I don’t care how many fans I point directly at my bed during the summer, the space between my butt and the mattress always reaches temperatures that make comfortable sleep entirely impossible. So, either I get a lame, inefficient AC window unit. Or I sweat my way through the brief, though surprisingly hot, Montana summers.

So far I’ve elected for option two, but now, thanks to some clever folks in Japan, I can cool the two inches between my butt and the mattress (the two inches that really matter) without having to pay to cool the entire room around me.

Lord this is an amazing idea. I’m about ready to fly my sweaty butt to Japan to get one right now. This extremely simple invention (by the people who brought you the USB Powered fan shirt) simply uses two ultra-quiet fans at the base of a mattress pad to pull cool air from above the head under your hot body. The device is more efficient even than regular fans. Even if used 8 hours a day for 30 days straight, it will only consume about 25 cents of electricity.

Via TreeHugger

Graeme Attey, already a little bit famous as the inventor of a two-wheeled, wind-powered "dirt surfer," has just taken his inventing skills to a new (and more useful) level. This roof-top wind turbine is small, cheap, quiet and sits at the peak of the roof-line in order to capture wind at it’s maximum speed.

Mr. Attey has been awarded a AU$34,000 grant from the government of Australia to develop the technology and make it suitable for use across windy Western Australia. Another $28,000 was awarded to a scientist to determine the ideal placements for such small-scale residential turbines.

At only AU$700 a piece, these turbines are definitely the cheapest option we’ve seen in small wind. And though they don’t have an enormous generating capacity, they are designed to be used in series. So, an average household could install as many as six of these turbines on their roof, while selling all of their excess electricity back to the electric company.

The only issue, of course, is whether home-owners will be willing to add these clunky barrel turbines to their roof. But if Western Australia really wants to reduce it’s greenhouse emissions by 60% in 40 years, they’re going to have to make compromises. Besides its somewhat cumbersome appearance, these turbines look to me like a very promising advancement in suburban energy generation.

Video After the Jump.

Via Metaefficient

See Also:
–Big Ideas in Small Wind–
–Shape-Shifting Personal Wind Turbine–

What are the three biggest problems with wind power? Anybody, anybody, Bueller?

1. Bird Kill, 2. NIMBYism and 3 Dead bugs gumming up the works. Now, I’m not saying that these are always legitimate concerns, but migration corridors should be avoided and some people just really don’t like the way wind turbines look. These are real problems, so we’ve got to find real solutions.

How about we put wind turbines in a place that is literally no one’s back yard, there are no bugs, and where birds only go to die. Namely, 50-100 miles off-shore. The big problem, of course, is that there’s no way to anchor wind turbines into the sea-floor if the sea-floor is 300 meters down (as it is when you get that far off shore.)

Why is why Norsk Hydro has been working on a prototype floating off-shore wind rig called the Hywind. Norsk Hydro’s off-shore wind expertise comes directly from their experience with off-shore oil rigs. And now that off-shore oil is less interesting to Norway, Norsk Hydro happily developing this awesome new technology.

A pilot project with three 3 MW turbines will be installed before the beginning of 2008. But future plans call for larger farms with hundreds of 5 MW turbines producing as much as 4 terrawatt hours per year, or roughly enough to power 200,000 households.

More pics after the jump.

Via Inhabitat and Norsk Hydro

See Also:
–World’s Largest Offshore Wind Project–
–NIMBY to YIMBY–
–The AeroGenerator–

Once you have your solar photovoltaic panels in place on your rooftop,
how do you know how well they are performing? Maybe you’re lucky and
you have net metering where you are, so you can sort of guess at it
because your electrical bills are lower than they were. But it would be
useful if you could get more information so you knew how much you were
producing and how much you were using.

Fat
Spaniel is an amusingly named company (with an overweight corporate
mascot) which offers monitoring services
for building power systems, particularly PV. They "provide hosted
data monitoring, management and control services that OEMs, installers,
and distributed utilities can use to optimize performance and ensure
investment returns for all types of renewable energy systems." And, as
a third party, they can help verify system performance to an owner,
rather than relying on the manufacturer’s claims about what the system
will do.

Fat Spaniel monitoring shows both immediate and historical data from a
power system. Owners, users, and the merely curious can see how much
power a building is using, and how much of that is coming from a
renewable system. The monitoring system shows both building demand as
well as energy output by the generating system.

Power monitoring and display information can be beneficial in green
building where it can help gain an additional point toward LEED
certification. And state grants to encourage the installation of
renewable power systems also sometimes require a monitoring and display
component as a precondition for awarding the grant.

link: Fat Spaniel
Technologies