EarthAid is a brand new system designed to help you monitor your energy usage and encourage you to reduce it. They provide a database of energy saving tips and users who carry these out successfully will receive points for the energy that they save. This applies not just to electricity use, but both water and gas as well. The service ties in with your online account for your utility providers so will track your energy use automatically. Points can be exchanged for rewards from the partner network that EarthAid has set up. Usefully, they also provide information on the various tax incentives that are applicable. For example, if one of the actions you are considering is purchasing a new Energy Star qualified refrigerator they will link to the relevant tax rebates that you are entitled to.
Sign up is free, and the company makes clear that they intend to keep it that way. The first thing that you need to do is link your energy accounts. You can select your utility providers from a pre populated drop down menu and enter your login details. Obviously, your utility provider will need to provide online access to your bills, but from a few trials on their system it seems that the majority of providers do offer this. If your provider doesn’t allow this, I suggest you contact them because the sooner we can escape the black box of energy billing, the better. If you successfully link your energy bills then your data will be fed into EarthAid and you can monitor your energy usage, similarly to Google PowerMeter.
The CFL Savings calculator is a very simple app that will allow you to calculate just how much money you can save by switching energy intensive incandescent bulbs for CFL ones. CFL bulbs represent a far more energy and money sensitive option over traditional incandescent bulbs. Choose how many bulbs you have and your location, which it uses to provide the cost per kWHr and it will calculate your savings. You can also enter the cost of each bulb and the amount of hours per day you use them. The app is great as it makes it clear what a no brainer it is to switch to CFL bulbs.
FindGreen has been described as Yelp for the environment. Quite simply it is a guide-book to all the great environmental and sustainable resources that surround you. The app auto locates you using GPS and with 60,000 listings makes it a breeze to find anything from yoga studios to bicycle shops or organic restaurants in your vicinity. Features include the ability to submit new listings and rate existing ones. The ‘green tip of the day’ function is also a very nice touch.
The name really says it all for this incredibly straight forward iPhone app. Quite simply, when you purchase this app for $0.99, one tree will be planted in the real world. The tree will be planted in one of 12 countries that are currently fighting deforestation. All of these countries are located in tropical regions where the climate benefits from tree planting are maximized. When you purchase a real tree, or one for a friend, the app will furnish you with a ‘virtual’ tree (as pictured) which you can display proudly on your Facebook page.
Another simple, but effective app. This app from Amazon allows you to read the books you have purchased for your Kindle, Amazon’s popular eBook reader. Whilst the small size of the iPhone doesn’t really provide an optimal interface for reading it can be useful for reading a few pages on the go. The app will sync the page that you are on with your Kindle, so it is easy to pick up just where you left off. eBooks are set to have a big future in reducing the amount of paper we use and tools like these are important for making that transition.
The idea behind this carbon tracker is that it will use the iPhone’s in-built GPS system to track your movements and use this to calculate your carbon footprint. The limitation here with the iPhone is that you cannot run applications in the background, so you will have to have this app open, or there will be a fair amount of data to enter manually. If you can get over this hurdle, it’s a great tool to help you reduce your carbon emissions. It allows you to set monthly goals and motivates you to keep them each time you open the app.
Concentrating solar power uses arrays of mirrors to direct sunlight onto a very specific target in order to heat it up to very high temperatures. This is then used as a heat source for a conventional power station (whereby steam drives a turbine which generates electricity). It’s a very simple concept that has been around for more than a century. However, it is far from a simple technology. It requires detailed design to produce a system that is efficient as possible and the manufacture of the huge curved mirrors is quite an engineering feat.
PhotoVoltaic, on the other hand, uses a flat film of semi-conducting material. This has a special property whereby light shining on it will induce an electrical current, which can then be channelled off into the electricity grid. This method directly transforms the incoming sunlight into electricity although, as always, there is a loss.
Solar Water Heaters are perhaps the simplest of all types of solar energy. The idea is simply to place a water tank/pipes in view of sunlight, usually on the roof, and then use this water for various heating functions in your house like showers and filling radiators. The most common user of Solar Water heating is Israel where it is estimated that they save over two million barrels of oil a year.
Another type of solar power is Solar Chimneys, where in effect you have a very large, thin greenhouse with a chimney in the middle. The air inside the greenhouse is heated by sunlight causing it to travel up the chimney (hot air rises, remember?). The hot air will drive a turbine in the chimney, or something similar, which can be used to generate an electrical current.
Solar Power is without a doubt one of the most promising renewable technologies that is readily available today. The amount of energy from the Sun that reaches the Earth each second is enough to cover our entire energy demands many times over. One of the biggest challenges to using this energy is the fact that the incoming sunlight fluctuates massively: day/night, cloudy/clear days and winter/summer etc. Therefore in order to make solar powerful a viable choice for consumers at home, an agreement known as ‘Net Metering’ is vital. It allows consumers with solar panels to transmit energy to the national system when their panels are generating more energy than they can use, and in return they can withdraw energy when their panels can’t produce enough energy e.g. at night. The consumer would then only pay for the net energy used. In other words, if the consumer generated as much energy for the local electricity utility as it used then it its energy bill would come to a cool $0. Likewise, if the consumer used a little more then he supplied, he would just pay for the difference. There is therefore potential that someone could actually get paid by the energy company if they are efficient enough about their energy use, or have installed a large enough solar array.
