Tag Archives: home

Fed: VA and HUD hopes to expand solar

Posted on August 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

The Obama administration unveiled a plan Tuesday aimed at helping middle-class and low-income communities put solar panels on their roofs.

Homeowners could choose to harness electricity from the sun, buy energy-efficient water pumps and make other energy-saving upgrades at no cost upfront, eventually paying it back through their property tax bills.

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While this type of clean-energy financing has existed for years, officials said backing by the federal Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs should expand access to families who may not afford it otherwise.

The White House estimated the effort would bring solar power to about 250,000 middle-class and low-income homes by 2020.

“Solar panels are no longer for wealthy folks who live where the sun shines every day,” President Barack Obama said in a video message accompanying the announcement.

In recent years, technological advances have made it cheaper to install rooftop solar panels, Obama senior adviser Brian Deese said in a telephone briefing with reporters.

California Gov. Jerry Brown praised the effort, saying it would lead to more solar installations and energy-saving retrofits around the country.

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Battery-powered homes are unplugging Australians; are Americans next?

Posted on August 7, 2015 | Leave a comment

Lithium-ion batteries from maker such as China’s Tianjin Lishen are already available in Australia, while consumer electronics giant LG Chem is also targeting Australia, as are California’s Enphase Energy and the Warren Buffett-backed BYD, also based in China.

Luring them here is the popularity of rooftop solar, which has created a huge market for storage systems that can soak up the excess power generated by solar PV panels during the day, which otherwise has to be fed back into the grid at little financial gain to homeowners.

Instead of having to draw on peak-tariff electricity from the grid in the evenings, a household can then use stored energy, saving money and helping prevent the grid from overloading. Batteries also provide back-up power for computers, lighting and life-support systems that have to stay on during power cuts.

Households could in theory even move into energy trading, based on power from their battery storage system.

John Grimes of the Energy Storage Council describes storage as “the missing link” and expects strong demand among those with rooftop solar, partly driven by the slashing of the tariffs paid by state governments for electricity fed back into the grid.

“Feed-in tariffs for solar PV around the country have really been cut to a punitive level so many people are now receiving 6¢ or 8¢ per kilowatt hour for the energy that they feed into the grid and are having to buy energy back at the full retail rate of 25 to 28¢ per kilowatt hour,” Grimes says.

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Natural Cooling Strategies

Posted on June 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

Most people have limited tolerance for hot weather. As the thermostat rises, we quickly become uncomfortable, and if it becomes too hot inside our homes, it’s even dangerous. Our modern response to this problem is simple: “Turn up the air!” However, air conditioning consumes a lot of electricity, and most of it comes from polluting fossil fuels. Electricity is also a limited resource: On the hottest days of the year, some cities don’t have enough electricity to meet demand, leading to brownouts or rolling blackouts.

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Fortunately, many old-fashioned design strategies can keep a house cool naturally, which conserves energy and saves money. Although home builders largely have stopped using these techniques over the past 100 years, there’s no reason we can’t rediscover them and use them in our homes. This article explains how to use a few basic natural cooling strategies, whether you’re building a new house or making improvements to an existing home.

Natural Ventilation

Before society embraced air conditioning, we all found simple ways to beat the heat. One was to sit on a shaded porch, sipping a cold drink. If the porch was positioned correctly, gentle breezes would blow past. Breezes help moisture evaporate from your skin — one of the body’s main methods for cooling off. In fact, many natural cooling techniques boil down to one basic principle: Keep the air moving. So how do you improve airflow within your home?

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