Game over. LEDs win. Early in 2011 I wrote about the rapid ramp up of high-quality LED bulbs. Shortly afterwards, the big box stores started selling absolutely flawless bulbs at the eye-popping cost of $39.95. Even at that price the life-cycle payback still beat the old school incandescent bulbs for total cost. The problem was that it was about an 18 year break even.
That didn’t keep customers from grabbing these bulbs off the shelf. One big box store I visited said they were having a hard time keeping the LED bulbs in stock.
Now you can walk into a big box store and get a Philips Endura LED that uses only 12 watts for only $24.95. Today I was giddy over the sudden price plummet of these bulbs. You haven’t seen this kind of joy except from little Japanese girls finding Hello Kitty hats on sale. Please don’t judge me.
This is a game changer in lighting. Here’s why . . .
Artisan women in Guatemala earn less than $2.00 per day weaving textiles. Solution: Women weave textiles and then form them into high efficiency wind turbine blades. High value turbine blades create good paying jobs and clean renewable energy. University of Michigan BLUELab Engineering students are working with a local Guatemalan womens weaving coop to pioneer this new empowering technology. Guatemala has the wind, the need and the capacity to support up to 8 wind co-ops.
What is the issue, problem, or challenge?
Thousands of women in Guatemala make their living by weaving textiles and selling them to “middle men” who then sell textiles in regional markets. Women often make less than $2.00 per day. This level of poverty leads to malnourished children and lack of opportunity for children, particularly girls, to get an education. By creating new technologies and new markets for women artisans we are breaking the circle of poverty and creating new clean technology jobs.
How will this project solve this problem?
Our collaborative design team of University of Michigan Engineering students and a local women’s weaving cooperative in Nueva Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, Guatemala are working together, hand-in-hand to design a new high value technology based on traditional practices. We provide opportunity through new technology where none existed.
Potential Long Term Impact
Women bear the brunt of global poverty. Of the 1.2 billion abject poor (less than $1.00 / day) an astonishing 70% are women. We need to create new opportunities for women to take control over their financial destiny. To help thousands of women, we will publish the Woven Wind Turbine online along with instructional photos and video. From our previous projects we expect dozens of nonprofits (NGOs) around the world to use our designs to help create new income for poor women worldwide.
Project Message
We can generate income and electricity!
- Cleotilde Lopez, Woman Weaver
The Appropriate Technology Collaborative has provided construction drawings of our sustainable, affordable and low cost technologies to 1,200 nonprofits (NGOs), individuals and Governments in the last 15 months. We have had feedback from a couple dozen organizations who are using our technologies but with so many downloads we would like to get a better idea of how many groups are using our designs (that are always Open Source and free).
If you are an organization or individual or you know of someone using our designs we would appreciate a short note sent to: info (at) apptechdesign (dot) org.
If you have an interest in new sustainable appropriate technologies please check out www.apptechdesign.org
Your help with this is much appreciated. We are updating our ability to collect data on the efficacy of our work and making a Google Earth map of where our technologies are being used around the planet.
Thank you,
John Barrie, Executive Director, The Appropriate Technology Collaborative
About 2 million people around the world die each year of diseases preventable by widely used vaccines. In Africa and parts of Asia over half of all vaccines that require refrigeration spoil before they can be administered. Millions of lives and billions of dollars are lost due to a lack of refrigeration.
Solution:
For vaccines to be safely administered in rural parts of Africa and Asia one needs a novel inexpensive, easy to maintain refrigerator that provides World Health Organization and UNICEF compliant “chain-of-cold” storage of vaccines. It should run on free non-polluting solar energy and it should be built in-country.
Description:
The Appropriate Technology Collaborative (ATC) worked with engineering students and professors at Michigan State University to create a unique refrigeration technology.
The ATC Solar Vaccine Refrigerator is a robust, easy to maintain technology that can be made in the country or region where it is to be used. It is made out of simple materials that can be found in most cities: steel, charcoal and ethanol or methanol. The finished product has no moving parts that need maintenance and it doesn’t use electricity of any kind. One simply places it in sunlight and it freezes. Period. (Note: If the sun doesn’t shine it can run on biofuels)
Design:
Simplicity and sustainability guided the design of the Solar Vaccine Refrigerator. There are only a few parts connected together by pipe. A steel box filled with activated charcoal, a series of pipes with cooling fins and a container of ethanol. There are no valves in the system.
How it Works:
The steel box is the solar collector/adsorber. The box is painted black so that it converts sunlight to heat. When the solar collector gets hot in sunlight the charcoal rejects ethanol vapor. The rejected ethanol vapor flows into the condenser, which is a series of pipes with cooling fins. The temperature of the ethanol vapor is reduced to the ambient air temperature and it condenses into a liquid. The liquid then flows by gravity into the evaporator which is located inside an insulated box. At the end of the day we have liquid ethanol in the evaporator and cool charcoal in the adsorber. Cool charcoal can absorb ethanol vapor once again. At night some of the liquid ethanol is adsorbed back into the charcoal. The ethanol that remains behind in the evaporator becomes very cold and the temperature in the insulated box gets down to our pre-determined design temperature of 0 to -10 degrees Celsius.
Once each day the refrigerator goes through one cooling cycle. Thermal mass inside the insulated box keeps the internal temperature even throughout daily temperature swings.
Refinements:
We have also changed the geometry from the original prototype to use steel pipes filled with activated charcoal instead of the steel box. The round shape of pipe is structurally superior to a flat box so we can use thinner material and have fewer joints that need to be welded.
To vote they ask you to register with the site However the last time we did this we didn’t get any spam Your support is greatly appreciated.
While we all wait for the X-Prize car to be announced we should remember that a couple of students at Western Washington University managed to create a high efficiency car with off-the-shelf parts more than two decades ago. From their website:
The Avion was developed as a lightweight and aerodynamic and very fuel-efficient sports car. The prototype was completed in 1984 and set the Guinness world record for fuel economy in 1986 at 103.7-mpg average driving from the Mexico border to British Columbia Canada border.
The plan at that time was to manufacture the Avion but at the time fuel economy was not as big a concern 20 years ago and we lacked the expertise and the money to tool up and produce the cars.
The car has been designed to be manufactured in small volume using recycled components from the automobile recycling yards. Utilizing standard engines and drive trains installed in the Avion’s light weight and aerodynamic body we can achieve significant improvements in fuel efficacy and performance making the Avion both fun to drive and while getting great mileage. In our testing the car we were able to achieve 80mpg At 70 mph and an astonishing 114mpg at 55mph driving from Eugene Or. To Portland OR.
An Idea twenty years before its time.
From the Rocky Mountain Institute:
Transportation uses 28% of our energy and produces 30% of our GHGs. Three quarters of this comes from cars and trucks. These numbers can be reduced by 30-35% or more with technologies that exist today. The real question is how quickly these new technologies can penetrate the market in significant numbers. Programs like cash for clunkers can help accelerate this, though analysis shows that the savings achieved came with a high price tag.
Amory Lovins endorses the idea of using “feebates” in the book Winning the Oil Endgame. A feebate system using a combination of rebates and fees to help reduce the average fuel economy of our fleet. New vehicles with fuel economy above the target level receive a rebate, while those below the target are assessed a fee, which helps to fund the program. Proponents claim that a feebate of $70 per mpg above or below the target would be sufficient to improve the national fuel economy by one percent annually.
I like the idea of taxing “bads” like fuel guzzling cars and supporting the purchase of fuel efficient cars. Kind of like Robin Hood. I’d even support a couple of hundred dollars per MPG over the set point to help low income families pay for fuel efficient cars.
Even if every building built from this date forward consumed zero energy, the built environment would still produce enough greenhouse gasses to raise the carbon level dangerous new heights. What we need is a new dedication to retrofitting existing buildings with the latest in energy efficient technologies + a change in occupancy. Tenants need to feel comfortable wearing a sweater in winter and not wearing a suit and tie in summer.
The Empire State Building is undergoing an exceptional renovation. From their website:
Built during the Great Depression, the Empire State Building symbolizes America’s limitless potential.
Today the building is undergoing a major sustainability retrofit to become a leading example of economic and environmental revitalization.
Consulting, design, and construction partners Clinton Climate Initiative, Johnson Controls Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle, and Rocky Mountain Institute recently completed an eight-month modeling and analysis project which will save 38 percent of the building’s energy and $4.4 million annually.
Creating a leading example for the design of commercial retrofits was at heart a learning experience for the team. In the process of developing specific project recommendations, the team uncovered several key lessons for the retrofit of large multi-tenant commercial office buildings. Read more “Lessons Learned”
However the last time we did this we didn’t get any spam 
Your support is greatly appreciated.
