenious processes, we can hop in and do a bit of nature ‘plagiarism’ and steal it’s brilliance to help us with progressing scientifically as a species.
- Spiders can still spin a material far stronger than we can produce, and they do it using only the raw materials of dead flies and water…
- Beatles can detect forest fires up to 80km away, roughly 10 thousand times the range of manmade fire detectors. And the little buggers aren’t powered by fossil fuel power stations, just leaves and insects…
We still have a lot to learn from nature really don’t we…?
Ok anyway, back to painting a hut in photovoltaic paint which can then absorb solar raise to produce electricity…
Awesome huh?
Moving on; different types of generating power from water are being tested all the time. The main problem for all renewables is producing a steady and consistent source of energy at a low cost. Searaser have a new design that ticks those boxes.
Check out the video; As the ocean swells, it moves the two buoys up and down which pumps seawater to an onshore turbine. Simple, clean and the cheapest way of producing electricity, even comared to fossil fuels.
Moving on; My favourite recent development is using the by-products in the production of whisky as biofuel!
I’m going to have to try and develop a taste for whisky now, i’ve always wanted to be able to sit by the fire contemplating stuff whilst sipping whisky… But it’s just too fucking vile. This is real inspiration to help ‘wean’ myself onto the stuff though!
Moving on; Now, with developments in grid I.T. we can develop a global energy grid fuelled by the whole variety of renewable sources. It really could be just a matter of years before we wave goodbye to the silly and archaic digging of holes and sucking up of the earths finite resources for power, when renewable energy is all around us, and ready to be harnessed.
Let us go forth and harness.
