127 Madeira Consorcio Meeting 22.05.2022

May 23, 2022 at 6:49 pm | Posted in Posts | Leave a comment
Tags: Consorcio, solar power

We met in the Gallery again.

The Topic was the advances made on Solar Power.

The cost for Solar went down considerably

Here are the links (we saw both):

Marjan on Solar power: http://www.rocagallery.com/ted-talk-marjan-van-aubel

Hannah showed a flexible Solar Cell:

The notes:

Marjan said that the Earth receives in one hour enough power from the Sun to supply energy to Humankind for a year. (Marjan has also an interview here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdpNHCMnuJQ)

Solar cells now have an efficiency of 44.5%

M. J said that there is a village (300 houses) in Abu Dhabi that is completely “fueled” by Solar Power.

U. has two clients who are installing solar in their homes. Currently, there are two subsidy programs running in Portugal: one from the State for the panels and another one from Madeira for the batteries. The supplier in Madeira is Zenergy (https://zenergia.pt/ ), they also help the clients get together the paperwork to obtain the subsidies (warning: cumbersome bureaucracy). One of the clients will sell electricity to EEM.

D. and S. have a solar system, in the Algarve, more info on this later.

U. has a small solar panel on her balcony (movable, 60 x 40 cm) and a box with the battery (outside for safety reasons). Inside on the wall is a small “controller” (Red = no juice, Green = good) and a converter, and she loads her mobiles, Nintendo, and hoover with it. In theory, if there were no electricity but if the wireless worked, she could communicate with the world with her tablet or phone for some time, with power being supplied from the solar panel. The whole set cost about 250€ plus installation from AKI at the time.

C. and K. had solar in their Gallery in ZA, and in the beginning, the cost went down considerably but with time, the Grid company found other ways how to charge them for other costs so that they energy bill went up again. Cheeky.

On the south coast, we had a wave turbine experiment some years ago, but we couldn’t find any information on how that turned out.

In the TED talks, the speakers also mention that windows can now generate solar power; aluminum windows with two glass panes can have a solar film in the middle. Small devices can be loaded on the windowsill.

One of the speakers also said that we have a lot of new solar technology at but it is not being used or implemented. We should be further along with the implementation.

Batteries need to be developed further, to give more storage; their production is also a burden on the environment.

Smaller systems may be the future. Instead of damming rivers and damaging the environment, households or groups of houses should have small systems for energy… Small windmills can also be installed on balconies. Amazon has several types, but Leroy Merlin also got some systems at this time, with discounts.

The purchase of an electric car will only pay off after 200.000 km use because we have to consider the production costs and materials, such as “rare earths” (which are not rare) that go into these cars. Professionally used cars do that kind of km, in any case.

Other stuff:

Gamma Camera to detect breast cancer: we had a TED talk about it lone time ago, The Cameras are being produced and sold in the US: https://savvy-diagnostics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Dilon_Diagnostics_Brochure.pdf

H & M have a campaign that they buy back used clothes for recycling and repairing:

https://www2.hm.com/en_ca/sustainability-at-hm/our-work/close-the-loop.html