By Bruno De Wachter / Published on Thu, 2008-04-03 12:11
A clever tool to provide electricity for anybody anywhere
Engineers tend to see things big. So much so that they sometimes forget that the biggest impact can often be achieved by seeing things small and simple. This tendency to opt for the big certainly doesn’t hold for Colin Bulthaup, founder of Potenco. The mission of his company is huge: making clean power universally available and immediately useful anywhere and everywhere in the world. His solution is surprisingly small: a pull-cord generator the size of a yoyo that can safely power rechargeable batteries and provide energy for applications such as lighting, cell phones, or water purifiers.
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By Bruno De Wachter / Published on Tue, 2008-03-25 16:37
An educational project at Little Chico Creek Elementary School
The environmental benefits of solar energy are obvious. Less talked about however are the psychological and educational advantages of producing electricity in such an easy and direct manner. For many people who have installed their own PV panels, it is a real pleasure to monitor how much solar energy they are harvesting. It can also be an opportunity for them to learn about the differences between energy and power, DC and AC power, voltage and current.
These advantages did not pass unnoticed at Little Chico Creek Elementary School in California. The school dedicated a part of their website to demonstrating the performance of its PV system.
Consulting the output on line
Little Chico Creek Elementary School has had a 125 kW DC PV system in operation on its roof since 14 June 2006. The AC output power of their system can be consulted online on their website. Graphs show the evolution of the output over the day, the week, the month, etc. On a more detailed page, the evolution of the voltage and current values of the system are shown. The site also publishes environmental parameters like the ambient temperature, the cell temperature, and the sun irradiance power. Finally, it shows the amount of CO2 and NOx emissions that have been avoided by employing the PV panels compared with a standard energy system.
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