Music Monday: Summer Tunes and Solar

Celebrating summer with a chill song by Natty. It's officially monsoon season! Last week Kolkata finally got hit with the heavy rains that cooled the city down and brought a refreshing breeze for a few days. On Thursday, the main road I walk along to get to the metro was flooded, so I ended  up wading through a foot deep, very questionable murky water. Ugh.  

Two cool solar related articles from my new favourite website, Good.is:

Google's newest clean energy project: solar leasing. Google announced this week that it’s investing $280 million in SolarCity, a company that installs and maintains residential-scale solar panels. Customers pay a fee for this service, either up-front or at a monthly rate—and end up saving less money on electricity than they would if they were to buy and install the panels themselves—but they avoid the risk and long-term commitment of ownership. It's good to see solar becoming more accessible and affordable on the consumer level.

"If you’re like me, Google already backs everything else in life; why not let them help you save on your electricity bill as well?"

In NYC, The Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning Sustainability, sent a plane over the city  to capture its every contour with a system of lasers, which created a map showing how much energy rooftops would be generating if they had solar panels installed. If the city’s solar potential were realized, the study showed, New York City could get half of the electricity it needs at peak times from rooftop installations. However, due to the high cost of solar, in many cases the resulting savings per apartment per year aren't yet substantial enough to motivate landlords to invest in rooftop systems. The good news though, is that the city is beginning to offer a new type of lease that would allow landlords to earn back their investments in green improvements quicker. 

Swings: A Simple Happiness

Love this video - a weekend project to set up 50 swings around L.A to bring spontaneous joy to passerby's:

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They plan to bring it to Bolivia and are currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter: Swings in Bolivia.

Teen's Invention Makes Solar Panels 40% More Efficient

Eden Full, a 19 year old Canadian girl attending Princeton invented the SunSaluter, which makes solar panels more efficient by orienting them to always be getting the optimum amount of light from the suns rays. 


Two awesome things about this that make it affordable is that it is cheaper than the motor-driven tracking systems which rotate the panel as the sun moves across the sky throughout the day, and also that it can be built using local materials sourced in developing countries, thereby avoiding expensive shipping and import duties, not to mention creating job opportunities in the countries themselves. 


Impressive.

My World Environment Day, 2011

A few days late, but here's an overview of what I did last Sunday on World Environment Day here in India. ONergy kicked off a project in partnership with a local Rotary chapter (RC Calcutta Mid-City, District 3291) on an off-grid island in the Sunderbans, which is in East  India. 


The Sundarbans wetlands and mangrove forest is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Evidenced by a devastating cyclone in 2008, it is extremely sensitive to changing weather patterns. Electrification and water purification are critical issues. A majority of the villages are without grid access, using kerosene and diesel generators for lighting, electrification and pumping water for de-salination and agricultural irrigation.  Relying on fossil fuels for these purposes is detrimental to the surrounding environment, unhealthy, and incredibly costly.  

The event was organized and held at the site of a local NGO who works with and runs programs with villagers to promote income generation through skill building and sustainable development. 

A small training and awareness session on the benefits of solar and how to use the lamps was given to a group of school children.

"Who know's how solar works?"

Ekta from ONergy mesmorizing the group with how their
mobile phones can be charged directly from the panel!

Solar LED study lamps were provided to selected students from Classes 5 & 6 who were regular attenders at school and high achievers. 

The first two students chosen, all dressed up, so cute.

A group of students them performed a skit on stage, which was adorable. They were dressed up as elders- wearing grey powder in their hair, traditional dress, and fake beards/moustaches. Though I couldn't understand what they were saying, what I gathered was that it was a generational progress, with the elderly teaching the youth the importance of taking care of the surrounding environment. 

Love the girl in the middle with the straw beard. Some of the kids
twirled their mustaches at the ends - great style.

Students on stage performing a group skit on the importance
of managing the environment.

As always, the teacher was at the side of the stage feeding lines
to the kids who forgot or got temporarily distracted.

This purpose of this pilot was to get the program started in the community, and also for Rotary to gain awareness for the project as they look to secure funding to expand it. The plan is to set up a  "charging station" at the local school and provide subsidized lamps to 50-100 school children. They could then bring their lamps to the school to get charged during the day and be brought home to study with at night, thereby preventing them from having to study beside dim, unhealthy, and unsafe kerosene lamps.


Very entertaining Sunday, although extremely hot with lots of travel involved (trains, buses, ferries), and I suspect the heat played a part in taking me down on Tuesday. All better now though!